Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd. (BPCL) and Microsoft announced a strategic cloud partnership aimed at accelerating the firm’s digital transformation and shaping the future of innovation in the oil and gas industry. The collaboration seeks to unlock the opportunities that Microsoft’s cloud provides to address the unique challenges of the oil and gas sector, enabling BPCL to accelerate the modernization of its tech architecture to enhance customer experience.
The partnership gives a strong fillip to BPCL’s digital-first strategy, as part of ‘Project Anubhav’ to redefine customer experience through the pillars of trust, personalization, and convenience. Through a seven-year collaboration, Microsoft will provide infrastructure as a service (IAAS), platform as a service (PAAS), network and security services on the cloud, including Azure native services on Azure Datafactory, API, IOT and analytics. Microsoft’s secure cloud platform with data privacy at the center will fuel BPCL’s cloud transformation, providing the intelligence to transform operations, build smarter supply chains and increase customer engagement. Both companies have also been working closely to provide a secure collaboration experience for BPCL’s employee ecosystem across the country, with Microsoft Teams and workplace productivity suite.
As part of the strategic partnership, the companies will focus on the following:
- Creating a digital customer experience for BPCL customers through UFill-an innovative fuelling solution powered by Microsoft Azure, which delivers on BPCL’s promise of ensuring that their customers have complete control over Time, Technology and Transparency as part of their fuelling experience. With UFill, the invitation to customers is to “Fast forward your fill”, leveraging the latest in digital technology which obviates the need for looking at zero or final reading and such offline manual interventions.
- To reaffirm its brand promise of quality and trust, BPCL is digitally transforming its backend operations, enabling IoT powered supply chains with Microsoft Azure. BPCL’s Digital Nerve Center, IRIS will remotely monitor thousands of sensors, integrating across 19000+ fuel stations, retail terminals, bottling plants, consumer pumps, RDI (Railway Diesel Installations) and VTS (Vehicle Tracking System) systems, to ensure BPCL’s entire supply chain is tamper proof and delivers 100% percent quality.
- Powered by Azure Analytics, BPCL is building a conversational AI platform, the chat bot, Urja, to provide access to anytime, anywhere customer support across platforms customer support across platforms anytime, anywhere. Urja can be accessed by customers on platforms of their choice, including WhatsApp and Facebook, providing the flexibility and convenience of access at a click.
Rahul Tandon, Chief General Manager (Project Anubhav), BPCL said, “Microsoft has been one of the undisputed global leaders in technology for decades altogether and BPCL is proud of taking this partnership forward now in the cloud domain. Through our cloud based digital transformation project, we are focused to build innovative and customer friendly solutions which are increasingly interconnected, smart, always available and provide a single window of BPCL services to customers seamlessly. We look forward to unlock value for the organization by availing world class scalable infrastructure, crashing our time to market and reimagining the way our customers interact with BPCL.”
Sharing his thoughts on the partnership, Anant Maheshwari, President, Microsoft India, said, “BPCL is one of the most respected public sector companies in the country and we are honoured to work together to define the next frontiers of data driven innovation and customer engagement in the oil and gas industry. Bringing together BPCL’s operational expertise with Microsoft’s cloud and AI capabilities, our partnership will help fortify BPCL’s business operations with trust and security at the core.”
Microsoft has over 60 cloud regions across the globe with Azure available in 140 countries, delivering a comprehensive set of enterprise-grade cloud computing services for developers and businesses of all sizes to create new customer experiences, transform their business and operations and accelerate the pace of innovation. As India continues its journey towards becoming a data and AI led innovation hub, Microsoft’s collaboration with BPCL is a strong reinforcement of its commitment to partner with public sector organizations, making available the technology and tools required to accelerate their digital success.
