Last week I had a chance to attend Quorum’s Qnections conference in Las Vegas.
The purpose of the event was to showcase Quorum’s new and updated software offerings to current and potential Quorum customers and help make connections with 3rd party consultants like Velocity Insight who can help integrate data systems post-merger, implement new software, and visualize data. A few takeaways below…
Takeaway #1: Quorum is a much bigger company than you may remember
M&A isn’t limited to E&P companies. Quorum has spent several years positioning itself to go global with a long series of transactions from WellEz (2017) to OGsys and FLOWCAL (2019) to EnergyIQ and Landdox (2020), culminating in the 2021 merger with Aucerna & TietoEVRY‘s Energy Components. All those transactions together give Quorum claim to the title of world’s largest energy focused software provider. Quorum is now a behemoth, selling over 30 pieces of E&P software by our count. This was Quorum’s best attended Qnections yet with over 700 attendees. Quorum wants to be your one stop shop for energy software with its Upstream On Demand suite, including Accounting, Land, Well Ops, and Production.
Takeaway #2: The energy industry still has a lot to gain from the cloud
This was not surprising to me having worked for E&P companies of all sizes, but Gartner still ranks the energy sector dead last among major industries for adoption of cloud platforms. If your company has yet to stand up a data warehouse, you’re in good company based on several presentations I saw at Qnections. An oil company I would classify as a “Supermajor” was running its land department out of spreadsheets as recently as 2022! They were very happy with their On Demand Land implementation after a lot of focused development time on Quorum’s part making the software fit for purpose. I heard 70% of O&G companies still run their land department out of spreadsheets (but 63% of statistics are made up, so take it with a grain of salt), which isn’t surprising to me either given the complexity of land data. Workflows like figuring out whether leases are in jeopardy are tough to build data models for with multiple many-many relationships required in the data model.
Takeaway #3: Quorum’s “all in” on their On Demand suite
It’s clear from the presentation content that Quorum’s all in on On Demand SaaS offerings. Older, on-prem solutions like OGsql were barely mentioned, which are still supported but could impact your business in the future if you’re not using On Demand Land, On Demand Accounting, On Demand Well Ops, or On Demand Production. If you’re still slinging spreadsheets to run your business, using cloud based data keeps your reports evergreen, and combining databases across departments allows for much faster access to new kinds of insights about the way your company runs and what drives value. Quorum showed a lease in jeopardy / shut in well workflow similar to one we have on our website that leveraged all four On Demand platforms via their Energy IQ master data management system as an example of how integrating data across departments drives value. We’re a huge proponent of this approach, getting your data out of silos and into the light makes miracles happen.
Takeaway #4: “Just give me the data!”
Quorum’s continuing to move towards DataHub and away from the prior BI On Demand system. They’ve already made this transition for On Demand Production, which mirrors Field Insights. DataHub is a big improvement over BIOD having worked with both systems. WellEz (aka On Demand Well Ops) is headed that direction soon, and their roadmap has them not just giving clients the standard SQL Views, but access to the raw data tables for doing your own joins and empowering users with more control over how they view their data. This bucks a worrying trend from some data providers that want to charge users extra for access to their own data from providers’ cloud platforms. Including this access with their software adds value to Quorum’s offerings.
Too nerdy? Just nerdy enough? Wondering why you should care about having a data warehouse? Reach out, we love talking about this stuff!