The organization formerly known as COM for Energy held its second annual membership meeting in Microsoft’s Houston offices last month. Around 50 showed up for the BizTech For Energy Foundation (B4E) meeting whose theme was "e-standards Powering e-business.”
Abusalbi
President Najib Abusalbi (GeoQuest) claims that B4E is a “vibrantly active community, which has produced tangible results and which has even more substantial, near term plans that will create value for the energy industry.” Four working groups have been operating at different pressure points along the business to technical frontier. The original proof of concept work, concerns the integration of well planning and ERP (see PDM Vol. 4 N° 8).
Owner operator
Work on production data to ERP integration has resulted in the first official B4E standard (see sidebar). Adrian Gottschalk, from PricewaterhouseCoopers gave an update on work in progress on interest owner/operator financial information exchange. Some concern exists here about re-inventing the e-wheel—since PIDEX has already published an AFE spec. Another development area is the linkage between land, division order and ERP, this work is headed up by Girish Bora of Tobin.
Q&A
In a question and answer session IndigoPool president, Satish Pai warned that “IndigoPool will go forward with or without agreement by consensus.” But Pai does see a future for collaborative standards for meta data. A similar caveat came from Ray Cline, CTO of SAIC’s Grand Basin co-venture with Landmark. Cline opined “Our focus is on Landmark products and databases, leveraging data warehousing approaches.”
Community
B4E membership fees are on a sliding scale according to company revenues—from $2,500 to $25,000 per year. This gives access to the specifications. B4E has now set up shop on the Microsoft Net communities site supporting collaborative work and a chat room. Currently, community membership is restricted, but you can apply on http://communities.msn.com/biztechforenergy.
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PDM comment—the puzzling thing about B4E is how the standards
are to be deployed. Our current understanding is that although B4E has “announced,”
a standard, this does not mean it is released to the public domain. One suspects
a little reticence on the part of the fee paying members to hand over the fruits
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