Chevron Corp. (NYSE:$CVX) has announced a seven-year partnership with Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:$MSFT), thus establishing the company as Chevron’s primary cloud provider and accelerating the application of advanced technologies such as analytics and the Internet of Things to drive performance.

Here’s what Joe Geagea, Chevron’s executive V.P. of technology, projects, and services, had to say:

“We embrace every opportunity that streamlines our workflows, gives us insights into more efficient operations and helps us compete. We already have a head start in digitizing our oilfields, but we want to accelerate our deployment of new technologies that position us to increase our revenues, lower our costs, and improve the safety and reliability of our operations.”

So what caused the two companies to enter into a partnership? Well, the Microsoft strategic partnership is all a part of Chevron’s overall digitization initiative, which is a multi-year effort to streamline information technology operations around a digital core that connects the company’s engineers and operations via analytics and increased automation.

Essentially, adopting Microsoft’s Azure platform will let Chevron’s IT workforce evolve from supporting infrastructure to one that allows for more advanced technologies and marketing operations.

“Chevron has a long history of applying advanced technologies to develop the energy that improves lives and powers the world. We also understand scale, and the cloud at hyper-scale is something we intend to leverage for agility and efficiency. Through this strategic partnership, we believe Chevron will have a competitive advantage,” said chief information officer Bill Braun, “The volumes and velocity of real-time data we obtain from the reservoir through refineries to the retail pump grows at a dramatic pace every year. Our Microsoft relationship will advance our high-performance computing, IoT, and help capitalize on innovation in data science and machine learning.”

Additionally, the seven-year partnership will allow the two companies to focus primarily on joint innovation from both a technology and business process perspective.

“With Chevron and Microsoft, intelligent energy meets intelligent cloud,” said corporate V.P. of Microsoft Azure Jason Zander, “Our global cloud infrastructure – which has more regions around the world than any other cloud provider – will enable Chevron to leverage our capabilities across areas like high-performance computing and Internet of Things to become a truly digital business.”

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