In a web-based event hosted from Microsoft’s AI Centre of Excellence for Energy in Abu Dhabi, Microsoft announced the ‘Microsoft Energy Core’ (MEC), a grouping of energy industry players, technology partners and academic institutions who are to ‘infuse the energy sector with the power of the intelligent cloud, enabling innovation to flourish’.
The MEC is to ‘harness the power of artificial intelligence, cloud technologies and the internet of things to transform businesses, increase productivity and run more efficient and sustainable operations’. The MEC covers upstream, with data-driven value creation for the oil field and downstream with ‘frictionless experiences’ at gas stations and intelligent energy services to smart cities and prosumers. MEC’s ten founding partners are ABB, Accenture, Aveva, BakerHughes, Emerson, Honeywell, Maana, Rockwell, Schlumberger and Sensia.
The MEC website includes some rather old case histories from BP, Shell and Equinor covering computer vision deployed at Shell’s gas stations, Equinor’s Azure data center in Oslo and BP’s corporate-wide digital transformation and embrace of artificial intelligence. BP makes special mention of Azure automated machine learning deployed at its own ‘AI Center of Excellence’.
The MEC recalls an earlier Microsoft digital initiative, the Microsoft Upstream Energy Reference Architecture. As we mused back in April 2012, MURA did not make much sense beyond the statement that ‘involvement in MURA equates to the use of any Microsoft product—especially SharePoint’. MEC appears to update the marketing spiel with Azure replacing SharePoint!
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