Hard Times for Oil & Gas

Times are hard, and they’re changing fast. Nearly a year into a pandemic that has shut down half the world’s economy and upended our lives, we find ourselves on the cusp of an uncertain future. Our industry is in flux. Commodity prices have boomeranged from steady increases to a state where operators have to pay buyers to take oil and gas off their hands – and then prices have shot back up again. It’s crazy.

GVERSE GeoGraphix hasn’t been immune to hard times, but hard times have pushed us to do more with less. We embraced cloud computing in our North American operations, making us a leaner, far more efficient company. We discovered that our R&D and Support folks are more productive when working from home and avoiding two-hour daily commutes (we probably should have figured that one out earlier). And we’ve doubled down on our commitment to listen to our customers and understand what they think the future will bring. We received more than fifty responses to our latest GVERSE GeoGraphix (GGX) software survey, and we didn’t always like what we heard. But I’m convinced that the ability to truly listen makes an ordinary person seem like a visionary. Don’t get me wrong. I‘m not a person who believes everything he hears, and I hear a lot of stuff every day. Some of what I hear is brilliant, some silly, some thought-provoking, and some just plain weird. But in nearly every conversation, I hear folks describing a future where improvements to GVERSE GeoGraphix will make their work more productive and rewarding. We’re striving to make your visions come true, and it’s a fine line to walk. When corporate visions are born in the echo chamber of C-Suite egoism, bad stuff happens. The Scottish poet, Robert Burns, wrote that “The best-laid schemes o’ mice and men, gang aft agley.” How very true. But when our vision is focused on solving real-world problems and is rooted in the practical application of geological principles, the results can be very good indeed.

I’m finding that ending every message with a hackneyed “please stay safe” is becoming unbearably trite, so let’s skip the pabulum. I’ll entreat you to “think dangerously” of a future where your software becomes an extension of your intellect and intuition. So please let me know what you’re thinking. I’ve always wanted to be a visionary.