Petrobras' cloud computing investments set to grow 40% this year

Brazil's Petrobras plans to invest 240mn reais (US$47.5mn) in cloud computing initiatives this year, up 40% from 172mn reais in 2022, the national oil company said in a statement.

Resources are being applied to boost the deployment of technologies such as virtual terminals (digital twins), data platforms and machine learning capabilities.

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

In 2021, Petrobras launched a cloud computing competence center (CCC), in partnership with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, to enable enhanced artificial intelligence applications and analytics, among other things.

Since then, the CCC has delivered more than 80 solutions and made it possible to update the management system that connects thousands of company processes, according to the state firm.

The center relies on in-house employees and specialized consulting teams of the two cloud providers. Previously, a Petrobras spokesperson told BNamericas that the company expected to have 38 professionals involved in the CCC by end-2024.

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 strategic data, will gradually migrate to the cloud.

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

“Petrobras has already started using cloud for corporate ICT solutions, accounting, HR applications, etc., with the aim of keeping on its own datacenters scientific applications such as high performance computing (HPC), which processes data for exploration and production activities,” CIO Marcelo Carreras said in the statement.

ERP

One of the systems that has already migrated to the cloud, in a complex process concluded last year, was the company's ERP management software. The ERP is provided by German software giant SAP.

According to Petrobras, the migration of its SAP ERP platform to the cloud was the largest of its kind in Latin America and one of the biggest in the world.

Since its implementation, SAP S/4HANA – the new cloud version of the ERP – has been processing local and international payments worth around 5bn reais a day, according to the statement.

It has also received more than 72,000 proposals from suppliers in contracting processes and issued around 5,000 invoices per day, the company said.

Running these systems in the cloud is expected to bring productivity gains with a return of more than US$190mn by 2025, according to Petrobras estimates.

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