Brazil’s Petrobras tenders datacenter infra services

Brazilian state-run oil and gas giant Petrobras launched an 83.6mn-real (US$17.2mn) tender for a contract to provide services, operation and maintenance for its datacenter infrastructure.

The company issued a call for proposals, which can be submitted until 12pm local time on August 11, through its Petronect procurement platform.

The winner will be the proponent making the best offer from a technical standpoint and from a price perspective, according to Petrobras.

Brazilian or foreign companies authorized to operate in Brazil may participate in the bidding process, but companies organized in a consortium will not be allowed to take part.

The services sought are varied, and range from IT infrastructure support to structured cabling, data storage, and virtualization and orchestration services. They also encompass different business units and sites on a nationwide basis.

In order to carry out operations and monitor servers for Petrobras' LAN datacenter, for example, the contractor will have to maintain a full-time team at the company's research center (Cenpes) in Rio de Janeiro.

Details of the tender can be found on Petronect under reference number (“oportunidade”) 7004084458.

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Petrobras has invested heavily in its IT infrastructure to cope with the growing volume of data storage and processing needed for its operations. 

It is at Cenpes that the company maintains its main supercomputers – including Pégaso, one of the most powerful in the global oil and gas industry.

Petrobras' current strategic plan, which outlines US$78bn in investments for 2023-27, earmarks US$2.1bn for digital transformation and innovation.

Petrobras' strategy for its data management is hybrid – that is, part of its workload is and will continue to be kept on its own data processing premises, while another part, especially less strategically important data, will be migrated gradually to the cloud.

The company's data strategy is also multi-cloud, as Petrobras uses solutions from more than one provider (Microsoft and AWS).

In cloud, the company plans to invest 240mn reais this year, up 40% from the 172mn reais it spent in 2022.