We first heard Hua Hong-Hang at last year’s ECIM conference where she reported on her MSc Thesis, an in depth survey of OSDU, the open subsurface data universe, based on extensive interviews of OSDU participants and a literature review. Hua found OSDU to be stalled by ‘strategic deadlock’ between operators and vendors.
Since ECIM, Hua has kindly translated her thesis into English and provided us with a review copy which she has allowed us to host on oilit.com. You can read and download the whole thing here. You can also read our analysis of this important study in this issue of Oil IT Journal. Briefly, Hua’s investigation has shown that IT vendors struggle to find business opportunities, interoperability tests have failed, objectives are unclear and everyone has a different understanding of what OSDU is, where it is, and what it’s supposed to do. A data ‘platform’ is about more than technology, and requires extensive institutional and organizational change. OSDU does not make the grade.
My attendance at the 2026 EAGE Digital conference allowed more triangulation of the OSDU story. Just FYI, the official position is that 2026 will see a ‘finalized first version of the data standard’, followed in 2027 with a ‘sustained’ OSDU operating model and in 2028 by an ‘evergreen’ OSDU standard, reference implementation and certification. That is just 10 years since Shell first handed over their ‘SDU’ code base to The Open Group OSDU Forum.
As is often the case at conferences, the interesting stuff came in the Q&A sessions which I would invite you to read in our report from EAGE Digital in this issue. But as a teaser, here are a few snippets from the various Q&As. OSDU is fragmented, every company has its own implementation. Quantifying the benefits of a move to OSDU is a ‘very hard question’. OSDU is struggling with spaghetti code and a general lack of direction although one ‘medium term goal’ from the operators is for new apps running directly on OSDU. No wonder that software vendors are upset! Oh and BTW, the cost of running an OSDU instance in is in the ‘tens of millions of dollars range’.
But how can it be that some claim to be ‘running on OSDU’ already if the whole thing seems to be so shaky? Chevron and TotalEnergies both reported successful deployments of OSDU. Although Chevron gave the game away with two key questions: ‘Are you committed to OSDU?’ and ‘Are you on Azure?’ This is the major gotcha in how OSDU has morphed from a touchy-feely open-source-ish project into, da-da!, Microsoft Azure Data Management for Energy, ‘ADME’. So has Microsoft ‘captured’ OSDU?
I don’t think so, there has been talk of late of Microsoft abusing its dominant position in cloud computing. The EU is getting exercised about this and is facing a probe by the UK regulator over competition in software. But I do not believe that Microsoft has really captured OSDU. There was no need. OSDU has been thrust upon Microsoft by a few enthusiastic major operators. They used to say (a long time ago) that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. In the same vein, the top tiers of some EU majors’ management and CIOs seem to think that nobody will ever get fired for buying Microsoft. This maybe true. But for small and mid size operators with a more or less normal mix of software buying into Azure just to run a their portfolio of software from different vendors maybe a step too far.
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