At this month’s Society of Exploration Geophysicist’s (SEG) annual conference in Denver (full report in next month’s Journal), Halliburton’s Gene Minnich and LMKR founder and CEO Atif Khan teamed on a surprise announcement regarding the future of Landmark’s PC-based geoscience workstation, Geographix. Acquired back in 1995, Geographix has languished of late in the shadow of Landmark’s OpenWorks mainstream interpretation suite and has lost market share to segment leader Seismic Micro Technology.
The agreement between Landmark and Dubai-headquartered LMKR transfers management, sales, marketing and product development of Geographix to LMKR. Landmark remains ‘vested’ in the success of the Geographix business for an initial 5 year period and customer support and training will continue to be offered through the Landmark organization.
LMKR has doubled the number of developers working on Geographix and has introduced new workflows, including land-based unconventional development challenges.
Khan, a Colorado School of Mines alumnus, told Oil IT Journal that the spin-out deal results from a long-term collaboration between Landmark and LMKR which has been serving the Halliburton unit and its clients with development and data management services for over a decade—LMKR currently performs all new development on the Petrobank products line. During an initial five year period, LMKR will develop new Geographix functionality, filling certain seismic and engineering lacunae.
LMKR also plans to build on the Microsoft X-Box controller and Direct 3D11-based ‘in-scene’ reservoir movie technology that was unveiled at last year’s SEG (OITJ November 2009). Following the port of the Discovery 3D module, all of Geographix has been ported to Windows 7. LMKR also unveiled two new Geographix components at SEG, a geomodeling while drilling solution for horizontal drilling in unconventional targets and ‘GeoAtlas,’ a web mapping functionality with a capability for streaming satellite and other geodata sources.
LMKR has a couple of other software irons in the fire—the XpoSim training solution, (OITJ July 2009), PetroHive, an E&P catalog solution (Technology Watch, PNEC 2009) and a workflow/collaboration solution, ‘iScrybe’ under joint development with Adobe.
Khan told Oil IT Journal of his plans to release a ‘Facebook for the enterprise’ solution ‘Cotribe’ (previously known as iSkrybe). LMKR is half owned by Actis private equity and has some 600 employees worldwide. More from www.lmkr.com.
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