WE ARE taking a look at the IT companies providing services and products in the Oil & Gas sector.
About 40% of the IT companies in the Aberdeen area work with the oil & gas sector, and about 52% of the total number of IT companies working in oil & gas are located in the Aberdeen area, leaving 48% located throughout Scotland and the rest of the UK.
Looking at the business focus of these companies, they tend to work in highly technical areas, for example the top five business focus areas are process control, risk management, hydrocarbon accounting, document management and SCADA.
There are also a number of other oil & gas related business areas such as geoscience, drilling and well performance and monitoring etc.
The oil & gas sector has a relatively complex supply chain and this is reflected in the provision of services to manage the supply chain, for example asset tracking, and rental management.
The majority of these companies are in the Aberdeen area and although they have less than 20 employees, they have a significant global presence in the Middle East and the USA.
The global aspect of the oil & gas sector means that small companies can play well above their weight in the export market.
The IT companies in the oil & gas sector work within a number of other sectors – again the top five reflect the technical nature of these companies, and the skills required to support a complex offshore industry: Energy, Financial Services, Engineering, Healthcare and Aerospace & Defence.
Once again software development comes top of the skills, with 40% of the IT companies providing software development skills.
However, the rest of the top skills differ significantly from the "norm" – with web design & development coming in at number 40 instead of in the top 10.
Both project and data management skills are significantly higher than our "average", that is 20% of the companies provide project management skills, against our average of 8%, and 11% of the companies provide data management skills against our average of 4% of the companies.
The issues with the oil & gas sector caused by the current low oil price are well documented.
However, given the skills of the IT companies working in the oil & gas sector there are plenty of companies with a high level of technical skills, supplying a variety of sectors, and playing above their weight in the global market.