Thursday, March 24, 2016

Incumbents don't create disruptions

I have long held the belief that incumbents in a sector never disrupt themselves and actively fight the breakthroughs to their detriment.  The automotive industry would have remained delightfully stagnant in its innovation, or at best incremental, until Tesla showed up on the seen.  Plethora of other examples abound.  For example, do you still book hotels?  Really?  What is a hotel?  Do you still call of a cab or a taxi?  Really?  What is a taxi?

While the Digital Oil Field (DOF) has been a dream being had for the last 30 years, new, innovative, and entrepreneurial players a making inroads to deliver the solutions.

"Predicting failures and changing operations in real-time are now table-stakes for an industry that is already stressed by low oil prices. ARC expects the survivors in the oil and gas industry to follow the lead of Henry-Pump and make use of IoT Analytics Platforms. In fact, according to Meshify representatives, the Industrial IoT platform is fully commercialized, and other customers now include Sierra Resources, Tyco Gas & Flame Detection and Lubrizol, to name a few."

I spoke with Meshify in their infancy and I am delighted to see the progress they have made.  Henry-Pump is just a small example of what is possible.  Question remains, why have the companies in Oil Field Services, who have had resources on hand, could not build something like Meshify 10 years ago?

Read the article here on the Industrial IOT blog.

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Oil & Gas: Defunct business models

Interesting article in FuelFix quoting Mr. Paal Kibsgaard, CEO of Schlumberger.

"“We believe that project performance can only be improved by finding ways of breaking with the past and replacing the existing model with a new approach based on collaboration and commercial alignment between operators and the largest service companies,” (Kibsgaard) said."

Mr. Kibsgaard highlights the waste that follows the business model in use for the past 25 years:

"For roughly the past two decades, producers have drawn up master plans in house, then gone out and contract with dozens of suppliers separately for each piece of the larger project. The lack of coordination during the planning phase, as well as the lack of coordination between suppliers, has led to high costs poor financial results, Kibsgaard said."

Read the article here.

Thursday, March 17, 2016

Long settled? does not apply for breakthroughs

"Q-Carbon and The Man Who Makes His Own Diamonds" via friend Mr. Jim Verdonik:

"I found Prof. Narayan’s work fascinating for many reasons starting with a relatively simple solution dreamed about for centuries. But if it had been up to me go choose a research area, studying carbon would not have been among them. After all it is an old settled topic; carbon is either in the form of graphite or diamond – end of discussion. Fortunately, Professor Narayan and PhD candidate Bhaumik had the genius of avoiding my presumption and researched carbon phases. Sometimes the greatest innovations come from taking another look at the so-called long settled subjects."

Read the complete article here.

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Artificial Intelligence part of the 21st century corporate

At times it feels that some of the sectors that depend deeply on technology are oblivious to how their world is about to be disrupted from outsiders and where the future will be.  Case in point from an article via friend Mr. Pete Stuntz:

"… the launch of OpenAI, the billion-dollar nonprofit research center announced this week, opens a window into what some of the big thinkers in the computer science and business consider as opportunities and challenges."

Creative Destruction is to follow shortly, and IBM was not asked to be part of the founding group:

""The way software is eating the world today, well, AI will do that to software," says Amir Husain, CEO of Spark Cognition, an AI security startup in Austin, Texas.

He explained that many kinds of business software that replaced paper documents and in filing cabinets will eventually be transformed into a new format. And that format will likely be more user-friendly because of hard work done by artificial intelligence behind the scenes.

“All of these categories will be destroyed and remade, so there’s a lot of economic potential locked up in this,” says Husain. “It’s sort of like being the only guy in 1995 who knows HTML.”

And that, more than anything, is why the big brains in Silicon Valley and at other companies left out of the OpenAI effort are hustling to stake a claim in this space. Rob High, an IBM Fellow, and VP and CTO of IBM’s Watson Group, explained that the computing giant is interested in learning more about the organization and getting involved."

Read the complete article here.

Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Bloomberg Business (Interactive): Five years of oil run up and its collapse

Excellent interactive visualization showing growth of the oil industry in the USA over the past five years, and its quick decline at Bloomberg Business article - Watch Five Years of Oil Drilling Collapse in Secondshere.