How Aker Solutions is using cloud technology to empower its disparate workforce

“We design solutions that go deep into the sea in remote locations across the world. The accuracy of those designs is essential. Getting them right means making sure that both our people and the environment are constantly protected.” 

Lijo John, Enterprise Architect at Aker Solutions, is explaining the critical role that technology plays in not only supporting the Norwegian energy company to deliver its services – but also in keeping its remote engineers and machine operators safe.

“We are a global company and our workforce is spread out across the world,” John says. “We’ve got people in offices, but a lot of our work actually takes place at sea, where our engineers are working on offshore installations.”

The smooth and safe running of those installations is essential to the delivery of Aker Solutions’ services. That means making sure that the company’s remote engineers can run and visualize the compute-heavy, 3D simulation models required to undertake installations testing, maintenance and other work. All without access to the physical workstations typically found at Aker Solutions’ office branches around the world.

With Azure Virtual Desktop, the company has been able to provide its disparate workforce with access to the CPU and GPU capacity they need to work from anywhere, all while maximizing cost savings and environmental benefits that align with Aker Solutions’ business and strategic ambitions.

“We have a clear ambition to reduce our carbon emissions,” says John. “By 2050, we want to achieve net-zero CO2 emissions. That's the goal we have set ourselves.”

A company based on land and water

Headquartered in Fornebu, Norway, Aker Solutions is a global company that employs some 15,000 people in more than 50 locations and 20 countries across the world. Through delivery of integrated products and services to the global energy industry, the company develops renewable solutions to meet future energy needs.

“That’s the purpose of our company,” John says. “To solve global energy challenges for future generations.”

To achieve that goal, Aker Solutions places a huge emphasis on pursuing low-carbon and renewable solutions and is keen to lead from the front in contributing to the global energy transition. Underpinning those efforts is a focus on digitalization. 

“Our success depends on combining the physical world with technology,” says John.  

“Each segment of Aker Solutions has a digitalization team associated to it,” he continues. “That team looks at the work processes within that segment to see where we can transform the way of working to become more efficient, automated and solution-oriented.”

It was that focus that led John’s team to realize the huge benefits that Azure Virtual Desktop could bring to Aker Solutions’ workforce.

“We have two types of employees,” he adds. “Traditional office workers like me, and non-office workers who work out in the field delivering solutions to our customers.

“One of the main challenges of having this type of very spread-out workforce is accessibility to technology and data. Our engineers in the field are often disconnected, not so close to our network, our solutions, and they will have issues accessing data in real–time, as well as uploading and sharing information. 

“So when we started speaking to Microsoft about Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), that was one of the main things we hoped it would help us to overcome.”

Reaping the benefits of increased flexibility and scalability

To implement Azure Virtual Desktop, Aker Solutions were supported by Microsoft partner Cognizant, who had been working with the energy company on a number of digital transformation projects for some time.

“A common problem Aker Solutions faced was to do with having a very high business demand, but not for a long duration, just for the specific period of project requirements,” says Sandeep Ashtekar, Senior Delivery Manager at Cognizant.

“Before we moved to Azure Virtual Desktop, if you asked us to scale up, we had to put in additional capacity which would stay there as a capex for Aker Solutions for a period of time. 

“There was also a latency issue,” adds Ashtekar. “If you took your work computer home, there might be milliseconds of latency between your home and the data center, which made working in that way inaccurate.

“All of that changed when we introduced the Azure-based HPC cluster with the cycle cloud to orchestrate the entire provisioning and deprovisioning. Now, all the users get a uniform experience. Whether they are in an office, on an offshore installation, or at home, they always connect to AVD, so everybody has the same experience.”

And feedback from the end users is positive too. “They don't care where their data is,” says John. “But as long as they have a better experience, then they’re happy, which they are.” 

The issue of needing to scale at different times of the year has also been resolved by AVD. “Scaling up and down is one of the out-of-the-box capabilities we get from Microsoft,” says John. 

Supporting the company to meet its carbon reduction goals

Aside from the enhanced performance and a more flexible and cost-efficient operational model, Azure Virtual Desktop is also helping Aker Solutions to make significant progress towards its overarching strategic goals.

“Additional to all other benefits that the cloud brings, we also have our 2050 company goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions,” John says. “Wherever possible, we are trying to leverage modern technologies to help us achieve that.

“Azure is helping us to move in the right direction. Just by moving our global data center to Azure, we estimate we’ve achieved a 40% reduction in our data center CO2 emissions.

“So the next step for us is to continue to close down our on-premises data centers and move all our workloads to the cloud,” he concludes. “By partnering with Microsoft and Cognizant, I’m confident we’ll achieve our goal – and more.”