Landmark – the 'revolution in the white-space' (April 1997)

At the Dallas AAPG convention, Landmark is unveiling what is described as 'the industry's most complete suite of integrated reservoir management solutions'. These are set to fill the 'white-space' between existing applications and to facilitate inter disciplinary co-operative working.

Landmark continues to enhance and build on its integrated family of solutions for the entire oil field life cycle with the "most complete computer-aided reservoir management solution". Landmark has integrated and updated more than 15 key reservoir technologies as well as enhanced the technology and expertise it acquired last year from Western Atlas Software. Landmark's integrated family of reservoir management solutions provides the essential tools for reservoir management ensuring effective exploitation of assets from initial discovery, through appraisal and depletion, and on to field abandonment.

This new solution will "enable geoscientists and engineers to better characterize both large and small reservoirs more quickly and accurately". In addition, multidisciplinary asset teams will be able to simulate the movement of formation fluids, estimate recoverable reserves more precisely, manage wells more efficiently and gauge the economic impact of various production scenarios. "While the vast majority of reserves are found in existing fields, current production methods leave as much as 70 percent of hydrocarbons in the ground," said Robert P. Peebler, President and CEO of Landmark. "With Landmark's integrated computer-aided reservoir management solution we will enable our customers to find and produce reservoirs that were previously impossible to detect and uneconomic to produce." Several applications that comprise Landmark's integrated reservoir management solution were recently included in Landmark's Release 97 software shipment.

Release 97 was the industry's first synchronized release of a broad and integrated suite of E&P software applications. Release 97 included new versions of nearly 20 of Landmark's applications that were developed, tested and certified for concurrent release on Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics and IBM computing environments. Landmark's integrated suite of computer-aided reservoir management applications are integrated through OpenWorks 4.1, Landmark's dynamic data environment. Integration through OpenWorks allows multidisciplinary asset team members the ability to share and work with the same data—at the same time—in a common environment, resulting in more accurate interpretations. Landmark has also announced the expansion of its professional consulting services for computer-aided reservoir management.

These services include data management, workflow improvement, applications integration, certified installation, on-site client support, training and education. "While technology is allowing oil companies to flourish in an increasingly competitive environment, we understand it is the people who are using the technology that make their companies successful," said John Gibson, Executive Vice President of Landmark's Integrated Products Group. "With this release, Landmark continues to deliver on our commitment to helping people enhance their skills and work more productively, so that oil and gas companies can get the most from their reserves while reducing project cycle time and minimizing risk."

Reading between the lines of this hype, what really appears to be being released at the AAPG is Landmark's "Release 97" press release (featured in the February PDM), although to be fair, the new offering is more focused on production and on the reservoir with ex Munroe Garret's Aries asset management system amongst others. The title of this article refers to Robert Peebler's vision of a major change taking place in the "whitespace" between E&P applications, whereby the focus is on activity that bridges the gaps between the existing domains of competence. Thus a reservoir engineer will dialogue with a geophysicist and a financial planner using the same data. While Landmark's "long as your arm" list of software tools do cover the whole gamut of E&P activity, putting them in a strong position to defend their position as revolutionaries of the whitespace, one cannot help feeling that the spread of domain centered applications and the multiple OS/hardware supported is crying out for rationalization.

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