A Top Global Energy Firm

This oil and gas firm operates across six continents with its products and services available in more than 100 countries. As one of the largest oil and gas producers, the firm helps the world meet its growing need for heat, light and mobility, and strives to do so by producing energy that is affordable, secure and environmentally friendly.

Finding new oil and gas sources
In the oil and gas industry, the upstream sector focuses on the search for potential underground and underwater oil and gas fields, drilling of exploratory wells, and subsequently operating the wells that recover and bring the crude oil and raw natural gas to the surface. This is the heart of the business. With the growing demands for up-to-date information, the upstream sector needed new technologies and techniques to meet these needs.

To deliver more value to shareholders, the firm realized that it had to find ways to obtain a more comprehensive view of key assets. For example, it needed a way to look across wells and identify which wells, company-owned and others, to query. The firm wanted to find specific attributes on those wells, their production and well works. This also allows a geographical view to determine which wells are in production across a geographic location. To achieve this, it was vital to draw key information from many applications, organizational silos, and repositories while minimizing risk and operating expenses.

Ongoing operational reporting is essential for the firm; however, with such a large number of applications and reporting platforms, this can be difficult. The firm’s upstream IT team, having reviewed their own reporting capability along with those of the other business units, realized the need for a single source of truth. This would allow faster access to consolidated data sets from a variety of databases. Other needs included: increased reliability, reduction of work effort to develop and create reports, reduction of impact of reorganizing events and changes to underlying systems, and the view in present day, rather than waiting for monthly or weekly reporting processes to be completed.

Creating a single source of truth to improve business intelligence
Previously, the firm retrieved the data from each necessary source and collated manually, or put them in separate data silos. This led to extremely long projects that, when finished, would include data that was not up-to-date. The firm would then be left with few, if any, reusable components that could be leveraged into other projects. Systems built in this way exhibit an unacceptably high level of inconsistencies and cost.

The firm adopted Composite Information Server from IBM Business Partner Composite Software as its platform for “Single Source.” Composite Software provided a Data Federation Layer that joined the IBM® Netezza® data warehouse appliance with other core data sources—including disparate third-party databases, SAP systems, web services and outbound interfaces—and demonstrated results quickly. The Data Federation Layer enables the firm to de-couple data consumers from data sources to avoid time consuming and costly point-to-point interfaces within the infrastructure.

With a Demand Layer, Common Model Layer, and Conforming Layer, the firm can provide specific query and procedure calls to obtain detailed data items and content for:

• Integrating data via web services
• Defining relationships between entities for analytics
• Standardizing data typing and joins between source tables
• Creating flexibility to extend quickly and easily

This infrastructure ultimately serves to conform data towards the common model structure. The IBM Netezza data warehouse appliance then loads and stages the data, delivering at least 10 - 15 times faster performance than traditional ETL (extract, transform and load) methods.

With the combined Composite and IBM Netezza solution, new use cases are being released monthly, including:

• Land GIS Portal/Well Reporting: Allows queries and full geographic views of company-owned or other gas wells across the United States
• Integrated Lease Reporting: Calculates finances including compensation of majority stakeholders and leases on land
• Health Safety Security Environment (HSSE) Performance Management/Health & Safety Dashboard: Shows a range of factors including health, safety, education and environmental
• Marine Analysis: Compiles data coming off the Gulf of Mexico, facilitating real-time decisions and action
• Inventory Management: Monitors natural gas liquids and analyzes volumes at different stations, storage facilities, etc.
• Financial Data Quality Assessment: Evaluates accuracy of financial data by looking at the master data

“Developers can’t create anything faster than Composite and IBM Netezza,” says a senior information architect for the firm’s E&P Information Technology & Services. “With this combination, we have releases coming out every month.”

The result

• 80 percent object reuse of data
• Average query run-time performance of less than 0.5 seconds
• 50 percent less cost than legacy ETL solutions with one-third of the time—saving US$2 million per year
• Record number of 25,000 business queries in a single day

Solution components:
Hardware/Software

• IBM® Netezza® 1000
• IBM Netezza 100
• Composite Information Server 5.1

IBM Business Partner

• Composite Software

For more information
To learn more about IBM Netezza data warehouse appliances, please contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit the following website: ibm.com/software/data/netezza

Visit thinking.netezza.com to see how our data warehouse appliance eliminates complexity at every step and allows you to drive true business value for your organization.

To increase the business value of Information Management software, participate in independently run Information Management User Groups around the world. Learn about opportunities near you at: ibm.com/data/management/community.html

For more information about Composite Software, visit: www.compositesw.com