Locating a competitive advantage in the energy sector

Energy and utility companies have come to make up a significant portion of our Visual Command Center and Visual Fusion clients, and when we look into it, it’s clear that companies in this sector are particularly well-positioned to benefit from geographic data visualizations. 

That’s because:  1) they typically need to monitor vulnerable, high-value assets that are tied to fixed locations (think mines, wells, pipelines, transmission lines), and 2) many of them have already made a substantial investment in geospatial data and geographic information systems (GIS).

In many cases, that location data was buried in GIS departments until Visual Command Center and Visual Fusion made it available to users and departments across the enterprise.

You can visualize pipelines, transmission lines, and other energy assets in Visual Command Center

What’s striking are the many ways these organizations have gained value from the software to work. For example:

• Atlas Pipeline, a midstream natural gas company, visualizes all of its pipelines and processing facilities along with more than 40 other data layers, like weather and wildfire reports, hydrology, gas volumes, well performance, budgets, and growth projections.  All of the company’s departments—from production to legal—use the software to find operating efficiencies and improve the bottom line.
• The construction engineering firm Steele & Company (formerly a unit of Englobal Corp.) uses Visual Fusion to track land acquisitions and right-of-way agreements and manage the large quantity of documents associated with pipeline projects.
• Energy giant BP created a solution to identify drilling platforms and other assets at risk during hurricanes. 
• Australian renewable energy company Pacific Hydro used Visual Fusion to link its store of documents—including occupational health and safety reports—to its GIS data, to improve efficiency and decision making, and create safer outcomes for personnel.
• Canada’s Newfoundland Power cataloged more than 300,000 utility poles, to facilitate cost-sharing with local telephone and cable companies.

Of course, energy companies also have the same needs as other enterprises: to detect threats (from weather, civil disorder, etc.) to their people and infrastructure, to evaluate these dangers, and to communicate potential risks to employees—all of the areas where Visual Command Center shines.

 

Visual Command Center 2.0 at ISC West 2013 - April 10-12

In less than two weeks, IDV Solutions team members will be heading out to this year’s International Security Conference & Exposition (ISC West), in Las Vegas, where they’ll be demonstrating Visual Command Center 2.0, our physical security and risk visualization (PSRV) software.

As they did last year, several members of Microsoft’s Global Security Operations Centers will be joining us in booth 25108 to demonstrate how that company uses Visual Command Center to protect its worldwide facilities and employees worldwide.

Visual Command Center helps organizations identify potential risks to their facilities, employees, and operations. It unites information on global sources of risk, like weather, terrorism, and natural disasters, with data from an organization’s internal data stores and physical security systems, presenting all of the information on an interactive map and timeline.

Visual Command Center made its ISC West debut last year.

Featured Presentations

Two IDV Solutions’ representatives will speak at the conference:

• IDV Solutions’ User Experience and Mapping Manager, John Nelson, whose visualizations of earthquake, tornado, and drunk driving data sets have been widely reproduced and linked, will give a talk titled “Social Media and Publicly Available Data: Turning Tweets and Other Data into Actionable Security Intelligence.” Nelson’s presentation starts at 10 a.m. PDT on Wednesday, April 10.
• Scott Sieracki, Executive Vice President – Global Sales for IDV Solutions,  will be one of four presenters for “Turning Risk and Security Data Into Security Intelligence” on Thursday, April 11 at 7:30 a.m. PDT.  Sieracki will share the stage with:
  
  -Mike Howard, Chief Security Officer, Microsoft
  -Jeff Hearne, Director, Global Security Technology, Dell, Inc.
  -Laurie Aaron, Executive Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer, Building Intelligence Inc.

ISC West is the largest event in the U.S. for the physical security industry and features new products and advances in security technology and practices.

If you’ll be at ISC West, plan to stop by and see us in booth 25108, or set up a private appointment via e-mail.