TGS Launches Data Visualization Solution in Six Months by Working with INT on AWS

Energy data provider TGS launched data visualization capabilities for its data library in only six months by working alongside AWS Partner Interactive Network Technologies (INT). Since 1981, TGS has served the oil and gas industry by providing energy intelligence and data. As its library grew, TGS wanted to optimize searches, streamline its data delivery process, and implement data visualization features. In 2016, TGS began working with INT to adopt cloud solutions, including Amazon S3, Amazon Textract, and INT’s IVAAP. Since then, TGS has saved its customers an average of four to five hours in delivery wait time, implemented data visualization capabilities, and increased customer satisfaction and sales.

Energy data provider TGS wanted to optimize its data library by implementing data visualization capabilities to help users find the energy data they need to make decisions more efficiently. The company was also looking for a scalable, secure solution that would improve its overall data delivery process. In TGS’s first quarter of 2016, the company began to explore cloud solutions, and the search led it to Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner INT. TGS selected INT’s IVAAP solution, which is a scalable, cloud-ready HTML5 enterprise visualization framework. By working with INT, TGS has been able to adopt a combination of cloud solutions to enhance its data library, streamline its data delivery process, and increase its sales and customer satisfaction. 

As a global energy data and intelligence provider since 1981, TGS offers the oil and gas industry access to its global data libraries, which include seismic, magnetic, and gravity data and multibeam and coring data, as well as digital well logs and associated production data. TGS also offers specialized services, such as advanced processing and analytics alongside cloud-based data applications and solutions. Prior to TGS starting work on a data visualization solution for its data library, its customers were required to purchase and download the data to their own storage facilities. If customers subsequently wanted to visualize their purchased data, they had to find their own solutions independent of TGS. To accommodate its customers, TGS wanted to offer a data visualization tool that would help them find the data they need with greater ease. To develop such a tool on its existing system, however, TGS would have needed to invest in additional hardware to scale to its growing data library. “It was much more expensive to be scalable because we needed bigger machines at all times,” says Jim Burke, Software Development Manager at TGS. The company also wanted to reduce data delivery times so that customers could not only get the data they needed the first time but also access it quickly.

TGS decided to turn to INT for cloud visualization. “INT has an innovative solution for visualization, and that’s the reason we partnered with it,” says Sathiya Namasivayam, Vice President of Data and Analytics at TGS. Moreover, both companies share a mutual history of working on the cloud. “The fact that both INT and TGS work well on AWS made it easier to come up with a solution together,” says Paul Schatz, Vice President of Sales at INT. “We didn’t have to convince each other of the viability of the cloud."

In TGS’s first quarter of 2016, the company began storing its data on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. TGS built a data lake using Amazon S3 and has stored 28 million files from over four million different wells around the world on AWS. Since creating a data lake on AWS, TGS has found it simpler to optimize searches for customers. “We built search categories based on our metadata,” says Namasivayam. “It helps our clients search through our data before they buy our products.” TGS uses versioning in Amazon S3, which lets users preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object stored in their buckets. The company also switched its delivery method from FTP to cloud-based APIs. Using these APIs, TGS can quickly scale to meet the demand of its orders. Customers can download 100 files at a time from Amazon S3, which saves them an average of four to five hours in file delivery time compared to TGS’s previous file delivery method.

Using Amazon S3, TGS also can digitally deliver large files to its international customers. Previously, if a customer from overseas placed a large order, TGS would have to deliver the files by storing the data on hard drives and shipping them, meaning delivery to the Asia Pacific region could take a week. Now, TGS is able to deliver data to customers in the Asia-Pacific region within 24 hours. The company has also increased time savings for its staff by automating some of its internal processes for pulling data from PDF files using Amazon Textract, a machine learning service that automatically extracts text, handwriting, and data from scanned documents. These improvements have increased sales and customer satisfaction for TGS. “Our clients are really happy,” says Namasivayam. “They have never had such a short time frame for delivery. It’s a huge win-win.”

To create data visualizations, TGS worked with INT to implement INT’s IVAAP solution. “Using IVAAP, you can build dashboards and displays that let a user quickly see all the different types of data that might be relevant to a project,” says Schatz. Within six months of contacting INT, TGS was able to launch beta testing for its new solution. By adding visualization capabilities to its data library, TGS has enhanced the user experience on its customer portal, TGS R360. Now, customers are able to review details about a dataset before making a purchase or downloading it.

TGS plans to continue working on AWS, adding more data and data types to its data lake to meet the growing needs of the industry. “Since we have the infrastructure in place, we are trying to expand our data lake on AWS,” says Namasivayam. TGS also plans to develop and deploy more artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in the near future. Additionally, TGS is working with INT on additional visualization options and to standardize APIs for its customers across the oil and gas industry. Using standard APIs, customers can integrate their systems with TGS’ system to enhance searching and downloading performance. In taking these next steps, TGS plans to continue using AWS to meet its technology needs. “Using AWS changed our way of thinking,” says Charles Nguyen, Director of Software Development at TGS. “We’re more nimble and forward thinking, which has helped our technical innovation.”