Oil IT Journal met with Charles Karren this month, Oracle’s new Director of Oil & Gas Strategy & Marketing, to hear about Oracle’s revitalized marketing effort in the oil and gas vertical. Oracle’s Digital Oilfield (ODO) offering spans upstream ERP and geotechnical data.
Data Warehouse
The idea is simple enough. Most oil country applications run an Oracle database of one sort or another and Oracle itself has a range of federating technologies in the form of data warehousing and business intelligence. So why not bring all this together with a data warehouse and master data management combo?
Data hub
Oracle wants to provide companies with a global E&P data hub, a ‘single source of truth’ integrating geophysical, geological, engineering, operations and financial data. By centralizing data access, Oracle plans to support real time business analytics, simple query and reporting, compound E&P workflows and data cleansing.
Back to the future?
Old timers will remember previous attempts to federate oil and gas data and to provide a ‘single source of the truth.’ Indeed Oracle’s very own project synergy (OITJ Feb 99) crashed and burned despite strong support from Statoil. But technology moves on. In particular, there is better understanding of how to address data federation today—through data warehousing and master data management—and this is the approach that ODO has taken.
PPDM
Rather than trying to model the whole of the upstream, Oracle is working with the PPDM Association to develop a master data management system leveraging Oracle’s Data Warehouse Application Console. The PPDM Data Model is to assure master and spatial data management for the ODO across the ‘smart well’ data lifecycle.
eOil and Gas
Other components, notably Siebel’s eOil and Gas, offer production and HSE reporting. Poster child for the ODO is Petrobras which has deployed a central Oracle database platform leveraging much of Oracle’s technology—but not the PPDM data model.
JD Edwards
Oracle is also entering the SOA space with its ‘Fusion Application Stack,’ a ‘pure JAVA/XML’ SOA infrastructure. Oracle plans to componentize its JD Edwards package into oil and gas-specific applets. Fusion Middleware is compatible with IBM, TIBCO and interfaces with .NET. The proof of concept Well Data Hub is in test with a supermajor which is using it to manage oil country tubular goods (OCTG). Three different naming conventions are managed in an Oracle Data Warehouse. According to Karren, ‘oil and gas is five years behind financial services in data warehousing and master data management.’ More from www.oracle.com/oilandgas.
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