Oracle Corp has now delivered a Petrotechnical Open Software Corp standards product called Oracle/Upstream. The software, on top of its Ofirs Unix package which it sold to Conoco Inc last week, is said by Oracle to provide its oil and industry customers with significant new decision support capabilities. The oilmen’s group, which has the potential financial clout of several Bill Gates and the charitable inclinations of Scrooge, has been established to ‘persuade’ suppliers to put together open systems that work in cohesion, and to this end announced in September the completion of the first two phases of its Industrial Pilot Project (CI No 2532). The organisation has ambitious plans, and of course just enough potential future business to persuade companies to make a long-term investment in the grouping. Companies funding the group, some 80 in number, include Oracle, UniSQL Inc, Chevron Inc, British Petroleum Plc, ELF Aquitaine SA, Hewlett-Packard Co, Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Texaco. To this end Oracle seems to have decided that hedging its bets is the best way forward and has announced a middleware package in conjunction with UniSQL. Oracle/Upstream is intended as a support for oil and gas companies migrating to the Petrotechnical’s standards. It can migrate data from legacy systems and will be implemented in three phases. The first provides DAEF support, the Petrotechnical standard for data access and exchange, whereby UniSQL’s object relational technology, the UniSQL/M Multidatabase System and E&P Data Access layer, will be incorporated into the Oracle7 database. Phase two involves Oracle delivering the relational projection specifications, while phase three will include full corportation Epicentre support by combining UniSQL’s E&P Data Access Layer with object relational features based on the SQL3 standards that are promised with the next release of the Oracle7 server product. The product announcement follows on from a September announcement by the Petrotechnical Open Software Corp, whose aim is to bludgeon suppliers into putting together some open systems that actually work together, that it had actually completed the first two phases of its Industrial Pilot Project. At that time Oracle opted to hedge its bets, providing Oracle systems with UniSQL middleware to appease the Petrotechnics without too much detailed work. But Oracle still has its eye on the lucrative oil market and has developed a Unix package, the Oil Field Reporting System. It has sold it to Conoco, which is downsizing onto an RS/6000-based client-server system, away from its mainframe in Germany. According to the company the Oil Field System will be used to report on its gas production in seven North Sea fields.
