GreenWire: Microsoft Corp. sees the oil and gas industry as an ideal fit as the software giant looks to expand its commercial information technology business, CEO Steve Ballmer said during a conference in Houston yesterday.
“The power and importance of information is as obvious to leadership in oil and gas as any industry,” Ballmer said in an interview before a speech at the Microsoft-sponsored Global Energy Forum in Houston. He said the industry is “very opened-minded, frankly, to information technology as a tool and the kind of investment that sometimes has to go into information technology to improve productivity.”
Ballmer hosted a breakfast that was attended by the CEOs of Marathon Oil Corp. and Baker Hughes Inc., as well as medical, financial and manufacturing industry executives. Those are some of the sectors served by Microsoft’s commercial industry group, which provides about $5 billion of Microsoft’s roughly $60 billion in annual revenue.
Ballmer said he hopes to provide oil and gas companies with sophisticated communications systems and cloud computing technology, which allows users to store data remotely and access it over the Internet (Brett Clanton, Houston Chronicle, Jan. 22). – GN