Oil & Gas ICT Leader 2015 Event

*This post originally appeared on the AppSense blog prior to the rebrand in January 2017, when AppSense, LANDESK, Shavlik, Wavelink, and HEAT Software merged under the new name Ivanti.

Last week we had the pleasure of once again joining up with our friends Citrix, Lakeside Software, and Atlantis Computing to attend the Oil & Gas ICT Leader 2015 event in Aberdeen, Scotland.

Over 200 IT leaders from the oil and gas industry attended the speaker and round table sessions to discuss how their roles and responsibilities are expanding and becoming increasingly central to the performance of their organization.

IT in the Oil and Gas Industry

The increasing complexity of IT systems gives rise to new challenges and risks. Reliance on technology demands an assurance of continual functionality and reliability, which requires constant monitoring of systems and 24/7 support. Due to critical ties to infrastructure, the digital age has also seen the oil and gas industry identified as a prime target of cyber-attacks, leaving information security a key concern for IT personnel.

However, not all challenges are of the technical nature; people within an organization must also adapt and change to new, mobile ways of working and accessing sensitive data or resource intensive applications from remote locations.

Thoughts from the floor

Speaking with the many delegates and exhibitors, I found the general theme for the whole event was: do more with less!

The oil and gas industry has historically been a very cash-rich vertical, but with the price of oil going down, business leaders are putting growing pressures on IT and service providers to start managing their infrastructure more efficiently and reduce existing operational spending.  This is in contrast to their history of large budgets and implementing technologies with the sole intention of getting the oil out of the ground faster.

Event Observations and Use Cases

One specific use case that was discussed time and time again at the event was the requirement to remotely deliver heavyweight, resource intensive applications to users, with instant logon and application launch times, all while retaining both the user personalization for the application and control of what data the application can connect to, often on a low bandwidth connection.

This was highlighted to us in our speaker session (a joint story from AppSense, Atlantis, Lakeside and Citrix on how to extend your application delivery to the field, delivered by Andrew Wood, Citrix CTP) where, when we asked the audience how many people had successfully rolled VDI out en-mass, only one organization had.   Unfortunately the rest had either failed proof of concepts or were just heading into a pilot.

So why not more VDI in Oil and Gas?

A common theme for not achieving project success is a lack of user adoption.  This is often caused by a high, upfront CapEx requirement or instabilities in end user performance when working remotely. That being said, by the end of the session after we had demonstrated how we can deliver heavy applications over Citrix HDX to remote devices on low bandwidth connections, inside a non-persistent desktop environment with optimization at the server and storage levels from AppSense and Atlantis respectively. When combined with intelligent monitoring and insight from Lakeside to identify end user trends and confirm IT service quality, many were re-energized into taking a second look at desktop virtualization, with the right technology partners in place.

Thanks and more to come!

I’d like to say thank you to Scot-Tech for organizing and hosting the event, the delegates for the attendance and input, and the other vendors involved in making an interactive forum for discussion.

If you would like to learn more about how to deliver the ultimate end user computing experience, then please join Atlantis Computing, Dell, Lakeside Software, Nvidia and AppSense at one of our ultimate desktop events across the UK:

28th April | Manchester - Double Tree by Hilton
30th April | London - Searcy’s Champagne Bar, St Pancras
11th June | Edinburgh - The Scotch Whisky Experience

Together we will cover how we have helped thousands of organizations rapidly deploy desktop virtualization technologies, with maximum user acceptance and minimum IT workload and project costs.