Unstable oil prices and a global economic downturn place exploration and production (E&P) asset teams under pressure to more precisely characterize prospects and existing dormant assets. At the same time, data managers look to stretch shrinking information technology budgets. These challenges are particularly acute for development of unconventional resources, which entail large risks and require specialized engineering and seismic interpretation techniques. By optimizing information resources, E&P managers can improve decision-making, and companies can begin extracting more efficiently.

SMT offers a fully integrated E&P software solution. The integrated workflow operates in a Windows® environment, enhancing interpreter productivity and enabling analysis by a wide range of project participants—anytime and anywhere. In this way, SMT offers advanced science that is easy to use while pioneering advanced techniques for unconventional-resource interpretation, such as prestack/AVO and microseismic analyses.

NetApp® data management and storage solutions complement SMT’s solutions by providing an infrastructure that consolidates data across the enterprise and facilitates collaboration. At the same time, NetApp’s solutions improve storage efficiency, enable efficient data backup and recovery anywhere, and enhance performance in a scalable platform.

This paper summarizes the data storage, management, and interpretation challenges that E&P managers face and describes a comprehensive solution from SMT and NetApp.