Case Study: Royal Dutch Shell achieves faster software delivery and rapid vendor onboarding with Microsoft Azure

Top oil & gas firm accelerates software development to fuel global energy production

Royal Dutch Shell, a global leader in oil and gas with operations in more than 70 countries, needed to speed delivery of specialized exploration and production software while improving collaboration with internal teams and external vendors. Their on‑premises development tooling caused slow provisioning, costly maintenance, and long lead times that hindered continuous delivery and rapid feature requests.

Shell migrated its Visual Studio Team Foundation Server projects to Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services on Azure and adopted Azure Active Directory, moving to a SaaS DevOps model. The cloud solution cut vendor onboarding from months to under a week, delivers new features on a three‑week cadence, shortened lead cycles from months to weeks, reduced IT overhead by decommissioning on‑prem infrastructure, and enabled secure, global, cross‑platform collaboration with high availability.

Royal Dutch Shell

Johan Krebbers

IT Chief Technology Officer