Schlumberger Deploys SD-WAN to Support Remote Digital Oilfield Operations | Juniper Global Summit

00:07 Hello, everyone,

00:09 my name is Sue Graham Johnston and I'm vice president

00:12 and general manager here at Juniper Networks.

00:15 Joining me today is Maged Elmenshawy,

00:19 Global Network Manager for Schlumberger.

00:22 Maged, welcome, and thank you for joining us today.

00:26 Thanks very much, Sue, for having me.

00:28 Juniper and 128 Technology is really proud to partner with Schlumberger

00:33 because you're such a forward-thinking company in the industry

00:37 and we're excited to support your digital oilfield operations globally.

00:42 Tell us about Schlumberger and your role in particular.

00:46 Schlumberger is an oilfield services company,

00:48 which means that our domain is really in what we call

00:52 the upstream of the oil and gas industry,

00:55 which is mainly focused on identifying,

00:58 exploring and producing oil and gas from reservoirs,

01:03 basically assisting our clients that do that, right?

01:06 So we don't do it ourselves.

01:08 This involves a lot of advanced technology

01:13 and being able to serve our customer's needs basically anywhere on the planet

01:17 where these types of natural resources are produced.

01:22 It presents some really interesting challenges.

01:24 I remember when we were doing an installation in the Arctic Circle,

01:28 our team actually had to get polar bear training on

01:31 what do you do if you find a polar bear while you're out on the installation.

01:36 Yes, that's very true.

01:38 Health and safety and the environment

01:40 are really key aspects of operations in this domain, really.

01:45 That could involve anything from dangerous gases to dangerous animals.

01:49 That's certainly true.

01:52 It really is hard to think of an industry that's, frankly, more complicated

01:58 than oil and gas,

01:59 because you've got everything from

02:02 hyper-competition to probably one of the most volatile market conditions

02:07 that exist in any industry and certainly,

02:10 the environmental risk management you just mentioned,

02:13 can you help the people listening in understand more about

02:17 the role the network plays in helping Schlumberger

02:21 and your customers address those challenges?

02:24 Sure, fundamentally,

02:26 our services are focused on providing data to customers

02:30 so that they can optimize the performance of their operations

02:35 and optimizing the production of resources.

02:41 All of this revolves around data and typically,

02:46 the locations for these types of resources are

02:49 naturally in very remote locations.

02:52 It involves connecting people and equipment

02:55 from very harsh locations to central experts

03:00 or production systems that need to be able to interact and understand

03:05 and interpret this data on a 24 by seven basis.

03:08 The operations are extremely expensive,

03:12 drill ships, drilling rigs, things like that,

03:15 as well as the equipment that's required to achieve this.

03:18 Being able to connect the remote sites to experts in town and the necessary systems

03:27 is fundamental to the business.

03:29 The network is crucial.

03:31 Of course, we have a lot of people that work out of offices,

03:34 and then you have the normal day-to-day thing,

03:36 but from a direct revenue-impacting perspective,

03:41 the network is absolutely crucial.

03:44 This is really where Juniper and 128 Technology comes in.

03:49 We've been partnering with Schlumberger for quite some time now,

03:54 you really are a customer that has helped push our technology in new directions,

04:00 but it would be great if you could share a bit about why did Schlumberger select

04:05 the session smart routing solution?

04:08 If you think about the kinds of locations I just described,

04:11 whether it's in the middle of the desert

04:13 or in the snow in Canada or somewhere else in the middle of the ocean,

04:17 they're, by nature, locations that are very difficult to connect to networks.

04:22 Typically, you have a few options.

04:25 One of them is satellites.

04:27 Satellite networks are predictable in terms of coverage,

04:31 but they come with the drawbacks of being extremely expensive,

04:35 very limited in terms of bandwidth,

04:37 very cumbersome to deploy the equipment for,

04:40 as well as high latency.

04:43 The other alternatives are cellular,

04:47 which is very unpredictable because you don't know with a lot of certainty

04:52 where you're going to have coverage and even if you do,

04:54 it's not a guaranteed service.

04:56 It's just best effort,

04:57 just depends on what kind of throughput you're going to get,

05:00 it depends on how many people are using the same tower, et cetera.

