Australian mining company BHP has picked Microsoft and AWS as its long-term cloud providers across its global operated assets.

BHP is an Anglo-Australian mining, oil and gas extractor headquartered in Melbourne, and employs 80,000 staff. Its operations are principally in Australia and the United States, while it also carries out processing in Canada, the UK, Singapore and other locations in the Indo-Pacific region.

The collaborations with AWS and Microsoft will support two distinct parts of BHP’s operations.

Microsoft, through its Azure platform, will host BHP’s global applications portfolio. This will enable BHP to leverage its existing Microsoft licences and SAP applications portfolio, and help to reduce its reliance on regional data centres.

AWS will power BHP’s digital transformation by providing capabilities in data analytics and machine learning to rapidly deploy digital solutions globally to improve operational performance.

BHP Chief Technical Officer, Laura Tyler, said collaborating with the cloud providers highlighted the importance of cloud to support BHP’s digital transformation.

“Digital technology is in everything we do at BHP, from how we connect to our customers and partners every day to how we extract and find resources more safely and sustainably,” she said.

“We are leveraging next generation technologies like cloud, machine learning, and data analytics to solve complex business problems and unlock value even faster.

“Cloud is the foundation to our plans, and it will enable us to deploy digital solutions to the front-line quickly and at scale. Cloud will dramatically reduce the amount of hardware on sites, and reduce costs.

“We are thrilled to have AWS and Microsoft on board to ensure we have a strong foundation to accelerate our digital transformation plans and lift capability across the business.”