Luq Niazi, IBM Global managing director, Chemical & Petroleum Industries speaks about IBM’s commitment to serving technology in the oil and gas sector
Luq Niazi, IBM Global managing director, Chemical & Petroleum Industries speaks about IBM’s commitment to serving technology in the oil and gas sector.
IBM is a very substantial technology and services organisation and in the industry context the global company has a global business services dimension.
Luq Niazi is one of IBM’s 12 global industry leaders.
“We cover 12 industries globally. We have global industry offerings that take technologies like cloud, IIoT, cognitive and blockchain components and fuses them together with our R&D and services capabilities,” said Niazi.
He added: “What makes IBM unique is that we are one of these companies that have this broad capability across all the technologies through to deep services capability, combined with a deep R&D capability. We have over 3,000 researchers around the world in a network of 12 research labs.”
According to Niazi, the oil price dimension is really driving change in terms of innovation across the entirety of the value chain. “The whole dynamic across the value chain is driving the need for the next level of innovation in core business processes. That is why digital transformation is so relevant. It is enabling new levels of performance and efficiency,” he said.
Middle East digital drive
IBM works with many of the big oil and gas companies in the Middle East region and all of these companies, to varying degrees, are looking to adopt digital technology.
“The Middle East is a key area for us as it is in a very important geography,” said Niazi.
“We are seeing the adoption of digital in various parts of the business to drive value and higher performance,” explained Niazi.
One area that is seeing increased attention is cognitive technology.
“The application of AI is really important in the oil and gas industry. If you look across the value chain of cognitive application 60 per cent is used in the upstream part of the industry and 40 per cent in downstream and chemicals. The reasons why is the complexity and value of the decisions are larger in the upstream. This is driving a need for AI solutions,” explained Niazi.
In conclusion, Niazi said: “We want to be the digital reinvention partner of our clients in an open way that they can achieve by using all these technologies and applying them in a targeted way. We see really substantial growth opportunity for our clients and for IBM.”
Source: Pipeline ME
