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Worley, ABB, and IBM to collaborate to create an end-to-end green hydrogen solution

SYDNEY and ZURICH and ARMONK, N.Y., Feb. 22, 2022 — Worley (ASX: WOR), ABB (ABBN: SIX Swiss Ex) and IBM have signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on helping energy companies build and operate green hydrogen facilities more efficiently and at scale.

The planned three-party collaboration aims to develop an integrated, digitally enabled solution for facility owners to build green hydrogen assets more quickly, cheaply, and safely, and operate them more efficiently.

Green hydrogen is a form of clean energy made from water through electrolysis, which is powered by renewable energy. While many industries want to invest in green hydrogen, high production costs pose a barrier to driving market adoption and achieving scale over natural gas or blue hydrogen. In addition, production facilities require an accessible and abundant renewable energy supply. This collaboration aims to help customers address these challenges by scaling up technologies and reducing production costs to enable green hydrogen to become more widely used.

Under the collaboration, Worley will provide engineering, procurement, and construction expertise across all stages of the project. ABB will provide offerings for electrical infrastructure, automation, operations digitalization and optimization, and energy management. IBM will provide systems integration services, as well as data framework and management solutions. Together, the three parties will provide operations and maintenance services, leveraging their combined digital expertise.

“This collaboration aims to help turn net-zero solutions into reality. It will build on the key learnings of our ground-breaking Ambition to Reality paper, written in collaboration with Princeton University, USA. By fast-tracking and standardizing how we engineer-design-operate, this collaboration is expected to reduce the levelized cost of green hydrogen and help our customers to decarbonize their operations further,” says Chris Gill, Senior Vice President of Low-carbon Hydrogen at Worley.

“Hydrogen is at the heart of the energy transition and is essential to decarbonizing a wide range of hard-to-abate industries. Together with Worley and IBM, we’re dedicated to enable a new concept to accelerate the adoption of low carbon hydrogen and efficiently meet the growing demand. Complementing our partners expertise with our electrification, automation and digital solutions, we will aim to enable lower production costs through smart, safe and sustainable operations,” says Bruno Roche, Vice President, Energy Transition at ABB Energy Industries.

“While many industries have been able to adopt wind and solar to help decarbonize operations, energy-intensive industries, such as petrochemical, cement and steel, require heat temperatures and combustion that cannot be achieved with these renewables. Green hydrogen can help address these distinct needs in a more scalable sustainable way. IBM’s collaboration with Worley and ABB aims to address those challenges by combining expertise and solutions from all three companies into a distinct ecosystem of industry leaders to help form a repeatable process to build, operate and manage green hydrogen facilities. We believe this kind of collaboration is critical to achieving decarbonization goals,” says Zahid ‘Z’ Habib, Vice President, Global Energy & Resources Industry Leader, IBM Consulting.

The planned relationship is subject to the parties reaching definitive agreements.

About Worley: Worley is a global company headquartered in Australia and our purpose is delivering a more sustainable world.  Worley is a leading global provider of professional project and asset services in the energy, chemicals and resources sectors.  As a knowledge-based service provider, we use our knowledge and capabilities to support our customers to reduce their emissions and move towards a low carbon future.
Worley Limited is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX: WOR).

About ABB: (ABBN: SIX Swiss Ex) is a leading global technology company that energizes the transformation of society and industry to achieve a more productive, sustainable future. By connecting software to its electrification, robotics, automation and motion portfolio, ABB pushes the boundaries of technology to drive performance to new levels. With a history of excellence stretching back more than 130 years, ABB’s success is driven by about 105,000 talented employees in over 100 countries. www.abb.com

Worley, ABB, and IBM to collaborate to create an end-to-end green hydrogen solution

SYDNEY and ZURICH and ARMONK, N.Y., Feb. 22, 2022 — Worley (ASX: WOR), ABB (ABBN: SIX Swiss Ex) and IBM have signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on helping energy companies build and operate green hydrogen facilities more efficiently and at scale.

The planned three-party collaboration aims to develop an integrated, digitally enabled solution for facility owners to build green hydrogen assets more quickly, cheaply, and safely, and operate them more efficiently.

Green hydrogen is a form of clean energy made from water through electrolysis, which is powered by renewable energy. While many industries want to invest in green hydrogen, high production costs pose a barrier to driving market adoption and achieving scale over natural gas or blue hydrogen. In addition, production facilities require an accessible and abundant renewable energy supply. This collaboration aims to help customers address these challenges by scaling up technologies and reducing production costs to enable green hydrogen to become more widely used.

