Cross-vendor Integration in Exploration and Production Today a report by Jay E Valusek Geoscientist, and Consultant, OpenSpirit Corporation
To create fit-for-purpose workflows that meet the complex, specialised needs of exploration and production (E&P) professionals today, oil and gas companies worldwide are seeking more effective methods of connecting diverse applications and data repositories. They are striving not merely to bridge technical domains, but also to cross the chasm between technology vendors – especially the gap that remains between major competitors.
“The upstream business today is more complicated and more specialised,” explains Herb Yuan, former Manager of Upstream Information Technology for Shell E&P. “No single vendor covers the waterfront. The challenge is to get more oil out of the ground and keep costs down. Getting the right information, workflows and integration is critical to success.”
All oil companies have mixed software portfolios today. It is simply a market reality. “Ten years ago, many operators liked to keep their eggs in one basket,” observes Grant Monaghan, Managing Director of Perigon Solutions. “Today, they’re aggressively seeking the best tool for the job – regardless of vendor.”
To better understand the need for interoperability across E&P vendor boundaries and identify existing solutions, thought leaders working for oil companies, independent software developers and other upstream organisations were interviewed.
How Critical Is Exploration and Production Cross-vendor Integration Today, and Why? Everyone agrees the proverbial ‘easy oil’ is gone. Conventional resources are diminishing. Remaining targets are smaller, deeper, more complex, less accessible and more often found in remote, hostile environments. With the current costs of drilling and extracting hydrocarbons, huge financial motivations exist, as one expert put it, to ‘get it right’. 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.
To that end, most energy companies have adopted a ‘best-of-breed’ software strategy. Rather than being held hostage to one vendor’s solutions, these organisations attempt to deploy the most appropriate applications and databases to achieve their unique and continuously evolving business objectives. Oil companies want to combine best-of- breed algorithms into integrated workflows to fit their particular needs, but they also want to customise things to maintain a competitive edge.
Due to ongoing competition, no single vendor or software suite has dominated the market over time. Entrepreneurs and unexpected breakthroughs constantly alter the competitive landscape. “The best approach for an oil company,” says the Chief Information Officer
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of one large independent, “has been to cherry-pick the highest value applications, then find ways to move data in and out of various workflows tied to these applications.” Thus, heterogeneous computing environments have become the norm. This, of course, makes cross-vendor integration critical.
The upstream industry workforce has also changed dramatically over the past decade Highly experienced geologists and geophysicists retire in large numbers every year. Among those who remain, no-one wants to waste precious time moving, converting or duplicating data. Allowing experienced professionals to use familiar software enables them to tackle opportunities more efficiently without the need for unproductive re-training due to frequent changes in the corporate IT standard.
However, in this environment software has proliferated. Even smaller oil companies today have multiple packages to empower their users. Following mergers and acquisitions, many companies have inherited diverse, incompatible portfolios of E&P technology. It is therefore vital to make all these tools work together more seamlessly without cramping anyone’s style. “There will always be a need to plug other tools into your workflow,” adds Peter Breunig, General Manager of Chevron Information Technology Company.
Integration across vendor boundaries matters even to the vendors. As the CEO of one company admits, “It’s really difficult for solution developers to provide best-of-class science and best-of-class integration.” It is increasingly important for software developers to find viable ways of ensuring their solutions remain accessible to customers that have multivendor environments. Arshad Matin, President and Chief Executive of Office (CEO) of SMT, puts it plainly: “If we couldn’t work and play well with others, oil companies wouldn’t incorporate our technology into their day-to-day workflows.”
How Are Oil Companies Actually Solving the Cross-vendor Integration Problem Today? According to industry experts, there are two main ways of integrating across vendor boundaries: at the data level and at the application level.
Data-level Integration
Many large companies have sufficient IT resources to build custom links between applications and databases. These are usually ‘hardwired’, point-to-point connectors that hook a software tool to a data store. One advantage that custom links offer is that they can move data very quickly and cleanly from one place to another. Unfortunately, these links typically replicate data. Duplicates proliferate and get out of sync – and eventually out of control. Also, custom links are costly to create, inflexible to use and difficult to support over time. Each new application or data store release may
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