Case Study: Rowan Companies increases offshore drilling efficiencies with Hortonworks

Rowan Companies - Customer Case Study

Rowan Companies, a global offshore drilling provider, needed a way to reliably connect remote drillships to onshore teams despite intermittent satellite links, latency, and bandwidth limits. The challenge was made more urgent by upcoming BSEE regulations requiring real-time monitoring and onshore archiving of safety-critical equipment data. Rowan turned to Hortonworks for an IoT approach, using Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) and Hortonworks DataFlow (HDF) alongside Kepware to move data from sea to shore.

Hortonworks helped Rowan implement a secure, scalable streaming solution that connected industrial control systems and prioritized, compressed, and encrypted data for near real-time monitoring and analysis. Rowan deployed the Hortonworks solution on its first drillship in less than 90 days using 3,200 tags and only 50 kilobytes of bandwidth, with plans to scale to 25 rigs, 10,000 tags, and 150 kilobytes of bandwidth within six months. The result was improved remote monitoring, better troubleshooting and predictive maintenance, reduced downtime, and a path to compliance with BSEE requirements.

Rowan Companies

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Rowan Companies