What is Datagration’s vision for fixing the bad data problem in the oil & gas industry?
Datagration’s focus is twofold: visibility and simplicity. These two things are at the heart of most bad data problems. When you don’t have an easy way to collect, access, and analyze data, you risk missing valuable insights that could drive your business forward. Using PetroVisor’s robust platform, we’re focused on bringing change that’s specific to O&G. We have deep roots in the industry and understand the challenges O&G companies face that could be solved by better data visibility and transparency. Once you know the problems, it’s easier to reverse engineer a solution.
- Michael Stundner, EVP of Technology
What makes Datagration & the PetroVisor platform unique?
One of our biggest advantages is that we’re an open and agnostic cloud platform that is extensible, flexible, and adaptable to customer needs. Users can implement workflows to meet their specific needs using PetroVisor’s unique proprietary P# language. This is the leading Knowledge AutomationTM platform in the O&G industry, enabling high value technical analysis from dispersed data sources in a collaborative environment, breaking down silos, allowing informed business decisions to improve ROI, and capital efficiency. No other platform does this at the level of Datagration and Petrovisor in the O&G industry, and it’s this level of collaboration and visibility across the enterprise that is empowering companies to collect better data and make better use of it.
- Jorge Machnizh, CEO & President
Do you believe Datagration can bring the O&G industry into the 21st century?
Datagration is one of the only companies with its Petrovisor platform and analytic workflows that can bring the O&G industry into the 21st century. Changing the way engineers use data to make decisions is the key to making this leap forward. Capturing the right knowledge each day automatically will be the driver for change. Making it easy for engineers to view and use data will drive the success needed to bring companies to use technology the way it is intended. Linking the engineering outputs to business and financial decisions will be compelling once implemented fully.
- Peter Bernard, Executive Vice Chairman
How fast does Datagration™ intend to grow?
We acquired 15 people in our acquisition of Petrovisor and added our Senior Management team of 7 individuals. Our plan is to have about 40 total employees by the end of 2020 and approximately 50 by the end of 2021. We also have the flexibility to grow quicker with a faster scale of the business.
Ike Epley, Vice Chairman
How does the PetroVisor platform fit into the overall digital landscape for O&G companies?
The PetroVisor platform is the “connector” of the digital value chain from Exploration to Product Distribution. Through better data collection, management, and visibility, it ensures the capital effectiveness of your investments from drilling to ongoing production is always optimized and generating the best returns. And at the same time, it allows you to manage and optimize your reservoir. This, along with an integrated workflows allows the enterprise to drive an effective digitalization strategy and implementation.
- Lars Olrik, VP Sales & Business Development
How do you build an IT architecture that can adapt to a fast-moving environment?
This is the driving question (and goal) behind digital evolution across industries. There are changes in the industry itself that must be considered, as well as changes in the technology like Datagration that supports those industries.
For O&G, the key to making sure you can adapt quickly and maintain speed of delivery is to have confidence and speed in your release cycle. We focus on collecting metrics such as availability, performance and error rates to give us insight and targets for how our users are experiencing the platform. Also key is automating testing to ensure that changes to your platform are not disruptive or have unforeseen consequences.
By focusing on iterative releases rather than traditional “Major Releases.” it allows you to have confidence in your platform and code base and reduce testing cycles. This allows the customers to get features as soon as they become available and allows the team to quickly pivot based upon usage and customer response. Releases become routine as they occur daily instead of the traditional “death-march” and “code-freeze” approach. This also creates a better user experience as the changes are released in small batches seamlessly and require no work for the customer to stay up to date and receive the latest and greatest improvements.
- Kenton Gray, CTO
What value do customers see when they use PetroVisor?
Datagration enables customers to answer the question “How can I deploy my capital efficiently and maximize my return?” The unique differentiating ability of the PetroVisorTM platform is that it allows clients to develop and deploy truly automated decision-based Petro technical workflows that provide recommendations, the cost to implement and the potential returns associated with making the recommended CAPEX investment for a well, both within an asset or across a portfolio.
As the leader in Knowledge Automation, the Datagration technology gives our customers confidence in where to spend their next dollar. The open and agnostic platform quickly enables a company to connect and ingest all their data - Petro technical, financial, structured, or unstructured - then persist and process their data models. The extensibility of the PetroVisorTM platform allows an operator to take advantage of the many proven Reservoir to Topside solutions by deploying them at scale, expanding their implementation or creating new integrated decision workflows.
- Dale Sperrazza, CCO
How have you seen companies adopt to platform-based solutions over the years?
I have been overwhelming choices of platforms to choose from without a clear understanding of the differences and complexities. Many of these implementations use complex IT architecture that takes years to implement. They also require a huge team of people behind the scenes to make it work. In today's environment, the key value to a successful platform is speed. To be able to rapidly ingest the legacy knowledge to use in the future, find the data easily to assist in decision making, in an easy user format, means installing an automated platform. The intent of being elegant and the reality of being robust with automation have finally converged with Datagration. Datagration takes away all the complexities, the teams of teams to implement, and any custom products that are not easy to maintain. Automating knowledge is what we do and that will help our clients be successful.
- Carol Piovesan, SVP Constraint Management
What financial challenges do you see companies having in the next 18 months & how does the PetroVisor platform help them?
Oil and gas companies are under more pressure than ever to generate free cash flow, and this theme is unlikely to change over the next 18 months. After years of significant production growth funded by massive institutional equity and debt over-capitalization, investors are forcing operators to generate free cash flow at the very same time that commodity prices have declined.
In response, companies have resorted to shutting in wells, cutting capital expenditures, and overhead layoffs to right size their cost structure. In turn, this forces more work on remaining employees to maintain the same level of productivity.
Datagration alleviates these pressures through a leading workflow automation and decision-making tool for the oil and gas sector. With the PetroVisor SaaS software platform, Datagration allows operators to streamline workflows by aggregating and integrating data from disparate systems and databases into one cloud-based or on-premise platform that offers built-in applications to complete real-time analytics. With PetroVisor, Datagration producers can leverage data from all their legacy systems in a collaborative environment to ultimately streamline processes and reduce headcount, operating costs and capex -- precisely what is required given today’s low and volatile commodity price environment.
- David Freer, CFO
How important are channel partnerships for Datagration?
Channel partners are critical for a digitization strategy for prospects in the mid tier and up. Every company is engaging in a cost reduction strategy via a digital technology plan. Technology channel partners Microsoft and AWS are looking to extend their footprint out of IT into the business units. Datagration will provide SME that can assist them. The SI channel partners are looking to create more value in their Energy specific practices and are in need of SME and technology differentiators. Petrovisor can advance workflow creation with these partners. Our technology and vendor partners can help us and them with an integrated solution for enterprise problems instead of being a point solution.
- Jorge Machnizh, CEO & President
What is it like leading a development team with COVID impacting the ability to go into the office?
COVID hasn’t taken much of a toll on our work environment since we’ve always had the option to work from home. Our team is very tech-savvy and eager to adopt new ways of working, so we’ve treated this as a learning opportunity.
When the pandemic hit Austria in March 2020 and we went into a lockdown, sprint meetings and feature discussions were held online, which worked well thanks to how professional everyone was joining on time and muting their mics when not talking.
Our brainstorming and creative processes had to be adapted a little, so instead of huddling in the meeting room, we did Teams meetings and used the whiteboards or other apps.
I’m really proud of our team!
-Georg Schweiger, Development Director
November 23, 2020