(upbeat music)
- Hello, this is Hussein Shel. Thank you for joining me.
I'm a principal program manager
for the Azure Global Energy team,
focusing on strategic customer engagements
and working with the customers
to help them in their journey in digital transformation
across oil and gas, power and utility,
sustainability and renewables.
I'm here to talk to you about some of the work
that we're doing with our customers on HPC,
and we will be focusing on oil and gas,
but we're also working with many of our customers
across the spectrum in the energy industry.
Before I delve into the details for HPC,
I'd like to talk a little bit
about how we look at the energy industry in general
and how we recognize the challenges
that many of our customers face,
whether it's through their global footprint,
whether through their complex and harsh environments
that they have to operate on,
and the challenges that they have around data
and the scale, really, that they're operating on,
that many of the industries
don't necessarily have to deal with.
And in order for us to be the chosen partner
with many of our customers,
we really have to look at our engagements globally.
How do we provide the infrastructure, the datacenters,
the networking capabilities
that can serve our customers across the globe?
Be the trusted partner in many of the compliance
issues that they have and around data sovereignty
and cyber sovereignty in many of their operations?
And provide the intelligent tools and
capabilities that enable not only cloud workflows,
but also edge workflows and workloads
that many of our customers are interested in doing?
So we really want to partner with them
in a long-term journey, not on very quick wins.
And we want to make sure that we are providing
the necessary engineering capabilities to partnerships,
the trusted mechanics of engagement,
when we're dealing with many of our customers.
As I said, one key power of the cloud,
and what really Azure brings to the front,
is our global presence when it comes to energy industries.
Many of the partnerships
and the customer-driven engagements have been driven
by customers who are working with us
on providing a footprint available for them,
for many of the cloud services that they need.
A few things that I want to highlight,
or a few announcements I want to highlight,
are the work that we're doing in Norway
in partnership with many of our key strategic customers,
like Equinor and others,
in enabling a datacenter, multiple datacenters, really,
to allow them to do the work that they need to do.
Some of the work that we're doing in the Middle East,
like in UAE with our datacenters that are operating now,
are in close partnerships with many of our customers there.
And then any other regions that you see on the picture.
This is really supported by a huge backbone
and a very large fiber network that we own and release
that is a key enabler for many of our customers' workloads
around data movement
and latency-sensitive type of workflows.
And so this is a key important capability that we offer,
and many of our customers take advantage of.
Now I want to switch to HPC, in particular.
When we are dealing with HPC all-up in Azure,
we're really looking across many of our industries
that we deal with
and the customers that we interact with.
This can go through financial services,
through manufacturing, auto, including energy.
But specifically for energy,
when we talk about some of the workloads
that we're focusing on for oil and gas, in particular,
we're really talking about seismic processing and imaging,
reservoir simulation, visualization interpretation,
as well as an emerging aspect and pattern that we're seeing
in introducing AI and machine learning capabilities
into what is usually a traditionally,
or legacy, HPC workflow.
And we're engaged with many of our customers
across the board
when it comes to some of these capabilities.
So, many of you are going to ask why the cloud, right?
You've been doing this for many years,
you've been doing this for decades,
you've optimized your current on-premises footprint.
There are very specific opportunities
that the cloud can help in this journey.
Some of those reasons are mentioned on this slide,
and I'll talk about a couple. It's really the ability
to provide flexible offerings
and a different way of thinking and doing HPC
for seismic imaging processing,
for reservoir simulation, etc.
There is a pattern that we're seeing
with many of our customers that they are able to optimize
and specialize the solution
that needs to be deployed in the cloud
for that particular application or algorithm.
So they can do a slice of that workload,
given a type of hardware or storage that we offer,
but they could also do the other pieces
of that particular hardware
in a completely different way
than they've done it in the past traditionally.
Another way of looking at it is there's a lot of interest
in looking at cloud-native technologies,
whether it's object storage,
whether it's native schedulers,
and we offer that opportunity to our customers
to partner with us and do a lot of those capabilities.
