According to chief data scientist at Halliburton Dr Satyam Priyadarshy, the Big Data Analytics for Oil & Gas event has come at a great timing with oil prices going down and the companies looking to optimise their business values
Beginning 19 April 2015, the three-day event, organised by Oil Review Middle East, aims to provide an understanding of what real-time advanced analytics present for the energy sector in order to increase production and improve decision-making as well as reducing costs.
The event also hopes to address key challenges to create maximum value from data analytics and securing data flow.
The Day 1 saw the opening remarks by Priyadarshy, also the chairman of the event, pointing out that Big Data will help downstream, midstream and upstream organisations to maximise their assets.
Talking about Big Data in holistic sense and within the purview of the oil and gas industry, he added, “Big Data is all about innovation. And the companies must look at Big Data not as a return on investments but as a return on innovations.”
Making anecdotal references, Priyadarshy mooted on one point: Big Data should help one look for pattern recognition - data that one is not looking for. He also said that internet was responsible for revolutionising Big Data, among other factors like Open Source.
However, other speakers and delegates raised concerns about the security in an Open Source environment. This is where, Atif Kureishy, Principal, Technology and Analytics at Booz Allen Hamilton MENA, said that his company has invested heavily on providing security solutions and in 2008 launched a 40,000 node cluster, which is bigger than Yahoo’s installation.
“In the last 50 years, we have seen a high rate of digitisation in oil and gas sector, smart field devices and real-time asset management being developed. So everyone wants to know how to secure all the information. Lot of organisations pull in data from various sources and do correlations. We can help with how you disseminate in a way that only people that you want have access to the data. It is a parody between information security and analytics."
Another notable theme surrounding the day was how to leverage data centres to support Big Data. Speakers like Ian Jones from CommScope, silver sponsor of the event, and Awad El Sidiq from ADNOC Distribution gave indepth insight on managing and optimising data centres.
"Big Data is not only about analytics, it is physical as well. And we need to see how we bring out physical data at a lower cost. This is where we recommend modular data centres because as data centres are growing, so are the costs. Therefore, we build analytics into the data centres to make it more economical," Jones said.
Lead sponsor Wipro’s Big Data tech manager Sandeep Bhagat noted that in order to optimise Big Data, there has to be emerging architecture to manage and improve data. He also advised the delegates on choosing the right data platform to optimise costs.
With Big Data management comes the responsibility of right talent pool. Many at the event reiterated the fact that although the data centres have halved the man power to manage the production, yet the key to a optimum data sifting is human intelligence.
The day's speakers also included Ali Rabbaie, Big Data and Analytics consultant, who spoke about adopting data-driven cultures within the organisation and implement an appropriate infrastructure for successful data integration.
For a more detailed round up of the event, please see the next edition of Oil Review Middle East.
Big Data Analytics for Oil & Gas has been taking place at the Al Raha Beach Hotel in Abu Dhabi, UAE.
