Halliburton – forum for software vendors promotes collaboration
Feature Articles, May  29  2009 (Digital Energy Journal)

- In April of this year, Halliburton held a forum to for software vendors to help them determine new ways to integrate their products with the Landmark software suite and to find new capabilities to better address customer challenges

In early April 2009, Halliburton held its first DecisionSpace® Developers’ Network Forum for software vendors that have or plan to have integrated products that work with Landmark’s E&P technology workflows.

About 30 software vendors worldwide integrate with Landmark workflows – and ten of these sent fifteen attendees to the forum, primarily from the Houston area.

Vicki Jowell, global project director for Landmark’s R5000 suite of software

Vicki Jowell, global project director for Landmark’s R5000 suite of software, says the meetings provided an opportunity for attendees to get ideas for extending their products or creating new products. They also learned more about software development kits (SDKs) that make it easier to integrate into the DecisionSpace open environment.

“We already have two companies that have extended their application community because of the SDK technology,” she says. “They can now offer additional functionality not available previously, which opens new market opportunities in the current economic climate.”

“We’ve made a step change here – by broadening our openness – and being proactive in collaborating with software vendors,” she says. “We’re committed to offering the proper level of communications and support.”

Halliburton plans a range of offerings to support software vendors through the DecisionSpace Developers’ Network, or DevNet for short. This includes training sessions about specific software development kits, forums and webcasts, online knowledge management and expert support. “Keeping software vendors up to date on latest releases and our strategy and vision will help them plan their integration efforts and identify new opportunities,” she says.

To help reduce their development time and maximize their delivery to market, DevNet participants can purchase Landmark application and database licenses at greatly reduced rates. They can use the licenses to test that the software works together and for product demonstrations to their own customers. DevNet participants can also take advantage of co-marketing opportunities.

Landmark plans to develop similar forums for its customers, many of which want to integrate their proprietary software systems with Landmark applications. A customer forum is planned for the 3rd quarter of this year.

If anyone is interested in participating in DevNet, they should contact their Landmark account manager, Ms. Jowell says.

Halliburton stresses that it is happy to talk to anyone at any time about improving software integration.

Ecosystem

Last year, Halliburton announced a major new release of its software – R5000 – where all of its software tools, spanning exploration, drilling and production, could access data across multiple data stores.

Halliburton never anticipated that its software could do every conceivable task an oil company would want – and indeed, a number of other software vendors have found niches developing software tools that integrate with Landmark software, doing specialist tasks.

“We have a large suite of applications – and white spaces within some of our workflows that strategically we know are better filled by other vendors,” says Ms Jowell. “And some of our customers choose to create multi-vendor workflows or choose to use other applications as part of the workflows.

“Other vendors fill in the white spaces – to provide applications where we might not be providing those particular solutions,” she says.

Halliburton believes that the openness of its software is one of its strengths in the software market. “We see ourselves as being the leader in openness,” she says. “That’s been our strength in the past – and with the R5000 software release –we’re really taking it to the next level.”

Halliburton is making great efforts to nurture an ecosystem of software vendors to ensure the success of its R5000 software uptake, which enables oil and gas companies to benefit from new capabilities.

Ms. Jowell admits that the success of R5000 uptake requires the participation of the other software vendors – ensuring that their products are ready for R5000. “If they aren’t ready then our customers can’t always move to the R5000 software as quickly as they would like,” she says.

“We want to help them be successful,” she says. “If they succeed, then we all win – the software vendors, Halliburton and our customers.”

Software development kits

The software development kits (SDKs) make it possible for different software applications to easily integrate, with no proprietary formats, and no data being tied to any particular vendor’s application. So oil and gas companies can put together seamless structured workflows, taking the user from one application to another, without any complex importing and exporting of data.

“Our objective is making it a seamless and integrated environment,” she says. “The DecisionSpace environment and SDKs provide that openness.”

The SDKs provide tiered access for the DecisionSpace environment, including classic application support through data-centric integration, SOA-ready (Service Oriented Architecture) optimization for Web deployment and interoperable modules providing exceptional workflow support.

The SDKs provide data synchronization for varying data types, from drilling and completions to production; process integration across thick interpretation and engineering applications, distributed data management and GIS applications, and thin web-based applications, and loose or tight integration via remote components for distributed and Web applications or coupled applications as part of a modular framework, providing desktop access to other companies’ applications.

Complex

It is very easy to underestimate how complicated it is to integrate oil and gas data software and data together.

Plenty of feature-rich interpretation and engineering applications exist, such as heavy mathematical field science engineering applications.

Then there are distributed data systems – such as GIS – that often involve both fairly compute-intensive software on the desktop and much information sent over the Internet.

In addition, thin web applications are available – such as Landmark’s PowerExplorer® (for viewing geographical data over the Web), Team Workspace® (for viewing information about oil and gas projects over the Web), as well as documentation management systems and desktop dashboard systems.

The software systems are integrated together at varying degrees – from one extreme where two applications work on the same database at the same time, to another where applications are coupled loosely for easy data import from one to the other.

Consider that the data has an enormous variety of different formats – for example, reservoir and seismic models are a small number of enormous files – whilst production data has a large number of small files – and GIS data has both.

Halliburton

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