Being able to work remotely is more important than ever, and it is vital to have access to the powerful specialized software that you need in order to accomplish your tasks effectively and in a timely manner. In addition, it is important to be able to collaborate with your coworkers, team members, stakeholders, partners, and clients. Welcome to an interview with Vitaly Meyer describes how Petrocubic allows geoscientists and engineers to work remotely with the software and platforms they need.
What is your name and your background?
I am Vitaly Meyer, founder and managing director of PetroCubic. Before starting this company I worked as a petroleum engineer in large independents and then a few years as a consultant. I have two degrees one in applied math and second in petroleum engineering. Now I am actually combining them both with oil and gas domain expertise and IT knowledge.
How does PetroCubic make it possible for geoscientists and engineers work remotely.
This was part of our idea from the beginning to give petrotech people and consultants in particular tools to do their work with the maximum flexibility on both costs and access. Our first step was to check the feasibility if current technology coupled with cloud was good enough to make it work well for oil and gas demanding needs and it was. Thus we built this system we call petrocubic Workspaces where any individual or company can order online and then access E&P software remotely with pay-as-you-go price model which was unheard of in our industry. Even though the backbone is the cloud we made it very simple for end users so no IT knowledge is needed.
During unpredictable times, flexibility is vital. Please describe the workspaces that are available. What do they offer? How does one get started?
Indeed, flexibility is the key, especially for smaller companies and consultants. They tend to use certain software only from time to time so buying and even renting might not be feasible. On top of this you need to carry dongle and laptop everywhere. If there is more than one person working it makes it really inconvenient. With our remote access you and your team can login and access your software and data from any place being it home or office.
We are partnering with many software vendors such as CGG, RFD, ROGII, Seisware, dGB and others to offer their products. Since we have all the pieces already built we can also put your existing applications in and you will use it as a flexible remote option. To start you just go to our website workspaces.petrocubic.com, sign-up and place an order. It is like online shopping: no hassle, all prices are listed, select what you need, decide on hourly or daily pricing to use, confirm and then you will have 24 hours delivery by email of the link to login. You pay each month based on how much you actually used.
Please explain how an individual or small company can best use the remote workspaces and how collaboration might work.
Your workspace is a container of resources assigned to your account. If you are an individual you will have a remote computer assigned only to you. After login you can access the data from your local computer or upload all what you need. If there are several people then account owner can assign different users to different machines in any combination. Thus it is possible to share machines or share the data only between individual users. It is essentially your virtual office so you can work from home or anywhere else where there is an internet connection. You will not see a difference compared to sitting at your office desk. With time I think teams will become more distributed and more work will be done from home so having those digital platforms like ours will be vital for it.
Are there any additional features or strategies that you would like to use?
We are still in active development of the product and trying to bring more vendors. With many vendors in it will become really powerful platform without fragmentation when vendors are using individual clouds. Imagine end users working in multiple platforms trying to keep up and headache with data management. We are not quite there yet but it is coming. Since we are not competing with vendors we can bring them under one roof and save them money offering off-the shelf cloud solution. As an example of internal development we recently added cluster on-demand. Right now high performance computing (HPC) clusters are available only in large companies and they still require significant IT involvement regardless if it is on-premise or public cloud. We offer its unlimited power to small companies or individuals with no IT needed. It is already used for reservoir simulation and we are working to incorporate it with seismic workflows.
PetroCubic is a participant in AAPG's U-Pitch New Technology Showcase.