BP plc will shift 900 core workloads to Amazon Web Services Inc. as part of an agreement revealed today, while Novartis AG and FINRA are spinning up massive new data projects on the provider’s public cloud.

The three deals were all announced at AWS’ ongoing re:Invent event in Las Vegas. They follow several other high-profile customer wins the provider disclosed at the conference, among them a contract with Formula One Group for cloud-based aerodynamic simulations.

AWS’ partnership with BP is perhaps the broadest of the bunch. The British energy giant will close two European data centers that are currently its largest globally and move the 900 “key applications” they host to the Amazon Inc. subsidiary’s platform. In conjunction, BP is building a data lake atop the S3 object storage service that will analyze operational data from its global operations.

The project’s large scope — two data centers’ worth of infrastructure — is not the only notable aspect of the announcement. BP is  set to supply electricity to Amazon in Europe through a decade-long green energy deal the companies separately unveiled this morning. The contract is for more than 170 megawatts of wind and solar capacity per year that will be used not just by AWS but also Amazon’s e-commerce delivery network. 

“AWS is helping BP to transform our operations, and together we are using the cloud and renewable energy resources to drive energy efficiencies,” said BP Chief Information Officer Steve Fortune. 

Novartis 

Novartis’ deal with AWS centers on analytics. The drugmaker will use AWS to develop what it dubs Insight Centers, cloud-based data crunching systems intended to help its manufacturing group find ways of improving output. These Insight Centers are expected to give analysts the ability to better track how production lines are doing, create more accurate forecasts and find bottlenecks that are slowing down medicine shipments.

A second project will see Novartis use AWS services to streamline plant maintenance. Specifically, the company wants to use computer vision algorithms and the AWS IoT suite of connected device services to automatically spot potential hardware issues in factories. 

Novartis hinted that the analytics initiative could eventually expand to other areas beyond manufacturing. “While manufacturing is a great starting place, we’re keen to also explore where else we can apply this technology,” Bertrand Bodson, the drugmaker’s chief digital officer, said in a prepared statement.

FINRA 

The third deal AWS announced today will see it team up with FINRA CAT LLC, a subsidiary of the U.S. financial sector’s self-regulatory organization, to host its planned Consolidated Audit Trail. The system will provide a centralized database of all securities and listed options trades performed in the U.S so regulators can identify illegal market activity more easily.

The project involves a lot of data even by public cloud standards. FINRA expects that the Consolidated Audit Trail will ingest 100 billion daily financial market events from 22 stock exchanges and 1,500 broker-dealer firms when it goes live. 

Photo: BP