Cross-vendor Integration in Exploration and Production Today
require the link to be rewritten from scratch. “Everyone has a heart attack when a vendor decides to change its data model,” remarks the
E&P companies must ensure that analysis, interpretation and modelling of voluminous, multidomain data sets support the risky and expensive decisions they must make every year.
Director of Enterprise Integration for a large independent. “You have to do all these gyrations to catch up.”
As oil companies focus more on core competencies and abandon non-core activities, maintaining proprietary connectors becomes unwieldy and expensive. IT personnel no longer want to figure out how to move data between disparate commercial environments.
Another way E&P companies achieve data-level integration is through common project data management systems. Compared with migrating and duplicating data, sharing data among multiple applications enables a higher level of integration. Unfortunately, major competitors – especially large software vendors that oil companies often want to use side-by-side – do not voluntarily integrate with one another.
A newer approach to data integration is ‘middleware’, so-called because it is neither an application nor a database. It is a layer of consistent data exchange protocols that sits in the ‘middle’, facilitating communications among many applications and databases. By mapping data from diverse data stores to a common data model, middleware enables applications from one vendor to access data from other vendors’ repositories without necessarily moving or copying anything.
Users no longer need to determine where E&P data are located or how they are formatted. Instead of software being configured to read multiple formats, each application now has one connection to the middleware, which in turn handles all other data connections. Middleware effectively insulates oil companies from version changes and upgrades that ‘break’ proprietary connections. “With a third-party middleware solution that has economies of scale and scope,” explains the president of a large software firm, “you can get new technologies connected into established workflows using a standard set of tools.”
By piggybacking off a widely adopted middleware infrastructure, independent software developers save money too. They no longer have to maintain custom connections to many different repositories. They can focus instead on software innovation, which is precisely what oil companies want them to do. As the Executive Vice President of Research and Development for one software company states, a good middleware solution provides roughly the same level of integration among multiple vendors that a single vendor provides among multiple products.
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