Speaking at
the 2014 Microsoft Global Energy Forum held earlier this year in
Houston, Paul Kimbel’s team kicked off a demo of key Microsoft tools as
deployed by the fictitious Contoso Petroleum. First up was Laurie
Salmon who vaunted the merits of her Windows 8 intrinsically safe
tablet from XPlore Technologies. The familiar W8 interface pops up with
tiles to launch applications from Honeywell, OSIsoft, Esri, Siemens and
others.
The demo
begins with a drill down to well flow data and documentation. Users can
share their thoughts with OneNote, use Lync to call up expertise, and
visit with Microsoft’s own social network, Yammer. The 82”
Microsoft/Perceptive Pixel screen was also on show—impressive as an
enormous touch screen, less so as a display (only HD). Seemingly,
Contoso personnel eschew writing documentation, preferring instead to
make videos to share their thoughts on this and that. You may think
that this makes stuff hard to find. But no, video streams are converted
from speech to text in the cloud and made searchable.
Microsoft
business intelligence guru Tyler Chessman gave a compelling demo of
‘big data’ functionality blending full text search from Microsoft Fast,
Power BI, View and Map to inspect and visualize a large dataset of US
drilling and production. All ‘run from Excel!’
McDermott’s project analytics and reporting system, PARS is an ongoing development from Infosys that
will collate key data from different source systems and provide project
data analytics. PARS leverages SQL Server, BizTalk, SharePoint and Team
Foundation.
Biren Kumar explained how Rockwater Energy Solutions
plans to become the ‘Fedex of fluid management’ and is using a stack of
performant telemetry and Microsoft Dynamics AX with payment management
from Wells Fargo. The system lets Rockwater keep tabs on fluid levels
in mobile tanks and B2B payment. The two year old company claims
current revenues of $1 billion.
Breitburn Energy has grown through acquisitions and was confronted with application and data silo ‘sprawl.’ Stonebridge was
called in to help develop a new IT solution embedding components from
Enertia Software, Merrick Systems and Trenegy, a specialist in
‘cleaning up after the consultants!’ The result is a ‘data hub,’ that
leverages a comprehensive Microsoft stack and a Ppdm database.
Gimmal has provided Transocean
with an enterprise engineering document management system that includes
commercial content management, access to policies, procedures and
technical data. The SharePoint solution leverages an existing
enterprise document taxonomy from Aker (acquired in 2011).
As in previous years, as far as we can tell from the agenda and website, there was no mention of Mura, the curious ‘Microsoft upstream reference architecture.’ Is Mura work in progress or something to forget? Read (some of) the presentations and (if you have time) watch the (unindexed) videos.
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