The Open Spirit saga continues with the formation of the Open Spirit Corporation (OSC) supported by Chevron, Shell and Schlumberger. Each is to own an equal share of the new company which has been set up to further develop and market the Open Spirit middleware for E&P applications. OSC will be chaired by Neil Buckley – formerly president of U.S. operations with Merak, now a division of GeoQuest. OSA has also just announced the first commercial release of its middleware.
Shell
Open Spirit’s origins lie in in-house developments, mainly by Shell and in the POSC business objects initiative, back in 1996. The middleware was initially developed by UK-based Prism Technologies. Prism Tech was originally very keen on the potential market value of upstream component software. But the development of the infrastructure and services necessary to support these business objects eventually proved a more fruitful pursuit than the objects themselves. Prism Tech has signed a multi-million dollar contract with Inprise (ex-Borland) for horizontal object technology and turned its back on upstream IT.
Buckley
So now the three remaining Open Spirit protagonists have set up shop on their own. Buckley said “Open Spirit represents a significant advance in our industry’s ability to share information and develop innovative collaborative solutions in a distributed environment. Until now, there has not been a comparable framework capable of integrating data and applications from multiple sources in the E&P industry.”
V 2.0
Open Spirit V2.0 – the first commercial release of the middleware is now shipping. The initial release includes the Open Spirit Base Framework and the Subsurface Data Module supporting 3D seismic and well data servers for GeoFrame and Open Works. The release includes Java and C++ support for Solaris and Java support for Windows NT and 2000. OSC CTO Clay Harter said “With this release of OpenSpirit our customers will be able to integrate their applications across multiple vendor datastores and computer platforms.” More from www.openspirit.com.
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