IBM Launches Enhanced Maximo Industry Solution for Chemicals and Petroleum

Additional Development Resources Accelerate Delivery of Functionality for Safe and Reliable Operations



ORLANDO, FL - Maximo World 2007 -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced an expansion of its support for the Chemicals and Petroleum markets with new offerings designed to help companies meet reserve and production targets, while reducing costs and maintaining safety and environmental standards.

IBM Maximo for Oil and Gas has received considerable focus by IBM in the past year to address the rapidly changing needs of customers in this market. IBM acquired MRO Software, which developed the original solution, in October 2006. Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) is part of IBM Tivoli’s overall service management strategy and portfolio.

“The resources IBM has added since the acquisition less than a year ago, in the form of developers and industry experts, have greatly accelerated the delivery time frames for these industry updates,” said Jack Young, Vice President, Maximo Development, IBM Tivoli Software. “As a result of the work we’ve done with our many Oil and Gas customers and other experts, we’ve enhanced the deep functionality that these companies need to better manage the range of assets associated with the industry -- from offshore rigs to refineries, pipelines, facilities, and transportation and IT assets.”

Chemical and petroleum industries managing their operations and energy portfolios face tough business challenges -- including maintaining equipment reliability, increasing asset utilization and improving operational integrity, performance and safety. By working closely with the chemicals and petroleum industry, IBM has enhanced its industry-leading asset and service management solution to help companies better addresses these challenges.

The solution delivers asset management capabilities with an emphasis on safe and reliable operations and organizational learning and improvement. New modules record, track and investigate incidents and defects during plant operation and maintenance, evaluate the business benefits of new deployments, and document proven solutions and lessons learned by an organization while recording suggestions for improvements.

These features, which were added based on input from successful deployments and industry experts, combine critical functionality with field-tested implementation experience from chemicals and petroleum companies.

“The added functionality incorporated into the new Oil & Gas release will help customers address health, safety, the aging workforce and regulatory compliance,” said Mike Heagney, Research Director for Energy Insights, an IDC Company. “Our industry-specific research has shown that IT spending in the industry is focused on increasing supply and refinery reliability which is essential to sustain such high utilization rates. As the industry continues its pace of change, it becomes critical to maximize infrastructure life cycles and asset uptime.”

As the many existing implementations demonstrate, Maximo Oil & Gas interfaces easily with other enterprise applications, offering lower costs and greater flexibility.

“Organizations today are in need of some drastic changes to deal with the fast pace of business. Certain processes are required to deal with this and the first one is to empower the workforce to eliminate defects,” said Winston Ledet, creator of the Manufacturing Game and Principal of Ledet Enterprises, Inc. “The goal is to move operating domains from regressive to world class and building defect action teams is one way of doing this. I see this solution as both addressing the defect issue as well as the organizational issue.”

Among the more than 200 oil and gas companies using IBM Maximo, are seven of the ten largest oil and gas companies in the world. IBM’s Oil & Gas Advisory council members include BP, China National Offshore Oil Co., Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Kuwait National Petroleum Company, Flint Hills Resources, Occidental, Chevron, and Syncrude. The Company’s asset and service management solutions support the chemicals and petroleum industries in many areas including both upstream and downstream operations in the oil and gas industry and processing operations in the chemicals industry.

At the 21st annual Maximo User Group meeting, Maximo World, more than 1,600 users gathered to share industry best practices and ideas for driving greater efficiency and cost-savings through asset and service management, while learning about upcoming product enhancements to the IBM Maximo portfolio.