big data in the oil and gas industry

The oil and gas industry is in general an industry sector which collects large amounts of data. Not only companies who are active in upstream but also companies who are active in midstream and downstream. Specially companies who do work in all sectors of the industry do have large amounts of data ranging from seismic data to data on how the distribution chain is performing and much more. To be able to succeed in a industry like the oil and gas industry and to achieve compelling advantages over competitors it can be very beneficial to combine all this raw and unstructured data to help an organisation. Currently most of the data is siloed and not accessible or usable to do analysis over the whole chain. Also it is commonly impossible to use this data in a manner that is providing good results that are usable within the business planning.

For those cases and in oil and gas industry related companies it can be very beneficial to start thinking about a big data strategy. Implementing a big data strategy go's way beyond "only" implementing a hadoop cluster and give this to a number of tech people. Hortonworks recently published an article in which they provide a first insight into how hadoop and a big data strategy can be used in the oil and gas industry. A good image and starting point for thinking about a big data strategy is the below image.

The above image is showing it from a Hortonworks perspective however the same can be achieved with other Hadoop implementation vendors like for example Oracle or others. What is interesting about this image as a starting point is that it is showing a first impression of sources within the oil and gas industry that could potentially be used within a big data strategy.