05:04 What we really needed was something that could dynamically select

05:10 and leverage the most optimal network transport available,

05:14 whether that be satellite, cellular, et cetera,

05:17 and as well use it efficiently.

05:20 As I mentioned, some of these networks, particularly satellites,

05:23 are extremely expensive.

05:25 We need to be extremely efficient in the way we use the bandwidth

05:29 and really what differentiated 128T

05:32 and Juniper from some of your competitors

05:34 is the fact that you're not using legacy tunneling technology

05:38 and your approach is based on sessions

05:42 which secures the connection without

05:45 resorting to decades old approaches.

05:49 Yes, absolutely.

05:50 I remember telling my building manager we're working with a new customer right now

05:55 and I actually need to install a satellite dish

05:58 on the roof of my building in Burlington so we could better

06:01 test our technology with some of the challenges you are facing.

06:05 Certainly, here at Landside,

06:08 we actually have slightly more reliable satellite connectivity but it really is

06:14 a challenge when you're dealing with

06:16 all of those disparate types of transports all over the world.

06:20 In fact, you reminded me that one of the things that we faced was that

06:25 some of the satellite technologies use particular types of compression

06:30 and TCP optimization approaches to the network traffic.

06:35 That, in fact, some of the other platforms that we evaluated broke.

06:40 Meaning that they wouldn't work effectively

06:43 and 128T was one of the unique options that actually did not break

06:48 those types of protocols and optimizations.

06:52 That was another key deciding factor for us.

06:56 Excellent.

06:58 Are there any other challenges that you're facing right now

07:00 that we've helped you overcome?

07:04 I think one of the other things that we find that was very

07:09 beneficial to us to leverage from the 128T

07:11 approach was your flexible deployment options.

07:16 We can deploy it in the typical

07:20 edge device that is based on any X86 platform that you've certified

07:25 including a lot of different vendors.

07:27 Obviously, now with your integration,

07:30 with Juniper, that brings the additional advantage

07:33 of having an integrated hardware platform to provide the solution on.

07:39 In fact, even some of our business lines that produce

07:43 the acquisition systems that are collecting the data from remote sites

07:47 are now moving to X86 based platforms.

07:50 They're actually embedding the SD-WAN end points within containers,

07:55 within those virtualized platforms.

07:58 It gives us a lot of flexibility in terms of how it's deployed.

08:02 The other thing was, really, I should mention,

08:04 is the engagement factor.

08:05 We had extremely high level of engagement from your technical operations team.

08:13 As you mentioned, you sent someone all the way to Alaska

08:15 in the initial stages of us proving the solution works for our requirements.

08:22 That was really critical for us, is getting that engagement

08:26 and that agility in adapting to some of our requirements.

08:32 I think the partnership helped us understand better

08:35 the scope of what you were facing.

08:37 It made for some great photo ops next to FracCATs

08:41 and in barren landscapes, but really,

08:45 when we talk about the challenges of reliability,

08:48 it helped me impress on our development team that

08:52 for a company like Schlumberger and the industry you work in,

08:56 it's not a truck roll if something breaks,

08:59 it's literally a helicopter flight, if that.

09:03 The technology itself just has to be

09:07 really hardened and, hands down, reliable

09:10 because you may be running a rig with nobody there or if there is somebody there,

09:15 it really is life critical and health and safety critical information

09:19 in addition to the machine information that's being transmitted back across these networks.

09:24 The imperative for is just at a whole different level than it would be for, say,

09:32 a traditional retail network.

09:35 That's very true and, in fact, it's also been

09:38 exacerbated to some extent from the COVID-19 crisis

09:42 that everyone has gone through over the past year or so.

09:46 With a very concentrated push from both our clients and from Schlumberger internally,

09:54 from the health and safety perspective,

09:56 to minimize the number of people that need to physically go to these sites.

10:02 We already had a focus on remote operations,

10:05 what we call remote operations for the past few years,

10:08 but now it's become even more front and center where we need that network

10:13 that's serving the field to work even more reliably than it ever has,

10:18 because instead of sending the engineers that typically run these jobs to the rig,

10:23 now we're minimizing the number of people that go to the rig

10:27 and having them in town running the jobs completely remotely over the network.

10:31 It really has become absolutely business-critical.

10:34 It's amazing and Schlumberger shared a lot in the press about new frontiers

10:40 that you're pursuing as an industry from Rig of the future to

10:45 lots of cloud-based services and, of course, the whole push on IoT.

