I stayed with TIBCO for a respectable amount of time so that the technology could be transitioned to the new organization. I have not worked for a big organization for quite some time, so I figured it would be best to move to another small company.
The company was Object Reservoir, a software company that used Finite Element Analysis [FEA] to perform oil and gas reservoir simulation. (Most software used Finite Difference Analysis, as it is "cheaper" from a processing standpoint) It was founded by an old friend of mine several years ago and had sort of a tough time throughout the years.
My task was to see if we could pull the company out of a skid, or lacking that, get what we could get for the technology.
The technology was really quite spectacular. I would like to say that we moved on from the FEA an analytic solution to what was essentially a Big Data problem. The company had come up with a science based analytic and heuristic solution to the question everyone was asking at the time - how do you best produce unconventional gas wells?
We were Big Data before Big Data was cool.
But then gas prices collapsed, and we collapsed with it.
The company had built up a very nice consulting business based on our technology. And besides that, we were able to convince several oil companies to share their gas production data (very proprietary) so that we could perform these analytics across reservoirs so that we would not be influences by local anomalies .
These engineers were good at what they did, but more importantly, they were reservoir and petroleum engineers. We were able to get a small bidding war for that part of the company - and we ended up selling them (as a unit) to Weatherford.
That gave us some time to focus more on the software side of the business.
One problem we faced, however, is that we still hadn't solved the problem of either wet gas or oil. The physics are hard, and though in conventional reservoirs solutions have been found, there has simply not been enough data (big or otherwise) to determine the accuracy of the algorithms.
But we dedicated our scarce resources on solving these problems - but it all sort of caved in at the end.
So we started another "process" to get the software a good home.
It was a short sales cycle, and we were able to work with Halliburton to put the software, and the people, at the Landmark Graphics division of that company.
That was two years that was a lot of work, but ultimately a disappointing end.
The company was Object Reservoir, a software company that used Finite Element Analysis [FEA] to perform oil and gas reservoir simulation. (Most software used Finite Difference Analysis, as it is "cheaper" from a processing standpoint) It was founded by an old friend of mine several years ago and had sort of a tough time throughout the years.
My task was to see if we could pull the company out of a skid, or lacking that, get what we could get for the technology.
The technology was really quite spectacular. I would like to say that we moved on from the FEA an analytic solution to what was essentially a Big Data problem. The company had come up with a science based analytic and heuristic solution to the question everyone was asking at the time - how do you best produce unconventional gas wells?
We were Big Data before Big Data was cool.
But then gas prices collapsed, and we collapsed with it.
The company had built up a very nice consulting business based on our technology. And besides that, we were able to convince several oil companies to share their gas production data (very proprietary) so that we could perform these analytics across reservoirs so that we would not be influences by local anomalies .
These engineers were good at what they did, but more importantly, they were reservoir and petroleum engineers. We were able to get a small bidding war for that part of the company - and we ended up selling them (as a unit) to Weatherford.
That gave us some time to focus more on the software side of the business.
One problem we faced, however, is that we still hadn't solved the problem of either wet gas or oil. The physics are hard, and though in conventional reservoirs solutions have been found, there has simply not been enough data (big or otherwise) to determine the accuracy of the algorithms.
But we dedicated our scarce resources on solving these problems - but it all sort of caved in at the end.
So we started another "process" to get the software a good home.
It was a short sales cycle, and we were able to work with Halliburton to put the software, and the people, at the Landmark Graphics division of that company.
That was two years that was a lot of work, but ultimately a disappointing end.
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