Video
Karen Gondoly, CEO, Leostream
Jay Kirby, Vice President of Strategic Solutions, GeoComputing
Eric Johnson, Director of Consulting Services, GeoComputing
Karen Gondoly:
Thank you for joining another Leostream podcast. Today, I’m excited to be joined by our partners from GeoComputing, Jay Kirby and Eric Johnson.
Jay, why don’t you start by introducing yourself, and then we’ll hear from Eric as well.
Jay Kirby:
Absolutely. My name is Jay Kirby, and I’m Vice President of Strategic Solutions at GeoComputing. I’m glad to be here today.
Eric Johnson:
I’m Eric Johnson, Director of Consulting Services at GeoComputing. Thank you for inviting us.
Karen Gondoly:
We’re thrilled to have you. GeoComputing and Leostream have been partners for a number of years now. I believe our partnership goes back to at least 2008.
Who would like to talk a little bit about what GeoComputing does and how you found Leostream?
Jay Kirby:
I’ll start.
GeoComputing has been supporting oil and gas operators, specifically on the exploration and production side of the business, for more than 20 years.
About a decade ago, we decided to build a platform that was purpose-built for geoscience workflows. That platform became RiVA.
When you think about the complexity of these environments, there are a tremendous number of hardware and software components involved. We knew from the beginning that we couldn’t build everything ourselves, so we created an ecosystem of technology partners that specialized in the capabilities we needed.
Leostream has been one of those partners from day one.
While we’re delivering the RiVA platform to customers, partners like Leostream are fundamental to every deployment. The ecosystem we’ve built is one of the biggest reasons the platform has been successful.
Karen Gondoly:
That’s fantastic. We really value being part of that partnership, and it’s been exciting to watch the RiVA platform evolve over the years.
Let’s ground everyone in the use case.
Suppose I’m a geoscientist—which I’m definitely not. What does my day look like? What are you helping these scientists accomplish?
Jay Kirby:
One of the biggest challenges geoscientists face is working with a variety of highly specialized applications and extremely large datasets.
Their goal is to solve complex exploration and production problems, which requires not only significant computing resources but also efficient access to massive amounts of data. Those two things have to work together seamlessly.
Building the underlying platform is critical, but that’s only part of the solution.
Users still need a secure and intuitive way to access those resources, and that’s where Leostream comes in. It provides an organized way to ensure every user can securely connect to the systems they need to do their job.
Karen Gondoly:
Do those users need to be in the office, or can they work remotely?
Jay Kirby:
They can be almost anywhere.
Originally, we designed the platform for geoscientists working from corporate offices. Over time, we’ve refined the solution using technologies like Mechdyne TGX, allowing users to work remotely while maintaining an excellent experience.
As long as network latency stays below roughly 100 milliseconds, users can collaborate effectively and interact with applications as though they’re sitting in the office.
Karen Gondoly:
It sounds like you’re solving a very real challenge by giving geoscientists access to these powerful applications from virtually anywhere.
Can you give us an example of the kinds of applications they’re running?
Eric Johnson:
One example is Petrel, which geoscientists use to analyze seismic data and identify geological structures that may indicate hydrocarbon reservoirs.
These applications render extremely detailed 3D models and massive seismic datasets. Users are constantly rotating models, scanning through seismic volumes, and interacting with very graphics-intensive visualizations.
That’s where RiVA delivers tremendous value.
By centralizing the applications, compute resources, and data within a single platform, users can collaborate much more effectively while ensuring everyone is working from the same datasets.
We also deploy RiVA globally.
For example, one customer headquartered in Houston has operations around the world. We deploy RiVA into multiple regions, allowing teams in different locations to share data and collaborate efficiently while keeping everything centrally managed.
Karen Gondoly:
That sounds like a turnkey solution.
Is it really as simple as rolling the platform into a customer’s environment and getting them up and running?
Jay Kirby:
People usually don’t believe us the first time we explain it, because they’re used to the complexity of traditional deployments.
Historically, refreshing one of these environments could take anywhere from 18 to 36 months.
We wanted to change that.
