The global energy markets are standing at crossroads. The big themes that dominated the opening years of the century (prosperity, markets, peak oil, global warming and clean technology) are giving way to a different set of concerns centered on inequality, affordability, regulation and techniques for extracting oil and gas from tight rock formations and ever-deeper below the surface areas.

A snapshot of different challenges prevalent in the industry:

• Highly volatile price of crude and low retail margins make investing large capital exceedingly risky
• Vastly different qualities of crude and long supply chains make scheduling of refinery an extremely complicated operation
• Complex trading and stringent regulatory guidelines add another dimension to the complexity
• Extremely large amount of data, over 23 MB every second, from across the Oil & Gas value chain makes storage and analysis a tough endeavor