Under the collaboration, Worley will provide engineering, procurement, and construction expertise across all stages of the project. ABB will provide offerings for electrical infrastructure, automation, operations digitalization and optimization, and energy management. IBM will provide systems integration services, as well as data framework and management solutions. Together, the three parties will provide operations and maintenance services, leveraging their combined digital expertise.

“This collaboration aims to help turn net-zero solutions into reality. It will build on the key learnings of our ground-breaking Ambition to Reality paper, written in collaboration with Princeton University, USA. By fast-tracking and standardizing how we engineer-design-operate, this collaboration is expected to reduce the levelized cost of green hydrogen and help our customers to decarbonize their operations further,” says Chris Gill, Senior Vice President of Low-carbon Hydrogen at Worley.

“Hydrogen is at the heart of the energy transition and is essential to decarbonizing a wide range of hard-to-abate industries. Together with Worley and IBM, we’re dedicated to enable a new concept to accelerate the adoption of low carbon hydrogen and efficiently meet the growing demand. Complementing our partners expertise with our electrification, automation and digital solutions, we will aim to enable lower production costs through smart, safe and sustainable operations,” says Bruno Roche, Vice President, Energy Transition at ABB Energy Industries.

“While many industries have been able to adopt wind and solar to help decarbonize operations, energy-intensive industries, such as petrochemical, cement and steel, require heat temperatures and combustion that cannot be achieved with these renewables. Green hydrogen can help address these distinct needs in a more scalable sustainable way. IBM’s collaboration with Worley and ABB aims to address those challenges by combining expertise and solutions from all three companies into a distinct ecosystem of industry leaders to help form a repeatable process to build, operate and manage green hydrogen facilities. We believe this kind of collaboration is critical to achieving decarbonization goals,” says Zahid ‘Z’ Habib, Vice President, Global Energy & Resources Industry Leader, IBM Consulting.

The planned relationship is subject to the parties reaching definitive agreements.

IBM Acquires Neudesic, Leading Microsoft Azure Consultancy

Adds deep cloud and data expertise to seize the $200 billion[1] cloud consulting market opportunity

ARMONK, N.Y., Feb. 15, 2022 — IBM today announced it has acquired Neudesic, a leading U.S. cloud services consultancy specializing primarily in the Microsoft Azure platform, along with bringing skills in multicloud. This acquisition will significantly expand IBM’s portfolio of hybrid multicloud services and further advance the company’s hybrid cloud and AI strategy.

IBM continues to invest in its hybrid cloud and AI strategy, expanding its cloud services technology, skills and capabilities to meet the growing demand of clients’ hybrid cloud needs. Including Neudesic, IBM has acquired more than 20 companies — 12 in IBM Consulting alone — since Arvind Krishna became CEO in April 2020. Today’s news builds upon IBM’s prior acquisitions of cloud transformation capabilities, including Sentaca, SXiQ, BoxBoat, Nordcloud and Taos.

To improve operational agility, businesses are investing aggressively in their application portfolio, and according to IDC, 69 percent of companies worldwide view application modernization as a top or high priority2. The ability to accelerate digital transformation through application development, modernization and data capabilities, powered by the cloud, plays a significant role in achieving their operational goals. Yet enterprises are facing an acute cloud-native skills shortage.3

“As one of the leading cloud platforms, Microsoft Azure is key to many of our clients’ ability to modernize and innovate,” said John Granger, Senior Vice President, IBM Consulting. “Neudesic adds deep Azure cloud, data engineering and data analytics expertise to accelerate our clients’ hybrid cloud journeys. This builds upon IBM’s prior acquisitions of cloud transformation capabilities last year.”

“Customers are driving incredible acceleration across Microsoft cloud services, and it’s more important than ever to have trusted partners, like IBM, skilled in our technology,” said Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, Microsoft. “Neudesic and Microsoft are enabling enterprises to achieve their business outcomes with our Azure platform, leveraging a combination of services and IP. With this acquisition, IBM Consulting is gaining even more capabilities and assets to help customers succeed on their digital transformation journeys.”

Headquartered in Irvine, California, Neudesic has more than 1,500 cloud and data experts located across the U.S. and in India. Neudesic provides a full scope of digital transformation services across advisory, application development, cloud migration, DevOps, integration, data engineering, data visualization and hyper-automation. As a top Microsoft global solution partner, Neudesic has deep expertise in technology transformation and delivering Microsoft Azure cloud services to clients across the health and life sciences, financial services, energy and utilities, professional services and retail industries.

