Luo Haibo, General Manager of IBM China Petroleum, Petrochemical and National Defense Division

In recent years, with domestic large-scale enterprises such as Sinochem and CNOOC allowed to enter the wholesale and retail links of refined oil products, the domestic petroleum and petrochemical enterprises have formed a comprehensive competition from exploration and mining to refining and then to terminal sales. On the one hand, strong domestic consumption has led to a strong rise in oil prices; on the other hand, oil shortages have occurred in parts of the country once, and the arguments for the energy crisis and the exhaustion of oil and gas resources have been buzzing.

China has always been a poor oil country. According to statistics, at present, it is predicted that there may be oil in the country where it has been explored more than twice, and some places have even been explored more than three times. This objectively promotes the domestic petroleum and petrochemical enterprises to carry out more extensive information. Transformation to improve economic efficiency.

With the gradual reduction of energy reserves, exploration and development in the oil industry's industrial chain are increasingly difficult. The maturity of informatization has become the primary factor affecting the growth rate of the industry. After the application of information technology, the success rate of exploration and exploration will increase, which is helpful for improving exploration efficiency and reducing development costs and production costs.

At the 20th World Petroleum Congress held recently, Zhou Jiping, general manager of CNPC Natural Gas Group, said that the petroleum and petrochemical industries have taken technological innovation as a priority development strategy and seized the high ground of the economic and technological industry. It is not difficult to find that the global petroleum and petrochemical technology is developing in the direction of integration, informatization, and intelligence. Informatization is a major step for technological innovation in the petroleum and petrochemical industry. Informatization almost covers the production and management of the petroleum industry. All aspects have played an important role in enhancing the exploration and development efficiency of oil companies, strengthening data collection and analysis, and improving the management level.

Looking back at the development of the past half century, China's oil and petrochemical industry has achieved a more comprehensive and in-depth figure in its informationization construction from scratch, from small to large, from scattered to centralized and from independent to integrated. Oilfields, smart oilfields are moving forward.

Xu Yu, Director General of the Department of Informatization Promotion of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and Secretary General of the National Informatization Expert Consultation Committee, expressed his opinion in the “China Economy and Informationization”: “The Daqing Oilfield put forward figures for the first time in the domestic oil industry in the 1990s. The concept of oilfields shows that digital oilfield technology can increase the average recovery rate of oilfields from 30% to 50%, but the construction of digital oilfields cannot be accomplished overnight, and research on its construction mode and connotation is also constantly enriched. At present, compared with major international oil companies, domestic oilfield companies still have a certain gap in the construction of digital oil fields, and they should be used as strategic goals for the '12th five-year' information development.” Zhou Jiping did not hesitate to admit, Compared with the international advanced level or major foreign oil companies, China still has a gap of 8 to 10 years.

It is worth mentioning that because of the long industry chain and related industries in the oil industry, various departments that are closely related to the business have their own data collection. This objectively caused the bottleneck of development in the application of information technology in China's oil and petrochemical industry. . According to Wang Jianfeng, Senior Consultant of CCID Century Information, “In terms of informationization, large-scale central enterprises generally adopt a point-to-face model. However, in the process of promotion, more companies have begun to encounter the problem of data standardization.” In recent years, petroleum and petrochemical The industry's information system is also starting from decentralized local applications to the development of cross-functional and cross-enterprise global integration applications.

How to evaluate the informatization maturity of domestic petroleum and petrochemical enterprises, Wang Jianfeng is optimistic: “Perhaps the level of informatization of domestic oil companies is still slightly different from that of foreign top companies, but because of the earlier time of information transformation, they In the domestic major industries, the level of informatization is in a leading position."

After years of foreshadowing, the informatization construction of China's oil industry has begun to advance in the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain. A new generation of information technology such as cloud computing has brought profound changes to the oil industry. Wang Jianfeng told reporters: “Large enterprises have accumulated a lot of data during the years of accumulation. The advantage of cloud computing is that they can provide more computing power for integrating these data. For them, the wide application of new generation technologies should be "The trend is obvious." Obviously, the new round of infrastructure upgrade demand for the informatization construction of the petroleum and petrochemical industry has greatly stimulated the acceleration of investment in cloud computing by enterprises in the industry. In the process, a large number of IT vendors have already adopted the latest cloud computing technology. Continuously integrate with the petroleum and petrochemical industry.

What are the new characteristics of the informatization construction of the petroleum and petrochemical industry in the face of a huge market of information and investment in the petroleum and petrochemical industry in 2011 reaching 31.9 billion? What impact does cloud computing have on the petroleum and petrochemical industries? Cloud computing can be used in the new era. What practical problems are solved by petroleum and petrochemical enterprises? Our correspondent Sun Hongchao interviewed Luo Haibo, general manager of the petroleum, petrochemical, and defense divisions of IBM China, and Song Jijiang, solution manager of IBM's oil and petrochemical industry.

