Becoming Closer to the ‘Virtual’ Oil Company - Radical Models of Data and Application Services for the Geotechnical Community

By

 Jonathan A Jenkins¹, Emad Hamid²

(1) Landmark Graphics, Aberdeen, United Kingdom (2) Landmark Graphics, Cairo, Egypt

 Today’s models of Data and Application service are typically bespoke not only by company but adapted on a site-by-site basis. This means we can have different types of data and application service with long lead times, little uniformity within the company and inflexible service provision changes.

As network performance improves dramatically for less money, we have seen radical new data management and application solutions that promise much more efficient models.

We will contrast traditional master data stores and multiple project databases at bp Egypt with an outsourced Data Model that is non-exclusive. An external shared infrastrucure is a new model that has become popular because of cost savings and flexibility to grow (or contract). The recent experience from a major oil company will be given.

Furthermore, as oil companies again “right-size” and consider what is core to the business, IT spend is again under scrutiny. The inevitability of Moore’s law means that capital expenditure on hardware is a dispiriting business. Together with the explosion of operating systems now available, there is temptation to outsource the petrotechnical applications service and by so doing, removing decisions of buying hardware or upgrading software. But how much is this a bridge too far? By removing these responsibilities, how much of the critical petrotechnical workflow is in the hands of 3rd parties?