Strategic initiative project-managed by the oil and gas industry experts
Petroceltic International plc is a publicly quoted oil and gas exploration and production company which currently employs 25 full time industry professionals supported by 30 to 50 international consultants across multiple disciplines and geographies. The company is headquartered in Dublin with regional offices in London, Rome, Algiers, Hassi Messaoud and Tunis. Petroceltic is listed on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) of the London Stock Exchange (PCI.L) and on the Irish Enterprise Exchange (IEX) of the Irish Stock Exchange (EG5.IR).
In line with its strategy, Petroceltic seeks to develop operations in the Mediterranean Basin and North Africa. The company has built a strong operations team which covers this area and which provides exploration skills in geology, geophysics, petrophysics, reservoir engineering, petroleum engineering, well design, drilling operations and project management. For each country, the company seeks to develop its talent with an appropriate mix of international and domestic team members. Petroceltic currently operates in Algeria, Italy and Tunisia.
Delivering on ambitious business requirements
Towards the end of 2009, Petroceltic decided to enhance its IT infrastructure to support anticipated growth in its business - both in terms of the number of employees and the number of locations.
"The old IT infrastructure had served Petroceltic well during our recent growth and allowed us to expand rapidly,"explained Alan McGettigan, Petroceltic's Finance Director. "However we believed that to enable our next stage of growth we needed a new, cost-effective infrastructure capable of delivering on our ambitious business requirements. Our new ICT architecture had to support this growth and expansion transparently – that is, we needed to be able to add employees and locations without having a major intervention in the infrastructure."
Petroceltic required an IT infrastructure that would operate reliably and fully facilitate the diverse usage demanded by the company's business including the management of data around the organisation.
Email is critical to the running of Petroceltic. Three types of employee were identified:
- office based (and therefore with access to normal LAN type ICT);
- employees that operate outside of the office but have access to reasonably good personal communications infrastructure; and
- employees in the field with limited or no access to communications infrastructure.
"The new architecture had to support all three types of employee and cater for growth," continued Alan McGettigan. "It was crucial that all employees enjoy a consistent user experience for Microsoft Exchange and, as we planned to implement Microsoft Active Directory, all user accounts had to be attached to the respective mail boxes."
Flexibility - the key component
Petroceltic generates and stores large data files: subsurface information that is often transported on portable hard drives and manually loaded onto SAN storage for analysis and manipulation by two seismic analysis applications – Kingdom and Petrel. "Because of the volume of data involved, the existing infrastructure only allowed analysis applications to be run on the LAN," explained Alan McGettigan. "One of our long term objectives is to allow these applications to be accessed remotely. However, above all else, Petroceltic is an exploration company – we did not wish to be an IT company – so the running and maintenance of the new infrastructure had to be cost effective and capable of fully supporting the business."
Flexibility was key amongst Petroceltic's objectives. Its international locations each required seven day cover and as the organisation had limited internal IT capabilities, it needed a partner that would assume the role of IT within the organisation, including the provision of a help desk to resolve end user issues. "We were therefore looking for a long term partner that was flexible enough to deliver optimum support as Petroceltic grew and evolved whilst at the same time giving us a known cost for this growth," concluded Alan McGettigan.
Recognising that it needed external expertise, Petroceltic issued a tender to which a number of organisations responded. Having worked with Citrix partner ISN Solutions, on previous projects, Petroceltic asked ISN to evaluate the responses and recommend a preferred bidder. "ISN has a great deal of experience in similar IT infrastructure bidding processes and has developed a framework for objective evaluation of tenders," explained David Ellison, a Director of ISN. "We have maintained a long term partnership with Citrix. This, combined with our wide experience in designing, developing, implementing and supporting complex IT infrastructures for oil and gas exploration and production companies meant that we were fully familiar with Petroceltic's objectives and the issues that they were likely to face."
