Bangalore, India-based IT services behemoth (95,000 employees) Wipro Technologies is starting to productize its oil and gas SAP-centric services. The first offering is a pre-packaged service for implementers of an SAP-based enterprise information management (EIM) service tuned to the oil and gas vertical. The new service was unveiled by Wipro’s UK unit at the 2010 SAPphire Now conference in California this month.
Wipro’s EIM service allows consolidation, matching and merging for the purpose of unifying master data and analyzing global spend, products and customer footprints. The solution claims improved data visibility and compliance with multiple regulatory requirements. The EIM service leverages SAP’s NetWeaver master data management component and SAP BusinessObjects data quality management. SAP executive VP Mark From-Poulsen commented, ‘This offering complements our strategy to strengthen the SAP ecosystem and demonstrates co-innovation between SAP and Wipro, a key partner in our ecosystem.’
Wipro’s oil and gas expertise stems in part from work with Shell as a supplier of development services, packaged implementations, consulting, and application support. This includes an interesting proof of concept (POC) demonstrator that involved the migration of Shell’s retail businesses’ B2B order placement and invoice provisioning system to a hosted environment. Wipro leveraged Microsoft’s Azure application and data hosting offering and technology adoption program to allow customers ordering fuels and lubricants to place orders, view order status, and obtain account information from the ‘cloud.’ The POC has demonstrated that Windows Azure ‘can be used to build a B2B integration channel between Shell and its customers.’ However it is unclear whether Shell is ready to bite the bullet and migrate its’ tried and tested, EDI standards-based B2B infrastructure to Microsoft’s Azure cloud.
This article originally appeared in Oil IT Journal 2010 Issue # 5.
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