StrAIT Blogging

I recently viewed a webinar on Exploration and Production (E&P) Technology Trends (link here ; registration is required). It was hosted by Hart Energy Publishing. The presenters were Halliburton (Landmark) and NetApp. The intent of the presentation was to promote Landmark’s software and services as well as NetApp’s offerings in data storage and data management. While both companies have impressive credentials in their own right, neither are analysts (as in taking subscription money from clients for vendor neutral, informed opinions). The presentation was interesting and credible in supporting their respective offerings. However, I believe that some interesting points were glossed over. I am not implying that they were misleading, just that the points that jumped out at me were not major points for them given their goals for this presentation.
 

 Maturity
 

 They presented the maturity model shown below. I have seen similar ones from analysts like Gartner and Forrester and this one is relatively consistent with those. A little later a Domain Specific – Data Management Maturity Assessment, shown below, was provided. While I find the maturity assessment diagram to be a little vague (the difference between the hexigon, square and circle shapes was never clarified), I assumed that each symbol represented an E&P company. The point the presenters made was that the E&P world needed help in managing and storing their Drilling and Engineering data (Landmark software generates Petabytes of data while NetApp can provide and manage the subsequent storage requirements). From the discussion this diagram it was implied that red is bad, yellow is marginal and green is good although that was not said specifically.
 The point that was not mentioned is that the maturity assessment diagram implies that the “surface” domains, i.e., Operations and Business are in marginal or good shape. I believe their data implies something else. Later in the presentation we see the Production Data Management Challenges slide. There are three bullet points shown on that slide. All are big problems. The first two, Fragmented Solutions and Variations in Workflow, are huge. Those of us who have spend years managing operations and business organizations understand just how huge.
  

 Spending

That brings us to another slide. The Data Management (DM) Investments in 1 to 3 Years. I have provided an image of the entire slide as well as a larger image of the graph portion. The larger image is to make the information easier to read and the entire slide is to provide context. In this slide the Landmark data tells us that in the 64 customers surveyed four of the top five budget items over the next three years address business and operations needs.

Conclusion
 

 My point is actually very simple. It’s easy for E&P companies to focus on the downhole stuff. Just don’t loose site of where your competition is placing their bets for the near term. While that downhole technology is vitally important, getting the business and operations technology right can be a game changer too. It’s been the ugly stepchild of the E&P world for years. Now it’s time to let it out of it’s back room and let it join the party.
 

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