Having evaluated responses and on the advice of ISN Solutions, Petroceltic awarded the contract to managed services company, Unity."Petroceltic wanted to create a private cloud IT system to centralise their IT systems and to have a standard platform accessible from the Dublin HQ, London, Rome and Algiers offices, as well as from home or on the road," added David Ellison.
Expanding the partnership
Although in the initial stages ISN focused on reviewing the tendering process, the company was then asked to provide Project Management services to ensure that this strategic project remained on schedule. As Petroceltic required immediate assistance, ISN tasked two of its consultants to share the role, ensuring that a resource would always be available to oversee the project and drive it to completion. "Project management of mission critical projects for the oil and gas industry is an area in which ISN excels," added Project Manager Paul Reed. "We have a wealth of experience in all aspects of strategic project management and have a particular reputation for coordinating the activities and responsibilities of specialists and technicians from multiple organisations so that they work as a team and focus on the core objectives of the project."
From the middle of January ISN Solutions undertook the critical project management role, liaising with both third party organisations and with Petroceltic staff in various offices. During this time ISN consultants regularly travelled to Dublin to meet with the project teams to discuss the migrations for the London, Algiers and Rome offices - which were being fully migrated from local resources to the Citrix systems.
Addressing the geographic issues
Petroceltic's Algiers office had around a dozen computers and users, some of which moved back and forth to the operational site in Hassi Messaoud. A local IT Manager was involved in the discussions for the migration and was tasked with many of the migration steps. ISN planned the Citrix migration for early February, pending the installation of a WiMAX Internet connection. This line was tested and configured with the Citrix Branch Repeater WAN acceleration device to optimise Citrix and other network traffic. "The migration of the Algiers office was relatively smooth as there was little data held on local resources and the office had a dedicated IT resource on site," said Paul Reed. "After in-depth testing and close communication between ISN, the IT Manager and Unity, the migration was completed at the end of February."
"This migration was completely successful," commented Hichem Ferhat, Petroceltic's Algerian IT Manager. "With a matter of days, our staff were using the Citrix system without any issues."
Petroceltic's Rome office had a relatively small number of users and was supported by local IT company, SOS. The migration was initially delayed by planning permission being required for excavation work to install the Colt MPLS connection. Then issues had to be overcome with the email, data and workstation migrations and communications with the local IT support company. During the testing phase of the migration, the Office Manager in Rome raised a number of concerns about the Citrix systems which prompted immediate action by ISN. "We visited the Rome site with a Unity engineer to investigate all issues at first hand and address them on-site," explained Paul Reed. "This trip was very productive and smoothed the remainder of the migration."
During the entire migration project, ISN liaised closely with Petroceltic, with regular meetings being held in Dublin to review progress, highlight issues and address any new requirements that Petroceltic had identified. Additionally, being so closely involved with the entire migration project and observing at first hand the processes and procedures adopted by Petroceltic across its various offices, ISN were able to identify areas in which further improvements could be made. These ranged from points proposed in the original tender to additional initiatives that would improve and enhance the Citrix experience for all Petroceltic staff - especially those in offices where network bandwidth was limited. "The key to the long-term success of the hosted Citrix systems is effective monitoring and management of the network it operates on," observed Alan McGettigan. "ISN Solutions made a number of recommendations and enhancements that improved our quality of service and made us far more productive."
ISN Solutions delivers
The entire migration was completed earlier this year and has now gone live. Petroceltic is currently in discussions with ISN to provide an end-to-end managed service to support, manage and maintain its new infrastructure.
"From the outset we understood that this migration would fundamentally change our IT usage and deliver the improvements and enhancements that we needed to support our continued growth and expansion," concluded Alan McGettigan. "Petroceltic is an oil and gas exploration and production company and not an IT company. This migration was a strategic project for Petroceltic and in order to ensure that we maximised our investments, met our deadlines and rolled out the new infrastructure smoothly, efficiently and issue-free, we recognised the need to partner with an organisation that had the track-record and expertise in project management for the oil and gas industry. ISN Solutions delivered."
