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Microsoft – making computing environment simpler

Thursday, February 17, 2011 in Feature Articles

Microsoft has a mission to help oil and gas companies make their computing architecture simpler, and put it together in a standard way

The Microsoft Oil and Gas team has embarked on a project to help the oil and gas industry simplify its computing environments, said Paul Nguyen, industry technology strategist for oil and gas at Microsoft, speaking at the Digital Energy Journal conference in London on Dec 9, “Collaboration and the Digital Oilfield”.

A simplified computing environment will cost less to build, be easier to use, easier to maintain, easier for newcomers to the oil company to understand, and companies can get a wider choice of which software companies they work with after the system is built.

Employees will have a “dashboard” type application providing all the information necessary for them to do their role, such as managing drilling or production.

The current IT infrastructure most oil and gas companies have is often unable to cope with the enormous recent increase in data going through the systems, Mr Nguyen said.

For example, every time a company installs a fibre optic cable to an offshore platform to replace a satellite link, people find much more data that they want to send back to shore.

“How do you consume that? You can't use the existing same traditional way of processing that,” he said. “We need things like automated workflow to handle the data volume.”

Microsoft has oil and gas business in more than 70 countries. It has had a dedicated oil and gas team since 2002, but has been serving the oil and gas industry for over 30 years.

Standard architecture

An important step at simplifying the computing environment is encouraging all oil and gas companies to put together their IT architecture in a standard way.

To try to encourage this, Microsoft formally launched its standard IT architecture project, called “Microsoft Upstream Reference Architecture (MURA) Initiative”, in June 2010, following a number of discussions it had held with different software companies during early 2010, including oilfield software providers Landmark Graphics and Schlumberger, and system integrators Accenture, Infosys and Wipro Technologies.

Now there are 29 companies involved.

“We were exploring the idea: what if we work together as an industry and come up with this common architecture?” he said.

The architecture is intended to continuously evolve as new technologies and best practises emerge.

Having a standard architecture should help companies reduce overall costs of their IT, particularly when it makes it much quicker and easier to install software from different vendors.

The standard architecture won’t specify which vendors to use – the idea is that different vendors can provide all of the different components and compete against each other, and the customer can choose, and everything will be interoperable.

Oil companies will probably end up working with many different software companies in a mesh, rather than using gigantic software systems provided by the same software company, as many of them do now.

There will be no need for anyone to write any integrations between different software packages – everything will work together straight away, just like consumer IT does.

This will encourage a competitive environment in the software industry, something oil companies particularly like, he said. Software companies can compete to create tools which give better capabilities to their users.

There has been a recent change in the attitudes of oil operators over the past few years, in that they are getting less tolerant of companies who want to try to lock them into their software, he said.

The actual architecture is “fairly generic” he said, with data layers, integration services, business processing tools, and a presentation layer.

There will be cloud-type cluster of PCs which can serve people the data they need. It could be operated by the oil company or by a third party.

Microsoft is working closely with oil and gas standards body Energistics on the project, with monthly meetings to talk about what is most important in order to deliver a “highly interoperable environment,” he said.

Survey

In August 2010, Microsoft and Accenture co-sponsored a survey about oil and gas computing trends.

People were asked, “who do you see as most capable of creating a simpler and more unified computing environment across the upstream oil and gas sector?”

13 per cent said they thought it was upstream operating companies; 15 per cent said industry IT standards organisations; 18 per cent said
IT product and service providers; 19 per cent said oilfield product and service providers; and 35 per cent said an industry wide collaboration of all of the above.

When asked which IT standard technologies will help improve efficiency in computing, 57 per cent said more extensive upstream industry standards (WITSML, PRODML); 57 per cent said SOA approach; 30 per cent said cloud computing; and 30 per cent said social media.

However not so many companies are actually using these technologies – for example, only 24 per cent of people said they were using upstream IT standards such as WITSML and PRODML.

Top down and bottom up

To make it all work, you need to look at the system from both a top down and bottom up approach, he said.

Senior IT management can look at the entire company from the ‘top down’, and see what kind of IT services are required, and what needs to be brought together to create it.

For example, if a company is putting together a drilling and production optimisation solution, they might be gathering real time data from OSIsoft, and use surveillance tools from Schlumberger, some planning components from Landmark Graphics, and maybe their own algorithms. The top down approach is looking at ‘what sort of facility we need to provide’.

At the same time, a bottom up approach is needed, gradually connecting together the data infrastructure, so it can deliver data to where it is needed, or looking at ways to make software applications easier to ‘wire up’.

3 bottom up concepts

Microsoft is looking at three different ‘bottom up’ concepts.

The first is called “declarative integration,” which means making it easier for software tools to be adjusted by the people who use them, rather than programmers.

For example, if someone in an asset management team has a change to their role, which means they need different information on their main portal, this can be created without any new coding – users can do it themselves.

A second concept is making it easier for people to put together dashboards using maps. There is an increasing trend for map based navigation in applications, he said. This geospatial component is inherently the same within various applications, making it easier to compose these types of solutions.

The third concept is “event aggregation”, where “events” (such as a piece of data being updated) can be shared from one computer across to other geotechnical software tools like SeisWorks and Petrel, or shared across the whole company. OpenSpirit has tools to make event aggregation work between different geotechnical software tools.

To make all of this work you need a range of different IT infrastructure ‘services’ embedded – for example Esri, which helps manage map-based systems, and PointCross, which can ‘orchestrate’ different services together.

“The idea is that all of these components will drop into this canvas,” he said.