Economic and organizational effects of business ICT systems´ evolution in oil and energy sector

The past several years in the oil and energy sector have been marked by the disruptive behavior of the market shifts and economic cycle downturn: rising oil prices caused oil and energy sector to explode and then contract, marked emphasis is on operative cost maintenance, deployment of inventive ICT deployment strategies and utilization of ICT services and introduction of new technologies and concepts while lowering absolute investments value. One of the most prominent new technologies (although present on the market for well over a decade in various forms) is virtualization of software, operating systems and finally, in the last development step, infrastructure. This technology has allowed oil and energy sector to align its demands in form of distributed and remote project execution with technologies possessing similar characteristics that do not require close physical presence of resources in order to provide satisfactory levels of service. This is reflected in paradigm change from consideration of software, applications and infrastructure being a service instead of being a tangible asset and platform being a service instead of a tangible asset. This has allowed broader usability spectrum of centralized services, flexibility of usage and lower utilization cost, satisfying primary motivational drivers behind new technology adoption.