Gene Kliewer,
Technology Editor
HOUSTON –Schlumberger Information Solutions opened its Houston Breakthrough Performance Center on Thursday, Sept. 27, with a tour and demonstration of facilities and technology aimed at fostering collaboration, technological innovation, and solution deployment among Schlumberger, its customers, and its technological partners.
The center features an exploration 3-D imaging room with what may be the world's largest visualization wall, a collaboration and solutions development center, a systems development laboratory, and a real-time drilling operations monitoring room.
The emphasis of the showcase event was open collaboration for innovation.
"The Breakthrough Performance Center is devoted to helping our customers position their companies for future success using open collaboration to fuel innovation," said Olivier Le Peuch, president, SIS. "This is a new breed of facility and it features the Innovation Lab."
The Innovation Lab functions with Schlumberger's Ocean development software at its platform. The idea is to create and test solutions that integrate technologies and services. It offers the opportunity to create applications using Ocean and including Petrel, SIS' visualization and analysis software.
Ocean is an open software development framework that provides a unified desktop environment to simplify and accelerate development of software to support seismic-to-simulation, drilling, and production workflows. Ocean gives software development teams an extensive framework to create user workflows, leveraging and extending the Petrel, Osprey, Merak, and Avocet suite of applications. Ocean environment is based on the .NET framework from Microsoft.
"The Innovation Lab is a venue where we can work collectively with our customers and industry experts to pioneer ground-breaking solutions to solve the tough challenges of exploring and producing increasingly complex reservoirs," said Le Peuch. "Combined with our open development framework, it gives us a unique opportunity to create customized solutions that provide a competitive edge for our clients."
The Center also gives Schlumberger and its IT partners a place to test programs and hardware. The partners include Barco, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, NVIDIA, Panoram Technologies, and The Whitlock Group.
"The SIS Breakthrough Performance Center will be pivotal in demonstrating to our joint customers the power of SIS geoscience applications based on Microsoft's enterprise solutions and technologies," said Charles Johnson, Microsoft's WW Industry General Manager for Manufacturing. The Microsoft products being applied include Computer Cluster Server 2003, Office SharePoint Server, Vista, and SQL Server 2005.
09/28/2007
