FEATURE
OILCOMM AND FLEETCOMM CONFERENCE & EXPOSITION: Showcasing Rapidly Evolving and Diversified Mobile Industries
BY JEFFREY HILL
O
ilComm has been serving as the energy industry’s leading forum for telecommunications and networking technology since the turn of the century. Now paired with its FleetComm counterpart for commercial transportation and shipping markets, OilComm and FleetComm will open its doors for the 18th time on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2018 to a much more diverse audience seeking a more diverse set of solutions for a more diverse set of challenges. The exhibit hall floor will feature the mobile industry market’s leading satellite, wireless, cellular, microwave and fiber communications technology vendors, alongside machine-learning application developers, sensing and predictive
analytics providers, cybersecurity consultants, Virtual- and Augmented-Reality (VR/AR) hardware suppliers and other new entrants seeking to meet industry demands in the dawn of the “Big Data” era. In creating a 2018 OilComm and FleetComm conference program that would match the excitement of the show floor while providing learning opportunities for end-users, we identified a handful of key topics for sessions. They are:
1.
The convergence of Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) teams within industry organizations. For many years, the idea of integrating IT and OT processes has presented the oil and gas industry with a list of technical, logistical, and security challenges. However, now that standards have matured, and IP devices on Industrial IoT networks have flourished, integrating IT and OT has become an affordable, feasible, and essentially critical transformation for the industry. Kicking off the OilComm and FleetComm program, we have an opening session featuring Baker Hughes Technical Product and Security Leader Paul Brager, Noble Energy CISO Rob Nolan, and ExxonMobil Cyber Security Vulnerability Testing and Management Director Andrew Taylor. Together, the group will discuss how to overcome some of the unexpected challenges related to breaking down IT and SEPTEMBER 2018 | ISSUE 102
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