Instead of shipping hundreds of individual servers and components for customers to assemble themselves, we manufacture, configure, and fully integrate the platform before it ever leaves our facility.
By the time it arrives at the customer’s data center, the infrastructure is already built. The customer simply provides power and networking, and we begin migrating users, applications, and data.
That approach has reduced implementation time by roughly 70 percent.
Karen Gondoly:
That’s incredible.
I’m sure organizations appreciate not only the faster deployment but also the reduction in implementation costs.
Jay Kirby:
Absolutely.
For many customers, this is a significant investment, so being able to realize value much sooner makes a tremendous difference.
The CFO certainly appreciates seeing a return on that investment within the same year.
Karen Gondoly:
Let’s dig a little deeper into collaboration.
You mentioned users working together on projects. Is this where Mechdyne TGX comes into play, or are multiple users actually connecting to the same environment? What does collaboration look like?
Jay Kirby:
That’s a great question.
One example is a customer with offices in Denver, Houston, and Calgary. The head of geoscience recognized that they had incredibly talented teams in all three locations and wanted them collaborating on the same exploration projects.
The challenge was that their data was spread across three separate environments.
They came to us looking for a way to centralize that data so every geoscientist could work from the same source while collaborating in real time.
That’s exactly what RiVA enables.
Technologies like Mechdyne TGX certainly enhance the collaborative experience, but the collaboration wouldn’t have been possible without first centralizing the data.
That’s really where the value comes from.
Karen Gondoly:
That makes perfect sense.
We see similar challenges across a number of industries, but I imagine they’re especially important when you’re dealing with datasets of this size.
Jay Kirby:
Absolutely.
Over the lifetime of the RiVA platform, we’ve migrated hundreds of petabytes of customer data into these environments.
That’s an enormous amount of information, and making it accessible in the right way is fundamental to helping geoscientists work efficiently.
Karen Gondoly:
With all of that valuable data centralized, security has to be a major consideration.
How do users authenticate into the platform, and how do you keep everything secure?
Jay Kirby:
Security is built into every layer of the platform.
Depending on how customers choose to deploy RiVA, we can provide a fully self-contained cloud environment or integrate directly with an organization’s existing infrastructure for on-premises deployments.
From a networking perspective, we secure the edge with firewalls and segment the environment into security zones using a zero trust architecture.
Traffic between systems is controlled through policy, so only authorized communications are permitted.
For user authentication, we integrate with Active Directory and can also integrate with Microsoft Entra ID and other enterprise identity providers.
Leostream plays an important role in that process by providing centralized authentication and secure access to workstations. We also support single sign-on, creating a seamless experience for end users.
Karen Gondoly:
So not only are organizations keeping their data centralized, but it’s also never residing on the user’s endpoint.
That’s another significant security advantage.
Jay Kirby:
Exactly.
Beyond secure access, we also incorporate endpoint protection and data management capabilities.
For example, we can index customer data, identify which projects have been loaded, and provide additional visibility into the environment.
We’ve really tried to build value beyond simply delivering applications.
The platform combines application delivery, centralized data management, security, and operational visibility into a single solution.
Karen Gondoly:
That’s really interesting.
I wasn’t aware of everything the platform does beyond delivering applications.
Let’s look ahead a little.
This wouldn’t be much of a technology podcast if we didn’t talk about AI. How is GeoComputing approaching AI?
Jay Kirby:
It’s definitely the topic everyone wants to discuss.
From our perspective, AI is going to have a significant impact on upstream oil and gas, but we’re still in the early stages of that journey.
We’re not talking about AI drilling wells tomorrow.
Instead, we’re focusing first on how AI can improve our own operations.
One example is using AI internally to enhance customer support by building intelligent knowledge bases and improving how we assist customers.
We’re also exploring AI for data management.
Most operators have accumulated massive amounts of data over many years, and many organizations don’t have a clear understanding of everything they have.
Before applying AI to broader exploration workflows, we’re helping customers better organize, understand, and manage the data already within their environments.
At the same time, we’re ensuring the platform is ready for AI workloads.
We utilize the latest NVIDIA GPUs to support the AI capabilities software vendors are introducing into their applications.
Our role isn’t necessarily to develop AI applications ourselves.
