Oil company hopes to strike efficiency with cloud analytics

Grazed from CIO. Author: Clint Boulton.

To make drilling more efficient during a commodities industry downturn, Laredo Petroleum is turning to cloud applications from a Silicon Valley startup to correlate production and operational costs. An offhand remark about hating spreadsheets led Laredo Petroleum CIO Lars Crotwell to deploy analytics software to help the company curb production costs.

Crotwell, during a phone call with a friend in 2013, complained that business managers were cross-referencing data from dozens of Excel files to understand why operating costs for some wells were higher than those producing twice as much oil. "We were using a lot of homegrown spreadsheets and it was like herding cats," says Crotwell, who manages IT for publicly traded Laredo, which produces 15 million barrels of oil annually from 1,000 wells situated in the Permian Basin of West Texas…

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