Posts tagged ‘collaboration’
Shell, IBM Team Up to Extend Field Life
Shell and IBM have announced a research collaboration that aims to extend the life of oil and natural gas fields. Shell sees potential to reduce the time and money required to model its reservoirs. IBM’s long-standing analytics and simulation experience will meet Shell’s strong subsurface and reservoir expertise to create a more efficient, more accurate picture of energy recovery.
The companies will explore advanced techniques for reconciling geophysical and reservoir engineering field data. As a result of applying improved algorithms, analytics and accelerated simulations, Shell can reduce the educated guesswork and extract natural resources with more certainty and efficiency, thereby optimizing the recovery of oil and gas.
“This collaboration is remarkable,” said Gerald Schotman, Exec. VP of Shell Innovation, Research & Development. “Two industrial research giants are coming together to solve a very specific, real-world problem and make the most of oil and natural gas reservoirs. This will not be done through expensive, experimental facilities, but by bringing together a powerful team and powerful computers so we can be smarter than before.”
The complex process of reconciling often-differing views of oil and natural gas fields can take several months to complete and involves measurements of production volumes, flow rates and pressures. For example, geophysicists must examine time-lapse seismic data from subsurface rock formations; reservoir engineers receive well and laboratory data, and geophysicists receive cross-well seismic tomography data covering wide spaces between the wells.
Shell and IBM will reformulate and automate the task of reconciling the different data and create an enhanced, yet practical, mathematical optimization solution. This can improve the cost-effectiveness of the data inversion process and, once available, will become part of Shell’s proprietary reservoir modeling tool kits for application in new oil and natural gas developments as well as existing assets.
“Working with Shell is a prime example of the importance of collaborative research in the effort to build a smarter planet,” said John E. Kelly III, Sr. VP and Director of IBM Research. “Using predictive analytics to drive new intelligence into oil and natural gas reservoir management has the potential to extend the life of existing oil and gas fields in a responsible way.”
As part of this Joint Development Agreement, IBM and Shell research scientists will work in several laboratories in both the US and the Netherlands.
IBM Updates Lotus Sametime Videoconferencing App
At the annual Lotusphere conference, IBM announced the availability of new IBM Lotus Sametime features, including online meetings and expanded audio and video integration, that help make unified communications and collaboration (UC2) easier and more cost-effective.
Available now, Lotus Sametime 8.5 offers a new online meeting experience that provides a consolidated calendar view and enables users to start or join a meeting with a single click. Users can easily invite participants to a meeting by dragging names from the instant messaging contact list and dropping them into the meeting. Participants can also accept meeting invitations with a single click and upload materials to the meeting with a drag-and-drop capability.
Leading companies from around the world participated in a beta program to test the new Lotus Sametime 8.5 capabilities and experience its simplicity and cost savings.
“For more than eight years, we have used Lotus Sametime to help our employees around the world connect and collaborate through a real-time, integrated communications platform,” said Thomas Eidenmueller, Merck KGaA. “With our planned deployment of Lotus Sametime 8.5 in the second quarter of 2010, we will be able to further lower travel expenses with our plans to run education sessions both internally and externally with our partners. This is an important upgrade that delivers simplified capabilities that will help us increase the use of meetings and connect to our Polycom video conferencing system to promote richer collaboration.”
The latest version of Lotus Sametime features always-ready, reservation-less meetings that offer password-protected meeting rooms that are always available so that an online meeting can be started instantly. Documents such as meeting minutes and presentations can be stored in the personalized meeting room for future use. Additionally, standards-based audio and video integration makes it easier to interoperate with existing audio and video conferencing systems and improves utilization.
In addition, Lotus Sametime now offers a new zero-download Web client built on a new Web 2.0 toolkit that makes it easier for businesses to embed Lotus Sametime capabilities into their applications and websites. For example, a business can now include presence, instant messaging, click-to-call and click-to-meet features on its website so that customers can start a conversation or ask questions with one click from the company’s website. This capability helps businesses reduce charges associated with toll-free customer support lines and also helps to improve customer service. Additionally, the zero-download Web client makes it easy for external users to participate in meetings.
The new release of Lotus Sametime offers expanded mobility support with a new, browser-based Apple iPhone chat client, and an improved mobile client for Microsoft Windows Mobile devices.
DocVerse Brings Real-time Sharing to Microsoft Apps
DocVerse announced the launch of its new downloadable plug-in for Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel, which turns those applications into full-fledged, Web-based collaboration tools. The plug-in makes any .doc, .ppt or .xls file into a secure, Web-based document that can be shared and edited by multiple users anytime, anywhere.
