Asian Tech Press (Nov 15) -- International Business Machines (IBM) and Amazon Web Services, a unit of Amazon.com Inc, said on Monday they will collaborate to expand the reach of a range of tools used by oil companies to manage different types of data, Reuters reported.

The report mentioned that in 2018, Amazon partnered with Royal Dutch Shell to develop a technology that converts data from more than a century of oil production, mainly paper records, into a standardized format to improve efficiency in the multinational oil company's operations.

The technology is being shared across the industry on an open-source basis, and is available only in cloud computing data centers. Some oil-producing countries such as Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Russia do not have Amazon data centers, but require companies to store data within their borders.

IBM and Amazon said they have worked together to solve the problem. Using IBM's technology called OpenShift, oil companies can use the oil-industry cloud data tools in their private-owned data centers within their countries.