We have long argued that the absence of the major equipment providers has undermined the credibility of the ‘digital oilfield’ effort. This may be about to change as Siemens has acquired a license to the OpenSpirit software development kit (SDK) and will be offering visibility of geology and geophysics data to users of its XHQ Operations Intelligence dashboard. Siemens Energy’s Dave Horn told Oil IT Journal, ‘The partnership with OpenSpirit will offer access to a wide range of data resources and represents a significant step on the path to a true digital oilfield.’ Horn explained that initially, Siemens will leverage the SDK to offer visibility of OpenSpirit-enabled geoscience data to activities such as root cause analysis, operations and maintenance, conducted from the XHQ dashboard. XHQ provides plant and process industries with aggregated operational and business data in real-time, offering configurable dashboards and KPIs for performance management and decision support. XHQ’s use in oil and gas began in the refinery, with flagship clients such as Chevron and Saudi Aramco. But the technology is moving upstream—notably with Aramco’s deployment of XHQ in its Enterprise Management Solution.
The deal will extend XHQ’s i-field data visualization capability, pulling in key well data to, for instance, tune a model for performance enhancements. Results could then be passed to another OpenSpirit-enabled application like Petrel for more modeling before updating the XHQ performance dashboard. Other use cases include field planning and facilities design. Access to geoscience data types will be provided either by launching a native application or by using one of OpenSpirit’s basic data viewers. Siemens is also talking with INT about integrating some of its G&G visualization technology. Siemens recognizes that some of its planned use cases will only be fully realized when OpenSpirit further develops a web services-based information bus. Indeed it may be a while before the OpenSpirit footprint extends to embrace engineering data from operations and maintenance.
The press release made great play of the role of Microsoft’s Upstream Reference Architecture (MURA) in the Siemens/OS deal. We put it to Horn that Siemens developers will be able to use the SDK without any input from MURA. He agreed but noted ‘Siemens is a long term Microsoft partner and key XHQ functionality is based on Microsoft products. We could do all of this without MURA but we anticipate that the MURA products and services will bring more functionality to the table.’ Finally, Siemens were as surprised as we were to learn of OS’ acquisition by Tibco (see below). More from www.oilit.com/links/1009_1.
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