Offshore Energies Magazine - Issue 55 Spring 2023

W ith its origins in mid-nineteenth century Norwegian ship-building, Aker is now a holding structure with many of its subsidiaries designing heavy engineering projects. Many of these include energy. Among them are Aker BP, Europe’s biggest independent oil and gas producer; and Aker Solutions. This corporate history gives Aize the advantage of partnerships with companies with extensive experience in related sectors such as heavy engineering, logistics and energy production. Aize is then perhaps their grandchild, spunoff fromAker Solutions less than three years ago. It shares a building on a new estate just outside Oslo (where 70% of Aize’s staff work) with Aker Solutions and Aker BP, the latter set up five years ago by the UK major and Aker. Aize also enjoys very close business relations with this company. Aize has a large office in Aberdeen, where about 60 of its 225 full-time staff work. And at any given time, the company also has 40 or 50 consultants at work with clients on projects. There is also a small office in Houston, home to the US oil and gas industry. This is where Aize does its business development and works with North American clients. "This greatly accelerated the learning curve," Anders Brun, the company’s commercial director, tells OEUK. Until its demerger, the company drew heavily on Aker Solutions for personnel, who had several decades’ experience writing industrial software. After the demerger, Aize changed its focus several times as its perspective sharpened. It centred its strategy on the development of one product, workspace. Aize invests materially in security capabilities, and as its products requiremuch business-critical data, it maintains high standards for cyber security. "This is very strict, and there are protocols to protect leakage that leverage state of the art cloud solutions," Mr Brun says. It also co-operates closely on developing and testing software with its sister companies and sometimes takes people from Aker BP and Aker Solutions on secondment. "There is a true partnership between Aize and our corporate 'siblings' Aker BP and AkerSolutions," he says. Workspace Aize’s workspace technology can be applied across virtually all asset intensive industries. Although the company was born and bred inside the energy sector,

it also has done work on high-voltage, direct-current (HVDC) platforms for offshore wind farms and carbon capture and storage operations. Applying Aize technology to something like an onshore solar power plant however would probably make little commercial or practical sense as the data intensity and core asset complexity is low for such energy domains. It comes into its own though when working on a 30,000-tonne oil and gas production or processing platform in the hostile waters of the North Sea, Mr Brun says. "Our value is higher when there is a vast amount of data," he says. "We look for clients that use unwieldy amounts of data, typically on major, heavy projects with many personnel involved," he says. "This is everything from the wellhead upwards, including gas-gathering systems, processing plants and refineries." Its data- and IT infrastructure-agnostic workspace offering, which allows clients to create and experiment with technical solutions before contracting for the services needed, has become Aize’s primary business. It appears to take digitalisation as far as it can in the interests of saving clients’ time, effort and money. Clients log on, in as many numbers as needed, and they can spend days on end, working together in a virtual "Our value is higher when there is a vast amount of data. We look for clients that use unwieldy amounts, typically on major, heavy projects with many personnel involved."

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