10:52 Can you share a bit about what's next in your vision

10:55 for network transformation for oilfield systems?

10:59 Sure. Let me mention from a business perspective,

11:04 there's a few focus areas.

11:05 Obviously, the mental and physical safety of the people and certainly,

11:12 with this kind of work from anywhere type of environment

11:15 that will stay with us for quite some time,

11:17 probably permanently to some extent,

11:20 there is that perspective of digital experience.

11:25 How do you measure it?

11:26 How do you optimize it regardless of where

11:28 the person is working from or what type of network connection they have?

11:35 That's going to provide some new challenges that

11:38 we haven't really faced as much before.

11:41 From a customer perspective,

11:43 we're very focused on performance management,

11:47 delivering the optimal performance for the customer

11:49 and doing that through digital transformation.

11:52 That's where cloud-based services come in,

11:55 which again pushes the network to the front.

12:00 Finally, I would say from a industry perspective,

12:04 sustainability has taken on a very strong focus for us

12:08 both from the perspective of our operations itself and moving towards

12:14 a carbon-neutral type of operation as well as

12:19 exploring new markets in new energy.

12:23 Things like hydrogen and geothermal energy, things that are not petrochemical.

12:30 That's from the business perspective.

12:32 Really, what we're looking for from the network transformation

12:35 is how can we serve some of these key needs?

12:39 For us, the initial business driver was for SD-WAN and the network transmission

12:45 was in the field for the reasons that we've discussed.

12:48 Now we're looking really towards how do we extend that transformation

12:51 then to the core network that connects all of our offices,data centers,

12:55 and the cloud and optimize really the whole end-to-end

12:59 experience whether you're working from our own prem offices or whether

13:05 it's a customer accessing services that we're providing in the cloud

13:08 or whether it's someone working from home or anywhere else for that matter?

13:12 Fantastic. I think working with Schlumberger has really pushed our thinking about

13:17 what it means to deliver an experience-first network.

13:21 Maybe a way of closing here today,

13:27 any thoughts for other customers that are embarking on a digital transformation?

13:32 You're certainly doing one of the broadest implementations I've seen across

13:38 such a range of technologies and challenges,

13:42 but I'm sure many customers even in smaller,

13:46 more confined set of challenges

13:48 could benefit from some of the learnings that you've had along the way.

13:51 Any final thoughts to share on that?

13:54 I think that changing the network,

13:58 especially if it's a large enterprise network of any scale,

14:02 is always a very high-risk undertaking.

14:07 We've spent years basically evaluating, understanding SD-WAN.

14:13 It's still a very nascent technology.

14:16 There's not a lot of standards around it.

14:18 I think we've been a bit cautious.

14:22 We've identified where is the business case for first,

14:27 rather than just looking at it from a pure technology perspective.

14:31 We identified that very clear business case for us.

14:34 We did some initial quick pilots that proved that yes, in fact,

14:38 it does work and it fits our use case.

14:43 That was where we decided to okay, let's choose that scope and expand on it

14:49 and provide the value to the business based on that.

14:52 There may be other business drivers for other customers.

14:56 Other customers may still be,

14:57 let's say, heavy on MPLS and they'd like to move to Internet.

15:01 Us, ourselves we're still heavy on MPLS ourselves,

15:04 but we've optimized our cost a lot because we have a very large scale network.

15:11 That cost optimization was not the initial driver,

15:15 but for a lot of companies, that may be a different business driver,

15:20 where they may prioritize doing it on the core,

15:23 they may have a large number of very similar,

15:26 let's say, cookie-cutter type of sites where it's very easy to implement.

15:30 There's a lot less risk, I think so.

15:33 Identifying the business case,

15:36 proving that the technology works in the customer's environment with,

15:41 let's say, small scale trials first, and then expanding based on that.

15:46 That's great advice.

15:47 Thank you so much again for joining us today, Maged.

15:50 It's always terrific to talk to you and to hear what Schlumberger is up to.

15:54 I appreciate your time to share it with the broader Juniper audience.

15:58 Thanks so much.

15:59 My pleasure and thank you for having me again.

16:01 Great. We'll talk to you soon.

16:02 -Bye-bye. -Thank you, bye-bye, Sue.