I was lucky enough to be invited by the great folks at Digital Wildcatters to represent Ikon Science and Curate at the Houston leg of their Energy Tech Night. If you’re not familiar with their shows, think 8 Mile but with energy tech and PowerPoints… (it’s better than it sounds, honest!) Going head-to-head with other tech companies, distilling an entire product suite and its’ benefits and capabilities into a tight timeframe and whipping up the enthusiasm of the crowd for something as dry as subsurface data management was an enthralling experience, and one I’d love to repeat some time. 

My eight-minute pitch was focused on the fact that ‘Data Management Sucks’, or more precisely, that the way it is implemented in the energy industry and specifically subsurface departments is fundamentally broken. But why do I think this, and what do I believe the solution is? 

To answer the first question, we need a little bit of a history lesson. Data management has always been considered a service—a manually intensive series of processes to collate, enrich, store and distribute data within organizations. As a result, commercial data management solutions often involve heavy service components, either building customized data workflows or manually ingesting and standardizing data.  

The problem with service-led initiatives is that they lead to custom solutions that take months or years to implement and require constant bespoke maintenance by a few trained experts. This results in expensive, unwieldly solutions that frankly aren’t suited to the budgets, timeframe or resourcing of our modern industry. 

In the 1990’s, a reliance on service-led initiatives made a lot of sense but in a world increasingly harnessing AI, surely there are more intelligent, scalable, and flexible solutions than that.

That’s why we created Curate – a product that is available to install and populate immediately. Designed for the subsurface, there’s no need for custom development to meet baseline user expectations such as map or wellbore displays – it all comes as part of the package. Our existing technology aids integration from existing disparate systems and smooths data flow, while our intelligent, automated loading tools mean that there’s no need for costly service contracts to get your data in.

If you’re ready to break the connection to costly service contracts and take control of your own subsurface data management immediately then it’s time you looked at Curate.