The Houston-based Information Store (I-Store) is looking for partners to help market PetroTrek, its upstream asset and data management software. I-Store CEO Barrry Irani told Oil IT Journal that although its UpstreamInfo (UI) venture with EDS and Raytheon had failed, the PetroTrek suite was not at fault. Irani said, “Industry was just not ready for outsourcing its data management. UpstreamInfo was ahead of its time – even though the members appreciated the I-Store technology.”
Resistance
According to Irani, while the UI experience showed that there was resistance to putting data outside the corporate firewall, the technology for sharing information with partners – dubbed ‘JV Solutions’ – proved popular. PetroTrek was leveraged to expose in a secure and controlled manner, data stored in corporate databases. Now that I-Store has recovered all IPR on technology developed for UI, the company is seeking alliance partners to market PetroTrek. The PetroTrek concept is simple – leave data in situ and manage access through entitlements and web-based technologies. I-Store has been riding the internet wave since it’s initial vision in 1994 – Irani believes that this was a ‘good call’ at the time.
Industry databases
PetroTrek works with Finder, OpenWorks and other data stores. The philosophy is to work with, rather than to displace, legacy systems. Caching techniques assure good response even for large data sets. Entitlements controls are sophisticated enough to limit user access to data from different reservoirs within a well section. PetroTrek includes a mechanism for synchronizing data in disparate databases. Irani claims the PetroTrek is very easy to deploy and learn claiming a 30 minute learning curve for end users.
This article originally appeared in Oil IT Journal 2002 Issue # 7.
For more information or to comment on this topic email here.