At the very beginning it was pure adventure! Lonesome riders, heading towards where the sun goes down. Mavericks, with their own rules, rebels, free to make a living their own way. Yeah, the Wild West was a time of freedom – not necessarily fun, but opportunities everywhere, endless land and resources. A playground where wildcatters started their way becoming oil barons and roughnecks shaped today’s idea of a tough guy. The early upstream E&P was an era with room for many things, but not quite an ideal ambience for stakeholders considering industry standards and cooperation. Why should they? Facing the apparently unfailing oil in place, inefficiencies tend not to be as worrisome during oil boom times.

But things changed – and we hope to meet you on March 10th for the PPDM 2015 Houston Data Management Symposium and Tradeshow. Sorry guys, the Wild West in oil & gas is over to some extent; and the fun was limited anyway. The oil declining, exploring, drilling and producing is becoming much more complex and hence risky. And to make it even worse, markets are volatile as current oil prices keep on falling and falling.

Therefore, in today’s market environment, inefficiencies quickly make the business unprofitable – whether it is about work processes, information management, collaboration between the many parties associated with producing a reservoir, or decision-making.

Sound like a mission impossible episode but with digitized data-driven business processes, oil and gas companies are able to apply advanced techniques such as horizontal drilling, microseismic and hydraulic fracturing to get the hidden treasure out of these complex reservoirs at feasible per barrel costs. Using data to “see the unseen” has triggered the set of events that made US first the biggest gas and then the biggest oil producer in the world.

So now, the rebellion oil & gas industry has some new playgrounds to pioneer, less rough, but all the more sophisticated. Just think about the Internet of Things (IoT) or economies of scale – exponentially maturing innovations ready to capitalize on. However, this means to improve adoption of standards that are prevalent in the majority of other process & manufacturing industries. May be this seems a bit boring for the nonconformists in upstream E&P – but if your business is driven by data then it better be in good shape: data should have a common meaning across the organization and even across the globe if you really want to squeeze the last drop of oil from the reservoir.

That is where the PPDM comes in, the Professional Petroleum Data Management Association, collaborating on standards and best practices for data management throughout the upstream petroleum industry. Microsoft has contributed to this demanding initiative with its Upstream Reference Architecture – first introduced a decade ago – delivering the vision of a connected oil/gas field. Today, the support of our cloud environment enables totally different ways of optimizing the value chain, which were not possible or commercially feasible in the past. Currently, Microsoft SQL Server team’s close collaboration with PPDM has resulted in a joint working group ensuring compatibility with the new 3.9 schema and also resolve some of the challenges with certain use cases.

Now, no borders anymore – the new versions of SQL Server will support the 3.9 schema without compromises. We will have the capability to run PPDM enabled data stores on the smallest SQL Server box all the way to cloud scale SQL Azure platform. Furthermore, this will be possible at a fraction of the cost of what the oil and gas companies are spending now.

We cannot promise a Wild West adventure – but give it a try and join us at the PPDM 2015 Houston Data Management Symposium and Tradeshow, March 10, 1:00 – 1:30 where Conor Cunningham and Lindsey Allen from Microsoft SQL Server team will present the session “Testing PPDM 3.9 against SQL Server” and have the opportunity to hear from experts who made it happen.

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