Aker BP: Nitro – a modern platform for agile development

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Streamlining to meet requirements

Measured in production, Aker BP is one of the largest independent listed oil companies in Europe. Aker BP is engaged in exploration, development and operation of oil and gas on the Norwegian continental shelf. They have their head office at Fornebu outside Oslo and offices in Stavanger, Trondheim, Harstad and Sandnessjøen.

Aker BP has a vision of leveraging its expertise through accessible, high-quality data. They want to use innovative technology on their way to achieving world-class results.

In a strategic partnership with Sopra Steria, Aker BP has taken the initiative to establish a dedicated platform team to accelerate internal and external product and development teams.

This platform will serve as Aker BP's foundation for developing new innovative solutions. It will eliminate the need for manual infrastructure, conserving energy, and streamlining the deployment of new code for solutions. By adopting Agile development practices, Aker BP will accelerate the development of new solutions enabling frequent changes to meet the demands of the business.

Value for the customer: A modern development platform

Aker BP now has a modern development platform that ensures fast and agile development. The platform handles the entire release process in a safe manner from idea generation and development to production. This allows for significantly faster error correction and the development of new functionality. Developers can now deliver enhanced functionality directly to end users, regardless of limited IT operations capabilities or traditional change management.

 

"Through a good collaboration with Sopra Steria, Nitro has become an important development platform in Aker BP. More and more projects and development teams use Nitro, the developers experience great efficiency gains and we also get better control of governance and security."Sverre Edin, VP IT & DATA EXCELLENCE, Aker BP.

The Nitro platform was first established and tested in a specific business area but has now proven that it creates value through efficiency improvements and quality improvement. As a result, Aker BP has transferred ownership of the solution to its digital device. The features of the platform are available to unlock benefits in other development initiatives and areas.

"Through Nitro, Aker BP has significantly shortened the time from idea to production. This way of building software makes us faster and more innovative."Arnfinn Grøtteinitiator of Team Nitro and Chief Transformation Engineer D&W, Aker BP.

 

Establishing a dedicated development platform team

Sopra Steria assisted Aker BP in establishing the development platform, Nitro, primarily on Microsoft Azure technology. The Nitro platform enables faster and agile development, utilising container services, DevSecOps tools, infrastructure-as-code and facilitating microservices architecture and self-service, among others.

The main advantage of the platform is how it makes the job easier and more efficient for the developers. The team aids in establishing an agile development process and facilitating easy onboarding for the product teams. The platform supports the business' requirements for smoother and more frequent development and delivery of functionality. The key is continuous integration and automatic application deployment through modern DevSecOps principles.

This provides flexibility, rapid scaling up and down of resources with pay-as-you-use models, reduced investment, reduced delivery time with resources available on demand, self-service with reduced management costs, reduced product team infrastructure knowledge, support for collaboration across product teams, and increased security.

The Nitro team consists of six resources from Sopra Steria with multidisciplinary expertise in DevSecOps – development, security and operations.