A strategic partnership for delivering business and technological value has been established in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with a focus on upstream oil exploration in the world’s largest crude oil exporter. NetApp, TechAccess and Abdulla Fouad have teamed up to deliver upstream oil exploration IT expertise for Energy customers in the Kingdom. NetApp, the world’s leading data management company, has selected TechAccess and Abdulla Fouad as its strategic partners for distribution and reselling its equipment in upstream oil exploration environments. “TechAccess’ years of experience and flawless track record of delivering value to customers in this complex marketplace made it the clear choice for NetApp when we sought to expand our business in the region” said Ashraf Atia Energy Sector Manager for NetApp Middle East North Africa.

By introducing scalable NAS technology into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, NetApp, TechAccess and Abdulla Fouad have effectively reduced the time to oil discovery and extraction by a significant amount enabling the national oil company to increase its exploration and extraction efficiency. The upstream oil exploration workflow consists of four major processes: Interpretation, Visualization, Simulation, and Seismic Processing. For the past four years, NetApp has been the regional technology standard for Interpretation, Visualization and Simulation with its award winning FAS product portfolio. Starting in 2007, NetApp introduced its GX product line which offers scalable performance and massive data storage capacity as an alternative to the existing FAS products. Customers in the upstream oil exploration industry have embraced these products as it enables them to seamlessly make performance and capacity changes with zero application downtime and no interruption to exploration activities. The rate of data growth in seismic operations has grown exponentially as a result of the massive rise in the demand for oil products worldwide. Thus oil companies need technologies that enable them to manage thousand of terabytes and scale for throughput from linux grid computers used to analyze this data.

TechAccess’ long history in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and large portfolio of local partners enabled hassle free ordering and delivery of this equipment into a complex and critical environment. NetApp and TechAccess look forward to continuing to exceed customer expectation while helping upstream oil companies continue to provide the world oil markets with highly sought after petroleum products.

Abdulla Fouad Computer & Electronics (AFCED) division was established in 1973 as part of Abdulla Fouad group of companies with the mission of developing as efficient, well organized operation capable to meet industrial and commercial demands for both the government and private sectors. Commitment to meet the customer requirement has resulted in supplying multi billion dollars worth of products and services to the largest and most prestigious clients in Saudi Arabia.

In 2007 AFCED joined hands with NetApp “the global storage and Data Management Company” to enhance their offering of a full line of services, application software, PCs, UNIX workstations and supercomputers to complement storage in their business activities supporting multi platform configurations for a diverse range to meet clients needs.

AFCED in less than a year signed a 5 years framework agreement with Saudi Arabian oil company (Saudi Aramco) to provide the NetApp storage equipment, especially the High Performance Computing systems being the world’s largest GX systems installation in the downstream line of business. Also AFCED provided NetApp highly available storage systems in Saudi Aramco IT back office providing storage facility for SAP, telecommunication, Finance and medical and to many other applications.

AFCED managed to provide hundreds of Tera Bytes in upstream & downstream oil & gas industry. These modern systems allow rapidly analyzing and interpreting massive volumes of seismic data for the world’s largest oil fields.