Overall, there's a difference,
there's a shift in thinking
between a total cost of ownership
to a total cost of solution
that is needed to be deployed to the cloud
and optimize both performance and cost.
So it's really not a big bang transition,
and I'll talk a little bit about that journey
in a few slides,
but it's more of a journey to transform
the way they've done things for many, many years
into a new way of thinking.
I want to talk a little bit about the journey
that I just mentioned.
What we're seeing is that many of our customers
have very specific hardware or capabilities
that they've invested in on-premises
that usually leaves little room for flexibility
when they have spikier or new business demand,
especially given the current situation in the industry,
for example, in oil and gas.
There's also a new business demand that's appearing
through artificial intelligence and machine learning,
data analytics, new regulations, for example,
as well as IoT that is interfering
with the existing infrastructure
because most of those workloads
will leverage the same hardware and footprint
that was used for, traditionally, HPC.
So there's a lot of queuing,
a lot of time that's been spent there,
that is unnecessary typically now with the cloud offerings.
And so what we're seeing is many of our customers
are moving to the cloud through variable demand
and unlocking many of those capabilities
that they couldn't do on-premises in the right time
leveraging the cloud providers.
And we've invested heavily in solution, in software,
and in hardware capabilities with many acquisitions
to enable this particular workload.
But there's also another part of our customers
that are taking the journey completely
and seeing how can they meet all of the demand
on the cloud directly,
leveraging cloud-native technologies
that I mentioned earlier.
So we're seeing a pattern of transition
between lift-and-shift to hybrid workflows
and burst capabilities,
to also very new cloud-native technologies
and really a complete transformation
of HPC footprint on Azure.
I want to get into now a little bit
on the specific offerings that we have.
When we talk about HPC in Azure,
it's really focusing on our H and our N series,
along with some of our H high-performance storage options.
I want to highlight that we are the only cloud provider
that provides InfiniBand-enabled compute,
whether it's on the CPU or on the GPU,
which is a critical component
of the success of the performance and the cost
for many of our customers' workflows
that we mentioned earlier.
Our partnership with Cray has been instrumental
in leveraging their technologies, as well.
Many of our customers have deployed
and are very familiar with Cray.
Our partnerships with Intel and others
are extremely important in providing the right hardware
and the right solution for the right problem.
And we're very proud with many of those partnerships
that we have with the providers.
I want to transition
to the software side of the house
and talk about the investments that we've made
in our Azure Batch offerings, as well as Azure CycleCloud,
when it comes to the services in the software
layer of the solution.
Many of our customers are challenged
with managing the current infrastructure
that they have on-premises.
And so the ability to manage existing
and new infrastructure in the cloud is really important,
and this is where CycleCloud comes in.
It's a traditional cluster and scheduler orchestration
that helps an end-to-end story.
And with Azure Batch,
it's really focusing towards
how do you build cloud-native applications
leveraging cloud-native job-scheduling
components that enable partners, for example,
to build applications natively working on the cloud
without having to go through
the complexities of lift-and-shift.
I am extremely proud with many of the partnerships
that we've had across the industry.
This is, in particular, in oil and gas,
but also across the whole energy spectrum.
We have worked with many of the logos
and the companies that you see on this particular slide.
And one, in particular,
a company and customer that I'd like to highlight
is Repsol, where we've worked with them,
and we've worked with their team,
to transform the way they've done HPC in the past
and leveraged many of those services
that I talked about across compute,
across storage and networking.
On the other side, we have very strategic
and large partnerships with many of the service providers
and solution providers in this space,
like Halliburton, Schlumberger, and CGG,
and our main strategy and focus
is to enable our common customers
to use the tools that they've done in the past,
and they've used in the past, that they're comfortable with.
And at the same time, work with many of our partners
to enable and introduce new technologies
and new cloud-native technologies,
like machine learning and IoT, etc.
to improve on their existing solutions,
so that it's a win-win-win situation across the board.
This is really all I have for you today.
Thank you so much for your time. I hope you enjoyed it.
I hope this was helpful.
And if you have any questions,
I am happy to answer them and a slew of team members
that I have that could help you.
Thank you so much.
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