Application hosting delivers performance, savings

Application hosting is the practice of delivering software from a centralized location to users in different locations over an intranet, LAN, WAN or broadband Internet connection. It is the opposite of traditional software delivery, which involves installing software applications on each employee’s workstation.

E&P companies can use application hosting improve access to geoscience and engineering applications while reducing information technology (IT) infrastructure and management costs. Standard laptops or PCs connected to a secure hosting environment replace expensive workstations.

When users launch applications from a simple web browser, the applications actually run on high-speed computers in a remote hosting center, where the data is also stored. As a result, users no longer need to transfer massive data sets to high-powered workstations in their offices. They simply send a request to the hosting system where all processing occurs, and the results are sent to them as screen images. As long as users have a broadband connection, they can work without expensive workstations.

Application-hosting models

There are several application-hosting models. One option is to have a third-party vendor like Landmark deploy the software at one of its highly secure, multiclient hosting centers — delivering the applications as a leased, turnkey solution to the customer. Alternately, the service company can build an on-site hosting-facility behind the E&P company’s firewall. The E&P company can then elect to have the service company manage the facility for it, or simply do so itself.

The service company can offer a range of hosted applications, including its own software, client-developed software and third-party applications. Moreover, all three models deliver performance on par with traditional software-delivery methods while also providing enhanced uptime and reducing support and maintenance costs. The service company can even guarantee application availability and performance-service levels when it hosts the applications itself, or when it operates the hosting center for the E&P company.

New technology

Application hosting is not new: many mainstream industries have relied on it for years. The E&P business, however, has lagged in its adoption of the technique mainly because of technical barriers like enormous data sets and demanding visualization requirements. But recent IT advances are allowing E&P companies to surmount these obstacles.

Landmark, for example, uses technology to compress a geoscience data display as it leaves the remote hosting center and then de-compress it at the customer’s facility, where individual workers see it on their monitor screens as if they were processing it locally. In addition, the service company uses many patented methods to ensure that this technology works well with E&P applications. One patent-pending technology, for example, will help ensure that laptops and PCs display high-resolution images (up to 3840 x 1200) on huge, twin monitors.

Larger IOCs are also benefiting from application hosting. One supermajor is using the service company’s application-hosting system to evaluate datasets located in Moscow using consultants working on laptops in Houston. Before the company implemented its hosted system, it had to fly five geoscientists back and forth to Russia twice a month so that they could evaluate the data, a total distance of nearly 24,000 miles (38,616 m) every four weeks. Now, the geoscientists can stay put in Houston — only their computer calculations cross national borders, while meeting local export compliance regulations.

The arrangement has saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in transport, lodging, and lost-productivity costs — and also saved it an impressive amount in technology overhead. More importantly, though, it has saved the company time, both in terms of travel and in IT-deployment cycles. Cutting travel and deployment times has proven to be invaluable to the company, which is facing a narrow window in which to shoot and interpret the Russian seismic data.

Implications for operations

This type of value proposition has dramatic implications for any global operation. Consider, for example, companies that have to open new offices in places like Africa, where setting up a field operation often involves lots of time-consuming red tape. With application hosting, there is very little on-site technology to procure and deploy: IT infrastructure is housed back in the United States or Europe, but is available to workers almost anywhere in the field over a network without any performance compromises.

Similarly, companies that want to refresh their legacy IT systems or do upgrades can turn to application hosting as a solution. This is because application hosting reduces the expenditures and difficulties inherent in upgrading several different operating systems and application versions across multiple workstations and servers. Research finds that application hosting can result in a thin-client environment that costs one third of a hardware refresh in a large company. This is because bandwidth replaces workstations. In addition, availability rises as high as 99.9%.

Independent oil companies are also pursuing an application-hosting strategy. One such company recently adopted the technique to make the service company’s GeoProbe software available from its Oklahoma-based data center to geoscientists almost 500 miles (804.5 km) away in Houston. The company believes application hosting will allow it to centralize its backup and data management responsibilities in one office, while providing its Houston divisional office with access to key applications and data.

Larger international oil companies (IOCs) are making application hosting an important part of its IT mix. Marathon, for example, reports that the technique is about one-third the cost of a typical hardware refresh, and requires less equipment, bandwidth and support and reduces the number of updates and patches.

Network performance

Superior network performance is another significant benefit. Traditional IT infrastructure puts the work load on a sprawling network of servers and workstations — an arrangement that has worked well in the past, but is now inadequate in the face of growing data sets and the need for larger memory platforms. Application hosting allows companies to overcome this dynamic by centralizing IT challenges in the hosting center, where they can be easily solved with tools like grids and cluster computing.

With application hosting, all the heavy lifting happens in the hosting center. Application hosting means companies do not have to handle upgrades and maintenance. When the service company upgrades servers, storage technology and networking that a hosted environment sits on, it is totally transparent to the users.

IT executives have also found that application hosting provides additional benefits, including better scalability, superior disaster-recovery capabilities and enhanced data preservation as well as superior data consistency for improved Sarbanes Oxley compliance.

Moreover, application hosting is proving to be a powerful factor in worker retention, allowing professionals to access high-powered E&P software from their homes. This means more senior professionals can reduce their work demands without having to retire, while younger workers can be more productive, leveraging the flexibility of application hosting to alter their commute patterns or schedule their work around other obligations.

Clearly, application hosting, with its several options, is an attractive way to bring faster performance, improved collaboration, and anytime-anywhere access to geosciences professionals. One executive describes it as “a dream come true” for his company’s geoscientists, and many others in the industry are seeing a similar ROI, including C-suite executives, asset managers and IT professionals.