Around 100 G&G software users attended the Annual Petrosystems User Group meeting held last month on a Seine Riverboat. A sad note however was the untimely death of Petrosystems’ marketing manager Marc Philton, killed in a car crash earlier this year.

CGG’s new boss Robert Brunck outlined the revamped organization of the company describing the new - Processing/Reservoir business unit as a major new strategy for CGG. The new unit will handle Data Management, Processing, GeoVecteur Software and Reservoir studies. Brunck described the thread linking all of these as the service element of the offering. Data Management is to play a key role in the new unit as the glue for all these processes.

Reflecting on recent industry hard times, Brunck stated that this was a time of challenge, with plenty of opportunities to seize. CGG he said, was to become a 'data flow management company' - from Sercel’s hardware in the field to the reservoir delineation services of Petrosystems. During the downturn, CGG has continued with R&D spend and this year, has doubled investment in speculative surveys – during a time when many oil companies were keeping their hands in thair pockets!

Petrosystems recent acquisition of Flagship and NexModel, and pioneering work with with POSC and Open Spirit - were said to demonstrate this. Petrosystems will be managed independently from the parent group. "Be sure, CGG will emerge from these hard times as a leading company for the year 2000," Brunck concluded.

H. Posamentier (Arco) offered a client testimonial to the efficacy of StratiMagic in the extraction of stratigraphic information from 3D seismics. Posamentier's management is committed (not ’emotionally attached‘!) to GeoQuest, but he is a determined supporter of StratiMagic and conducts an ongoing battle against software rationalization. StratiMagic is 'fast and user-friendly' and as a geologist, Posamentier is at home with StratiMagic's concepts and performs iterative interpretation to test different hypotheses. StratiMagic is not used for structural interpretation, but rather to develop a geological context in which amplitude anomalies can be assessed, allowing for the management of stratigraphy-related geological risk factors. Generally, in the analysis of 3D seismic data, not single tool has all the answers. Stratimagic allows for 'slicing and dicing' of the 3D cube 'every which way’. The geologist can then apply his or her background in geomorphology and sedimentology to identify patterns overlooked by more geophysical approach.

Eric Lefeuvre described Petrosystem’s data management offering, particularly with Petrovision. Three different usage profiles are envisioned for Petrovision.

PetroVision as the Corporate Database designed to store and deliver data to the workstation

PetroVision used in the National Data Repository for data delivery to clients and subscribers

A subset of PetroVision for use as a Seismic Archive - including associated documentation.

PetroVision stores attribute data in a POSC Epicentre database. Bulk data is stored on any Hierarchical Storage Manager or Near-Line Storage Manager. The system is said to be hardware independent. RODE encapsulation allows for mixed and evolving use of tape and disk storage. A GIS front end is in the process of 'evolving' to include an ArcView front end. This comes in two flavors; ArcView may be 'encapsulated' in PetroVision, or PetroVision clients can now use a 'generic' ArcView Application Extension front-end. This allows for web-access to attribute data. Petrosystems are beta testing a Java applet for managing metadata, but much of this development is waiting on Oracle 8i.

Data loading objective is for 'transparent' loading to the workstation, and is direct to OpenWorks, including 'poly-cut' polygonal extraction of 3D data. Data loading is flexible to cater for the wide range of data formats - here benefit is claimed by loading metadata to POSC entities rather than to database tables. Petrosystems are working on an interactive data loader which will work through the logical model.