BHP is a global resources company headquartered in Melbourne, Australia. It is among the world’s top producers of major commodities, including iron ore, metallurgical coal, and copper, and has substantial interests in oil and gas. BHP embarked on a new data strategy to transform itself into a data-centric organization and help the BHP management make better data-driven decisions. As part of that strategy, BHP wanted to create an asset-centric data architecture that provided data utility, plumbing, and wiring foundations for individual business units, accelerating the delivery of new digital solutions, and providing a data environment for data science and advanced analytics. BHP’s enterprise data spread across multiple continents, in both on-premises and cloud sources.
A Logical Data Fabric
BHP’s global application landscape provided only limited and restricted reusability of existing data sources. This often led to repeated engineering efforts to access the same data sources for different solutions, as well as long lead times to ingest or load data before a data solution could be developed. In addition, the company created project-centric data repositories to provide a consolidated set of data for specific purposes, but this increased the total cost of ownership and complexity while increasing the general variability of data interpretation. BHP deployed a Denodo Platform cluster in every major geography where the company had a data center, including Australia, the United States, and Chile, effectively establishing a logical data fabric across these diverse regions.
At a glance