Spirited Business Alliances (December 1997)

The Open Spirit Program is sparking off some strategic alliances and corporate maneuvers already. Shell Services Company (SSC) has taken a 10% equity stake in Prism and two senior SSC executives have been appointed to the Prism Board.

For an initial two year period SSC will provide personnel and equipment to work on Open Spirit and other data management solutions for the E&P and Manufacturing Industries. Speaking of these initiatives, Scott Reeves, SSC's Manager of Subsurface IT Services stated "Currently many service providers are attempting to solve the E&P data problem with point solutions. We believe to really solve this problem a new approach is required that is enabled by new technologies. By combining this technology and our E&P business knowledge into our Veristream services offering we will present a unique and compelling value proposition to anyone who has E&P data management problems".

Another hook up concerns the relationship between OSA and Interactive Network Technologies (INT) whose Carnac C++ and Java 2D Graphics Toolkit core technology has been selected by OSA to provides a 2D graphics toolkit bringing "the next generation in flexible high-performance, cross-platform, multi-source graphics". With both C++ and Java API's, Carnac is a powerful tool for developing graphics applications. As an illustration, INT uses Carnac to produce its GeoBeans and JavaBeans visualization components. This library includes beans for seismic displays, logs, contours, maps, and XY-plots and will be used for the development of Java based E&P applications. Intriguingly, INT is also developing its own JavaBean based set of E&P visualization objects - GeoBeans, a library of components for the display of seismic, logs, contours, maps and XY-plots.