solution could be developed. Today, the need for the different factions to work together has never been greater. IT vendors must acknowledge that specialist domain expertise is required to build solutions that work. For the incumbent service providers that own the current application stack in E&P, there is a need to understand that technology capability has dramatically changed over the last number of years and they should take advantage of these changes. In the era of big data, sensor data and the ‘Internet of Things’, most other industry verticals are now facing many of the challenges that the oil industry has been facing for decades. IT companies are providing technologies that really do allow operators to leverage horizontal solutions for the data management challenges. Moreover, the increasing use of sensor data is bringing scientific and mathematical calculations and geospatial functionality into the data management arena for many verticals. Both have what the other craves, so there would appear to be a natural synergy to working together. But what about the customer? After all, aren’t they the ones that really matter? Some operators may be happy to wait for the IT and industry vendors to get together and build what they want. Others may actively encourage the union. What’s clear is that the leading operators need to take back control of the key part of the entire equation and the part that has the most value: the data. In spending vast amounts of resources obtaining data that is the key raw ingredient in E&P, this should be then valued accordingly. After all, the data is only created once; the seismic trace, the well log measurement, the resistivity, the flow sensor reading; all these are unique in time and space. How you use each data point over the lifetime of an asset will vary greatly, and the value that will be derived from each data point will depend on the people and tools made available to the data. The real value will be in ensuring that users are able to find and use all the unique data points and the information derived from that data so that they can impact the business; make better and safer decisions. Operators that move from the current application centric architecture to a more open data centric architecture will be best positioned to do more with their data. They will be able to leverage the best that the IT vendors and the specialist solution vendors can provide, today and long into the future.
Teradata Niall O’Doherty is international director of business development at Teradata and works in the Emerging Industries Team. In his current role, Niall is responsible for growing Teradata’s presence, solutions and strategies in the emerging industries of manufacturing, oil and gas, government and utilities. For further information please visit: teradata.co.uk
European oil & gas
The proliferation of applications across the E&P workflow, many of which are standalone, has resulted in a complex application and data management landscape. This complexity has led to many IT deployments failing to live up to expectations and many operators questioning why they are making significant investments in IT solutions that are not really addressing their most pressing challenges – or even offering the same level of sophistication they get from the consumer technologies that they are using at home. There has also been a migration of specialist skills and research away from the operators to the software startups and key service providers. Leading operators are now concerned about the uniformity of solution capability. If they are relying on their service provider vendors to develop and deliver new capabilities then they are resigned to having the same capability as everyone else in the business. Where is the competitive advantage going to come from? Now look at the IT vendor side of the equation. When you consider that, according to a paper delivered in 2012 by Piotr Luszczek of the University of Tennessee, “The iPad 2 could have stayed on the list of the world’s fastest supercomputers through 1994 – faster than a Cray 2”, you start to get a sense of the explosion in computing power that has occurred over the last decade. IT vendors are looking at the budgets and data volumes in the oil and gas industry and thinking that they can do better than the traditional service company based application vendors. After all, they are real IT guys who develop leadingedge software and technologies and not a bunch of oil service guys who set up a programming division to build some solutions. How hard can it be? This has, in some cases, led to arrogance on the part of IT vendors, who assume that there is nothing difficult in dealing with oil and gas data. They believe that the industry has simply fallen years behind other industries like telecommunications, banking and retailing because they are insular, they don’t keep up with IT trends and the latest technologies, or that they are resistant to change and stuck in the past. And they view those in oil and gas as either geology types who prefer crayons to computers, or a bunch of roughnecks who have just read coding for dummies. So a bunch of arrogant computer jocks or a herd of roughneck coding dummies? As usual, the truth is always somewhere in the middle. There is reluctance from the oil and gas industry to try horizontal IT solutions since they “won’t work with our data because our data is different" – it’s too big, or too complex, has strange formats, or is too scientific. But it’s also true that the solutions that IT vendors assumed would work easily didn’t work that easily at all, because of data volume, or data structure, or the way the scientific calculations are used so frequently. Vendors discovered that, in this complex environment, it was not just a case of loading the data and pushing a button. The science needed to be better understood and time invested in really understanding the problem so that the
europeanoilandgas.co.uk
IT
15