CEI: According to related reports, petroleum and petrochemical will be one of the key industries for cloud computing development in the next three years. How does IBM deploy cloud computing to help enterprises transform?

Luo Haibo: The internal demand for the transformation of domestic petroleum and petrochemical enterprises is very obvious. From the outside, the company hopes to have a bigger and broader market, have a faster market responsiveness, and have a stronger competitiveness. Internally, companies need to strengthen management, enhance their ability to innovate, and improve their financial capabilities. Therefore, IBM hopes to provide customers with assistance in transformation from concept to practice and from technology to service.

Beginning this year, IBM has cooperated with some domestic oil companies to complete some practical activities in cloud computing. For example, in the past two years, IBM has assisted an oilfield in China to undergo an intelligent transformation, triggered by the company's intrinsic transformation needs. The high-level of the oilfield enterprises hopes to make the oilfield the next generation of smart oilfields. In this starting point, IBM and oilfield companies collaborate to establish goals, design and implement blueprints, and achieve common goals.

CEI: According to your observations, is the petroleum and petrochemical industry currently still in the stage of massive development of information systems and extreme craving for computing resources?

Luo Haibo: The domestic oil companies have invested a great deal of manpower, material resources, and financial resources without exception in the application of information technology in the past decade. But I think the oil and petrochemical industry is still at the stage of resource craving. Information construction is a long-term process, and new technologies will continue to emerge. In the future there will still be a large number of application systems developed, and the development and application of each application system will be indispensable to the needs of computing resources.

However, due to the widespread distribution of business units in the oil industry and the large scale of the company, various departments that are closely related to the business have their own data collection, processing, and application. This objectively caused many difficulties in the application of the informationization of petroleum and petrochemical enterprises. .

CEI: Starting from last year, "High Performance Computing Cloud" entered the industry vision. How does IBM deploy this aspect?

Song Jijiang: At present, high-performance computing is mainly used in seismic data processing in the petroleum and petrochemical fields. Some advanced algorithm processing techniques can discover more complex underground oil and gas geological structures. However, these algorithms are accompanied by a huge amount of computation and storage space requirements, which means that hardware acquisition and operation costs will be very high. This has become a bottleneck for some algorithms that cannot be widely used.

The "High Performance Computing Cloud" has now received extensive attention from the oil and gas industry. IBM hopes to help users improve the efficiency of cluster applications through cloud computing, reduce operating costs, and provide maximum flexibility in time and space for data processing services.

CEI: Customers in the oil and petrochemical industry are basically large state-owned enterprises. In these enterprises, there are numerous hardware and software conditions that are uneven. In this context, what exactly does IBM do?

Luo Haibo: IBM will pay attention to the maintenance and appreciation of state-owned resources when it cooperates with large state-owned enterprises. At the same time, it is also well aware of the complexity and diversity of customer application systems. IBM provides end-to-end services from business consulting, cloud computing architecture design, and cloud computing deployment, and supports 13 cloud computing centers in the world to help organizations establish cloud infrastructures, provide cloud services and products, and manage The Cloud Computing Center assists companies in achieving business innovation and change, and optimizes the company's operational processes.

CEI: Different from other industries, with the gradual reduction of oil and gas resources, exploration and development in the industrial chain of the petroleum and petrochemical industry are increasingly difficult. What are IBM's countermeasures?

Luo Haibo: The premise of resource development is to find resources. From the perspective of exploration alone, China is a lean oil country, and the quality of oil is also relatively poor. Therefore, domestic oil companies have invested heavily in exploration and hope to make breakthroughs. .

IBM hopes to continue to provide advanced data processing technologies and services to help customers achieve their business goals. First, IBM assisted oil companies in improving their computing capabilities and providing them with higher-performance computers and storage devices. Second, IBM assisted customers in extending their tentacles. Because some of the oilfield sites were relatively remote, it was difficult to establish on-site computational capabilities. IBM worked on them. Providing a mobile data center solution can realize on-site field data processing capabilities in remote locations; in addition, IBM also assists oil companies in improving management capabilities, how to apply data, and maintain data.

CEI: To this day, IBM has more than a hundred years of history. How does the company see the significance of innovation in the development of enterprises?

Luo Haibo: IBM is historically a company that advocates innovation. In the beginning, IBM was a company that sold commercial machines (such as punch machines). In the 1940s, IBM began to do computers, and in the early 1980s, IBM invented the PC. In the past 20 years, IBM has successfully transformed itself into a service company. IBM spends 6 billion U.S. dollars a year on research and development, and has won the No. 1 patent for many years. In the history, five IBM employees won the Nobel Prize. In summary, innovation is driving the development of IBM, and innovation is also driving the progress of the world.

In terms of innovation, IBM first advocates innovation, followed by continuous practice of innovation with customers, while also delivering innovative ideas and experiences to customers to help them improve their innovation capabilities.