OITJ—What’s the rationale behind Petris’ acquisitiveness?
Pritchett—In 2009, with the current economic climate, everyone will be looking at mature fields. These systems will hit the bulls eye. Our ongoing program of acquisitions is designed to evolve our PetrisWINDS Enterprise (PWE) integration framework across more upstream application domains. Both Intervera and Zeh fit with our multi-vendor integration model. PWE is designed for integration with our own application and those from the main third party vendors.
OITJ—Both Zeh and Intevera are already ‘multi vendor’ providers.
Pritchett—Exactly. Intervera’s quality and master data management offerings are obviously complimentary to our data infrastructure. But Zeh’s graphics and printing offering can also be seen in the light of hydrocarbon data visualization and integration across disparate sources. The Petris framework now adds automated data quality and consistency to what is becoming an enterprise wide business intelligence system—with business process management to top it off. Also Zeh’s SeisInfo brings us a seismic data management and data quality system for field seismic data.
OITJ—What’s next?
Pritchett—We’ll continue to look at potential acquisitions that fit with our cross domain integrations strategy. The Intervera and Zeh acquisitions have also brought us better global coverage, Intervera in Calgary and Zeh in Perth. Petris sees this as a long term technology development play. We will be working on acquisitions for a time.
OITJ—How do you characterize Petris today, as an application developer or infrastructure supplier?
Pritchett—We are both. We would love to be a full vendor to everyone. Ultimately we may expand beyond E&P and pipeline. But the reality is that applications come and go but information stays.
OITJ—You mean that Petris’ strength lies as an integrator of third party applications.
Pritchett—Yes. We don’t really want to do the whole thing. Our WINDS Enterprise framework means that when we do an acquisition, we are well equipped to achieve a quick integration of the new portfolio. We are not just buying the new company’s balance sheet.
OITJ—How much did you pay for Zeh and Intervera?
Pritchett—We are a privately held company so I’ll pass on that one. I can say that we are well entrenched in the second tier of software houses, behind Landmark, Schlumberger and Paradigm.
This article originally appeared in Oil IT Journal 2009 Issue # 1.
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