Neudesic’s cloud and data consultants will join IBM Consulting’s growing hybrid cloud services business, enhancing IBM’s ability to help clients meet their business needs with multicloud technologies. Neudesic extends IBM Consulting’s skills and certifications across the hybrid cloud ecosystem including Microsoft, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Databricks, Snowflake, Denodo, Kubernetes, MuleSoft, RedHat, Salesforce, UIPath, SAP and Oracle.

“As a Microsoft Gold Partner with multiple Azure competencies, Neudesic is excited to enhance IBM’s hybrid cloud strategy with extensive Azure capabilities,” said Parsa Rohani, Co-Founder and CEO, Neudesic. “The combination of our capabilities with IBM’s hybrid cloud vision and scale will drive even more impactful innovation for clients.”

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed. IBM and Neudesic signed a definitive agreement leading to today’s acquisition in IBM’s fourth quarter 2021.

University of Florida and IBM Team Up to Solve Society’s Biggest Challenges

IBM’s investment advances UF’s ‘AI University’ initiative

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The University of Florida announced this week a new collaboration with tech giant IBM to launch a comprehensive skills program designed to extend UF’s vision to be an international leader in artificial intelligence, data science, fintech, and other related technologies that can help solve society’s biggest challenges.

UF — already ranked by U.S. News & World Report as one of nation’s most innovative universities — and IBM will work together to support UF’s faculty and students as they develop diverse and high-demand skillsets in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, quantum cloud computing and data science that align with industry needs and trends. The collaboration will extend to West Palm Beach, where UF is exploring an opportunity to co-create academic programming at a new campus that will serve the needs of the region’s rapid influx of companies across sectors, including finance and technology.

The collaboration is the next step in UF’s ambitious goal to be the leading “AI University” in the nation. The initiative will help UF transform the nation’s workforce and bolster research by embedding technology into its curriculum across disciplines.

“This collaboration with IBM puts us on the fast track to leadership in helping the world meet the greatest challenges of the 21st century,” UF President Kent Fuchs said. “By deepening our progress in artificial intelligence and other critical information technology, it will give our professors, scientists and students the right tools at the right time — benefiting everyone from teachers preparing schoolchildren for career success to doctors providing patients the very best health care to farmers growing more sustainable, healthier, productive crops.”

In a memorandum of understanding, IBM is pledging to UF software and tools to bolster the university’s work in AI and data science, including hybrid cloud. The multi-year initiative with IBM includes plans to develop at least one new degree program in AI, and the provision of online coursework, software, lecturers and case studies from the IBM Academic Initiative. IBM will also help establish a campus center that focuses on finance and technology education and research, and will provide curated course content, access to the IBM Cloud, and digital certificates to award upon course completions.

The collaboration with IBM follows last year’s substantial and transformational investments from UF alumnus and NVIDIA co-founder Chris Malachowsky to boost the university’s AI and data science capabilities. UF’s AI University initiative is highlighted by more than $250 million in support from the university, the state of Florida and generous donors.

“Working side-by-side with a company the caliber of IBM moves UF a giant step toward our efforts to transform how people work, learn and play,” said Cammy Abernathy, dean of UF’s Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering. “Our motto in our college is ‘Powering the new Engineer,’ and that exactly what IBM is doing.”

IBM’s relationship with UF is part of the company’s Global University Programs, which provide assets, training, curriculum content, hands-on labs and software to academic institutions to advance relevant skills for today’s workforce. Through IBM’s Global University Programs more than 900,000 students are enrolled in at least 334 specialized academic courses in over 10,000 universities and schools across the world. The company has committed to train 30 million people worldwide by 2030.

IBM’s investment in UF supercharges the university’s efforts to serve Floridians and others throughout the world. Plans include using advanced technology to reimagine how industries operate and prepare for the future. By embracing artificial intelligence and other powerful technologies, UF can help Florida become an economic powerhouse while addressing some of the world’s most pressing concerns, university leaders say.

“If we are going to be successful in advancing technologies such as AI and training people to apply it to civic, social and business challenges, it will require us to partner with key institutions of higher education and research like the University of Florida,” said Justina Nixon, an IBM Vice President and Global Head of Corporate Social Responsibility. “Skills are a human right and we aim to work with partners to make state of the art education and career readiness as widely accessible as possible. Today’s announcement with the University of Florida is designed to advance this critical agenda.”

The University of Florida, which traces its roots to 1853, has a long history of established programs in international education, research and service, and is one of only 17 public, land-grant universities in the Association of American Universities, which comprises America’s leading research universities. UF is ranked No. 5 in the most recent U.S. News and World Report’s list of best public universities.