#MeetOurTeam – Mark

What does a typical workday look like to you?

A typical workday for me can be quite varied from technical product discussions, showcasing our software and solutions to clients, discussing new projects and opportunities with clients, to thinking about resourcing and strategy.

As we have quite a broad software portfolio the technical focus can jump around from geophysics to data management to Python/data science which keeps you on your toes.

Also - as I work from home most of the time, I’m quite stringent about fitting some form of outdoor activity or exercise at lunchtime to get away from the keyboard, and screen Teams.

Which technologies do you work with?

As a geoscientist by background, I’ve always been engaged with subsurface software applications throughout my career, most notably Petrel. That of course extends to our own Blueback software portfolio within and around Petrel.

I’m a technical geoscientist at heart so still enjoy engaging with geoscience software after all these years to test and explore our products, features, algorithms, and workflows.

However, I’ve got to that stage of my career where I am not so much blazing the technical trail to being more of a PowerPoint Geologist and an expert in Snagit.

Read more about our Geoscience software here > 

What drives you at work and in your role, what's fun?

The product mix we have, as described above is broad – so shifting focus between domains and technology is a good challenge to have and keeps my mind engaged (others might argue otherwise).

Within Geoscience Software portfolio we have a fantastic team of software engineers, testers, product owners and support which I am proud to call my colleagues and with whom I can talk software all day long.

It’s also enjoyable to listen and learn from clients about their requirements, challenges, and technical experience to feed into the development of our products.

What is the latest geoscience technology developed in your team?

There are two new development areas for us within geoscience. Blueback Avary, which was developed in collaboration with Aker BP and Cegal Prizm, focuses on python and data science.

Read more about how Avary changes the way Aker BP work here > 

Blueback Avary is a new stand-alone software technology from Cegal that is a re-imagined, highly optimized, and efficient post-stack processing and prospect de-risking geophysical workflow.

Cegal Prizm is a secure modular suite of components that allow you to easily connect to domain data from legacy application silos and distributed data sources and expose these data to the python ecosystem.  The goal is to allow clients to innovate, collaborate and generate additional value and insight from their data by solving problems that are not possible with legacy applications.  

Read more about Cegal Prizm here > 

Have you had any new releases lately?

The most significant releases lately relate to the technology in the previous answer.
Blueback Avary v4.3 release includes our ODiSI seismic inversion technology.  ODiSI was originally developed in collaboration with BP and was, until the Avary v4.3 release only available in Petrel.  The ODiSI inversion workflow is available now for the first time outside of Petrel as part of Blueback Avary.  This allows us to extend the geophysical workflow leading into the inversion workflow to incorporate seismic data conditioning and colored inversion for you to understand dynamically how these processes impact your final inversion results.

Have a look here for more information on Blueback Avary, videos, customer case and webinar > 

Another milestone release relates to the launch of Cegal Prizm. Cegal Prizm is designed to be an easy-to-configure modular solution that allows you to piece together the appropriate technology to integrate data from different geo-applications and data sources into a single Python environment for advanced data analysis and data science.

One of the key things that data scientists struggle with is getting data in and out of Petrel (and other applications) in a format that can be easily consumed and understood by Python packages – be that data frames or Numpy arrays for plotting and analysis.  This is what we have targeted for Petrel initially -to get data in and out of the application in an efficient way such that the data scientists can work and collaborate with the geo-scientists easily and effectively.

What is the best thing about working in Cegal?

Personally, I’ve been afforded the opportunity to develop my career with both Blueback Reservoir and Cegal. It’s been a long time, 14.5 years across which I have progressed through reservoir modeling consultancy, technical sales, account management, and now portfolio management.

There are also my fantastic colleagues, with some of whom I have worked together for a long time who provide support and advice and of course the opportunity to pass through Norwegian duty-free occasionally 😉

Which app do you use the most, and why?

Probably Google Maps. Being a geoscientist, I like to keep orientated, and Premier League’s FPL.

What is your favorite quote?

Love the life you live, live the life you love!

Bob Marley

Is there anything else we should know about you?

I’m an avid collector of vinyl and have a large collection of LP 12's and 7’s records. I started when I was about 15 and haven’t really stopped.   My collection mostly focuses on soul, funk, blues, reggae, dub, hip-hop, disco, boogie, and electronica.  All the good stuff right?