Premier Oil Selects Tarmin and IBM

Premier Oil plc, a FTSE
250 independent upstream oil and gas company, has selected Tarmin, Inc., IBM Corporation and Eurotech Computer Services Ltd for
an ongoing big data project to manage unstructured data in its information management department.

Premier aims to store its growing data, consolidate disparate
repositories and archive and retain business critical information in a secure
and reliable platform in order to reduce escalating storage costs, address
information security and compliance concerns, and streamline management and
integration of post-merger digital assets. The combined data defined storage
solution represents the first customer win in a multi-year agreement between
IBM and Tarmin to bring a joint solution based on Tarmin GridBank and IBM systems. The solution will enable Premier to gain competitive advantage through
better exploitation of its unstructured geological seismic data as a strategic
business asset.

With significant operations in the North Sea and Asia, Premier is a
growing participant in the global upstream oil and gas (O&G) market.
Premier’s geophysical modeling processes, expansive geologic
image library and growth through acquisition have resulted in an
increase of data across its internationally distributed network of facilities.
In order to ensure high level of data accessibility, security and long
term integrity across the entirety of its intercontinental operations, Premier
selected the joint Tarmin and IBM storage solution after considering a number
of different vendor offerings.

"We feel that the new approach to
unstructured data management, that GridBank offers, will optimally position us
to respond to new opportunities in oil and gas exploration, development and
production," said David Edwards, group head of information services,
Premier. "The integrated IBM and
Tarmin solution delivers multiple data management objectives in a single,
cohesive offering."

Premier’s volume of data, generated through oil and gas exploration, are
growing ceaselessly, driven by new technologies and increasing sensor
resolution. These factors are compounded through acquisition of digital assets
across heterogeneous arrays of storage hardware through M&A activity. This
leads to challenges associated with data discovery, on demand access,
exploitation of data and a need for a single point of truth across the
organization, key differentiators in ensuring that Premier is able to underpin
business growth through identification and exploitation of opportunities.

The
joint Tarmin and IBM multi-terabyte, multi-site data defined storage solution takes a
data centric approach to providing media independent data storage, distributed object dedupe, compression and encryption, archival and tiering, failsafe
replication and unified search across 500+ file types, including O&G
specific formats, ensuring HA continuous access to previously
siloed data, trapped in remote data centers.

"With new technologies generating
vast volumes of data, the need for intelligent solutions have become acute in
our target markets", said Tony Klapcia, Eurotech, an IBM Premier business
partner. "The Tarmin and IBM
combined solution will enable Premier to consolidate, manage, analyze and
quantify its data, accelerating its ability to identify and exploit natural
resources."

"Premier Oil’s sophisticated
geophysical modeling processes and its ever expanding geologic image library
presents just the kind of Big Data management challenge that we are seeing
across a host of different industries," said Dave Kay, VP, IBM global business
partners, Europe. "With Tarmin
GridBank on the IBM systems stack, Premier Oil is not only able to gain real
insight from these digital assets, but can also reduce storage cost, simplify
compliance and increase business agility at the same time."

"GridBank’s O&G specific modules
address the information tier of managing geological unstructured data,
providing a complementary offering to the IBM System enterprise range of
hardware at the storage tier," said Shahbaz Ali, president and CEO,
Tarmin. "Tarmin is hugely excited to
be working closely with IBM to address the growing data defined storage market,
uniquely positioning us to deliver reduced cost of storing unstructured data,
simplified regulatory compliance and improved access to data, allowing advances
such as accelerated identification of viable wells of natural resources for
business growth."

The deal with Premier follows a recent agreement between IBM and Tarmin to
collaborate with each other and also with their respective business partner ecosystems
to deliver data defined storage solutions to enable their clients to gain value
from the vast amount of data that they generate. Tarmin’s GridBank
technology plays a vital role in responding to the pronounced need for flexible
and effective solutions to the challenges of managing and storing unstructured
data at an unprecedented scale.

More on the collaboration between IBM and
Tarmin