Kuwait’s national oil refining firm Kuwait National Petroleum Company (KNPC) has taken its digital transformation to the next level with American cloud computing and virtualization technology company VMware.
According to the company statement, it will be able to produce new mega-projects in the country as well as assist Kuwait Vision 2035’s aims for economic growth through this move.
Mr. Naji Al-Marri, Manager of Information Technology at KNPC said, “In Kuwait’s oil and gas sector, opportunities for new projects appear quickly and require sophisticated IT resources, with a rapid turnaround and the ability to develop powerful, customized applications.”
He further added that KNPC is already working on several megaprojects, including a strategic plan to expand and modernize the Mina Abdullah and Mina Al-Ahmadi refineries into a single integrated complex with an 800,000-BPD capacity.
To support these ambitious plans, KNPC constructed its own private cloud in two Kuwaiti data centers using a Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC) strategy based on VMware solutions, virtualizing computing, storage, network, and security layers for maximum agility, decreased cost, and complexity.
Furthermore, KNPC’s IT team operates both sites in Active-Active configuration, enabling them to offer high resiliency and Service Level Agreements to the business units.
Ahed Al-Khurayif Deputy CEO Admin & Commercial Affairs KNPC
“By embracing a cloud-first approach with VMware, KNPC has boosted its agility, efficiency, and security to set in motion a new era of digital transformation. The company has already achieved more than 95 percent datacenter virtualization, reducing its datacenter footprint by 70 percent, and realizing total cost savings of more than 50 percent over three years, while enabling the rapid launch of modern applications. KNPC’s management was keen to ensure the organization embraced the latest technology, enabling it to operate at maximum efficiency, with network visibility and agility to support changing market conditions and new commercial ventures.”
With cybersecurity becoming more of a concern in the energy sector, VMware’s technologies, such as NSX, have aided KNPC’s security by providing total network protection. KNPC’s security is additionally boosted by the VMware cloud foundation, which automates the lifecycle management of all software components throughout the organization’s infrastructure, ensuring that security upgrades are applied automatically as needed.
Mr. Imad Sfeir, Country Director of Gulf, VMware commented, “As one of the most digitally advanced oil refineries in the world, KNPC is demonstrating what can be achieved by embracing a cloud-first approach that supports automation, big data, and smart applications. KNPC is ideally placed to continue increasing its productivity and set a new benchmark for other companies in Kuwait and beyond to follow.”