Our goal is to provide the infrastructure and platform that enables customers to adopt AI successfully.
Karen Gondoly:
That makes a lot of sense.
AI is certainly at the forefront of almost every technology conversation today.
Eric Johnson:
I’d like to add one thing to Jay’s comments about AI.
We position RiVA as an AI-ready platform. That means customers have the infrastructure necessary to support AI-enabled applications as they become available.
Beyond that, we can also help customers predict the cost and performance impact of introducing AI into their environments.
When you combine RiVA with Leostream, you gain even more flexibility.
For example, organizations don’t need every workstation to be AI-enabled. Instead, Leostream can be used to create resource pools dedicated to AI workloads and grant access only to the users who need those capabilities.
That makes the platform much more efficient and cost-effective.
Karen Gondoly:
That’s a really interesting use case for Leostream.
Rather than equipping every workstation with AI-capable hardware, organizations can create dedicated pools of AI-enabled machines and use Leostream policies to control access based on user needs.
Eric Johnson:
Exactly.
It allows customers to maximize the utilization of those specialized resources while keeping the environment flexible.
Karen Gondoly:
Are there any other innovations you’re particularly excited about?
Earlier you mentioned offering both cloud-hosted and on-premises deployment models. Has cloud become a larger part of your business?
Jay Kirby:
Very much so.
When we first introduced the RiVA platform more than ten years ago, virtually every deployment was on-premises.
As public cloud adoption accelerated, many organizations wanted to move these workloads into the cloud. We evaluated that approach, but for this type of specialized infrastructure, we found it introduced several challenges.
The cost was significantly higher, performance often didn’t meet customer expectations, and supporting those environments became more complicated.
Rather than moving entirely to the public cloud, we evolved our on-premises platform into a private cloud offering.
Initially, that was a new concept for many customers, but today it’s one of the primary conversations we’re having.
Many organizations have spent several years experimenting with public cloud deployments for these workloads and are discovering that costs can be two, three, four, or even five times higher than expected.
At the same time, users aren’t always satisfied with the performance.
Private cloud allows us to deliver the performance customers expect while providing many of the operational benefits associated with cloud computing.
Today, it’s a core part of our strategy.
We’ll continue supporting traditional on-premises deployments where they make sense, but private cloud is where we see the greatest opportunity moving forward.
Karen Gondoly:
We’ve definitely seen increased cloud adoption across our own customer base, whether that’s private cloud or public cloud.
It’s interesting to hear the same trend from the energy industry.
It sounds like RiVA gives organizations a great deal of flexibility. They can deploy on-premises, move to private cloud, simplify deployment, and get users productive much more quickly.
What else is on the horizon?
Jay Kirby:
Innovation never really stops.
I believe we’re now on the seventh generation of the RiVA platform, and we’ll continue evolving it based on customer needs.
One thing that’s changing is the amount of time geoscientists have to make critical business decisions.
Whether they’re evaluating where to drill next or deciding whether to acquire exploration rights in a particular region, those decision windows continue to shrink.
That means they need access to increasingly powerful infrastructure that allows them to analyze data more quickly and make decisions faster.
We’re also introducing capabilities like on-demand data rooms to support joint ventures and collaborative exploration projects.
Ultimately, our roadmap is driven by listening to customers.
We’ll continue building the capabilities they need as their workflows evolve.
Karen Gondoly:
I’m sure you’ll continue to be successful with that approach.
Before we wrap up, where can listeners go to learn more about GeoComputing and the RiVA platform?
Jay Kirby:
You can visit us at geocomputing.net to learn more about our solutions.
If you’d like to speak with someone directly, you’re also welcome to reach out to me. We’d be happy to discuss your environment and how we can help.
Karen Gondoly:
Fantastic.
Jay and Eric, thank you both for joining me today. It was fascinating to learn more about these unique geoscience workflows and hear how GeoComputing and Leostream work together to deliver secure, high-performance solutions for the energy industry.
We appreciate your partnership and look forward to continuing to innovate together.
Jay Kirby:
Thank you. We appreciate the partnership.
Eric Johnson:
Thank you for having us.
"*" indicates required fields