DocVerse makes sharing Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents synonymous with saving them. Anytime a DocVerse user saves a document on their desktop, DocVerse automatically creates a Web-based version of it in the cloud, which is instantly shared with whomever the author has specified. All Web-based versions of a document receive a unique, secure, shareable URL that never changes and can be accessed by anyone the author invites to view it – whether they have downloaded the DocVerse plug-in or not. Users can view and comment on the most recent version of the document online using any Web browser, or via the DocVerse plug-in inside of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel.
Groups of DocVerse users are able to use Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel to simultaneously edit the same document at the same time, whether online or offline. DocVerse tracks, manages and syncs all changes to merge them correctly into one updated version of the document – even if they save changes to the same document at the same exact time. For DocVerse users, that means no more e-mailing of attachments or repeatedly cutting and pasting changes manually to collaborate on documents with colleagues.
“This is huge step forward for Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel, which turns those unconnected islands on 600 million desktops worldwide into connected, Web-enabled collaboration tools in a way that no product has ever done before,” said Shan Sinha, CEO of DocVerse. “And, best of all, you don’t need to learn anything new. DocVerse quickly and easily plugs into Word, PowerPoint and Excel, so you can keep working with those applications exactly the same way you always have; it just makes them better.”
Perfomix Announces PetroSocial RTO Gateway
Perfomix, a real-time operations management solutions provider, announced the launch of PetroSocial, the Integrated Real-Time Operations & Collaboration (IRTOC) Gateway at the Society of Petroleum Engineers’ 2009 Annual Technical Conference & Exhibition in New Orleans, LA.
PetroSocial is a vendor-neutral, Web-based, integrated, real-time operations and collaboration gateway for the Oil & Gas industry that can seamlessly bridge well sites with regional and headquarters locations. It empowers experts to handle operational issues before they become a problem – regardless of where they are physically situated. This platform provides Web services APIs, integration repository and toolkit, and composite operations management gadgets while supporting open industry standards such as WITSML and PRODML.
The PetroSocial solution components include:
- PetroFieldGenie – Field operations management, data aggregation and streaming;
- PetroXchange – E&P data conversion, transformation, mapping and exchange services;
- PetroGisticsHub – Central data store and WITSML and PRODML services;
- PetroAlertGenie – Exception rules and alert management;
- PetroPerfoMax – KPI dashboards and operational reporting; and
- PetroDashBoard – real-time well views, collaboration tools, innovation applications launch platform and portals.
The PetroSocial enterprise components can be deployed on premise at the customer’s IT center or can be offered as a Software as a Service (SaaS), while the PetroFieldGenie can be deployed on a small industrial computer running Windows or Linux OS at the well site. The PetroSocial Platform facilitates transformational initiatives and digital breakthroughs in Oil & Gas industry. It comes with gadgets for Real-time Operations Centers (RTOCs) well monitoring, well surveillance dashboards, universal real-time viewer, well status reporting with GIS maps, shift management, operational reports and KPI monitoring. Other composite applications can be developed and deployed incrementally on this platform. The cost savings from small operational innovations with these gadgets can fund longer term transformational digital oilfield initiatives.
“Perfomix is leveraging Web 2.0 technologies to bring together people, information and real-time data scattered across the field, the enterprise and the E&P community,” said Celestine Vettical, President and CEO, Perfomix. “Because it is based on service oriented architecture, we are able to flexibly deploy innovative workflow scenarios on top of customers’ existing systems together with PetroSocial gadgets. This enables service companies and operators to work collaboratively together to make faster and better decisions and reduce risk and non-productive time.”
To accelerate the launch of the PetroSocial platform for real-time operations and collaboration, Perfomix introduced the IRTOC Gateway QuickStart program, which gives potential customers the opportunity to integrate 2-4 real-time data streams from 2-3 well sites as a proof of concept in only one month with minimal investment. One of the deliverables of the QuickStart program is a real-time operations transformation roadmap covering PetroSocial deployment and rollout plan.
AIIM Survey – Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0
Twice as many organizations are now taking active steps to implement Enterprise 2.0 technologies, such as wikis, instant messages, FaceBook-style employee profiles, compared to 15 months ago, according to a survey by AIIM, the Association for Information and Image Management. Knowledge-sharing, collaboration and responsiveness were given as the main drivers of this increase.
The online survey, which was taken by 789 individual members of the AIIM community between May 11 and May 26, 2009, also found that:
- LinkedIn is twice as popular as FaceBook for business networking;
- 68% of those surveyed think professional networking on the Web is vital to career progression;
- 27% of people aged 18-30 consider Twitter is an important rapid-feedback tool for business. Only 7% of those over age 45 agree.
- 71% of respondents agree that it is easier to locate “knowledge” on the Web than to find it within their companies’ internal systems.
PetroComputing 