BKV Breaks Free from Siloed Systems with Cloudwick’s Amorphic Data Cloud for AWS

Across the oil and gas industry, companies struggle to gain insights from data spread across siloed systems and processes. For BKV Corporation (BKV), these challenges were all too familiar, but the energy company recognized that unlocking the full value of its data was necessary for future growth. After a large acquisition in 2020, BKV knew that it needed to unify its disparate data so that it could support its expanding business.

“We needed a single data platform that pulls in knowledge and data from all over into one place where we can gain insights, create dashboards, and build applications,” says Bryan Becker, vice president of IT at BKV. “I wanted to help our teams do things that modern cloud and data teams do and not be restricted by having data in different locations.”

Searching for a way to harness data insights and advanced cloud analytics on Amazon Web Services (AWS), BKV chose to migrate to Amorphic Data Platform for AWS (Amorphic), a self-service and fully-managed data platform from AWS Partner Cloudwick. This migration accelerated BKV’s digital transformation, unlocking improvements for agility, innovation, and predictive analytics across the organization. On Amorphic, BKV is positioning itself as the next generation of oil and gas.

Recognizing the Need for Digital Transformation

In 2020, BKV acquired over 4,000 producing wells in the Barnett Shale in North Texas, grew its team from 40 to 225 employees, and expanded the number of wells under its control by 17 times. To support this sudden growth, the company knew that it needed a centralized data platform for AWS. However, its small IT team and limited resources made a custom-built solution expensive and time consuming.

“BKV needed a trusted partner who could build a cloud-native data and analytics solution to support our operations and business analytics,” says Becker. “We needed not only an AWS Partner, but also a collaborator that understood the unique data challenges of the oil and gas industry.”

After exploring different vendors, BKV engaged Cloudwick in July 2020 and learned about its Amorphic offering. Amorphic serves as a unified data lake solution for organizations and connects to over 50 AWS services, such as Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, a serverless streaming data service that makes it simple to capture, process, and store data streams at virtually any scale. Using the capabilities built into Amorphic, BKV quickly realized that it could scale to support its disparate legacy systems and advance its artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities.

BKV selected Amorphic in August 2020, and began the migration process in January 2021. With Cloudwick’s support and funding from the AWS Migration and Acceleration Program (AWS MAP), BKV consolidated the data from its point applications and siloed data systems to Amorphic in only seven months—a speed that is unheard of in the energy industry, even among large enterprises with vast amounts of IT resources.

Unlocking a Single Source of Truth with Amorphic

Using Amorphic, BKV has gained complete visibility into over 4,000 oil and gas wells, from its younger wells in Pennsylvania to its older legacy wells located in the Barnett Shale. Now, the company has a single platform for all company data, and it can use Amorphic to access advanced AWS data services, thereby gaining tools to improve its analytics capabilities. Furthermore, BKV can develop innovative applications to unlock the full value of its data, gaining sophisticated insights to drive business transformation. “The ease with which BKV can accelerate its modernization on AWS is really a game changer for energy companies,” says Mark Schreiber, general manager of Cloudwick.

For example, BKV can build, train, and deploy ML models on Amazon SageMaker, a fully-managed ML service, to gain insights from its well data. These insights are displayed to BKV employees on custom dashboards connected to Amorphic, which are then used to inform business decisions and maintenance needs. As a result, the company can improve uptime and increase production revenue. Cloudwick also built a custom solution for BKV using Amazon Textract—an ML service that automatically extracts text, handwriting, and data from scanned documents—which reduces the human effort from hundreds of hours per month to several hours. The solution can accomplish these results by automating midstream statement analyses for hundreds of wells.

BKV has improved its agility and resilience using Cloudwick’s serverless solution and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a service that provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. During a Texas winter storm in February 2021, BKV would have lost power to its entire infrastructure and regional office if it were still on-premises, thus preventing it from delivering gas to metropolitan areas. But because Cloudwick had already supported BKV’s migration to the cloud, the energy company continued its business without worrying about managing system outages.

BKV no longer needs to procure hardware to scale, and it can onboard new use cases and acquisitions in minutes on AWS. “We literally don’t own a single server,” says Becker. “I don’t have to send someone to replace hardware in the middle of the night or wait for new storage or hardware to be delivered. Being cloud native is exciting, and I fully believe it is the way forward for the energy industry.”

Becoming the Next Generation of Oil and Gas on AWS

Equipped with advanced analytics capabilities and greater visibility into its data, BKV has improved its position for the future. The company can engage in smarter decision-making and strengthen its employees’ data and analytics skills on Amorphic. This will drive innovation in the energy industry for years to come. “We are using the capabilities of AWS and the imagination of our people to help us leap forward,” says Becker. “We understand the role of data in a modern energy company and are using AWS services to position BKV as a leading, data-driven energy company of the future.”