BKV Modernizes Its Data Systems with Cloudwick’s SaaS Data Cloud for AWS

BKV Corporation (BKV), a national natural gas exploration and production company, accelerated digital transformation and unified siloed data by migrating to the Amorphic Data Cloud on AWS (Amorphic), a solution provided by AWS Partner Cloudwick. Wanting to support its growth after a transformational acquisition and gain insights from its data, BKV needed access to advanced analytics tools and a centralized data cloud. By migrating to Amorphic, which natively enables over 65 AWS services in its architecture, BKV gained a data cloud to provide a single source of truth and advanced tools for cloud analytics. Now, BKV can use AWS services and artificial intelligence (AI) to automate complex processes.

In 2020, BKV acquired more than 4,000 oil- and gas-producing wells in the Barnett Shale in North Texas, making it the largest natural gas producer in the area. As a result of the acquisition, the energy company’s team grew from 40 to 225 employees, and the number of wells that it managed increased by a factor of 17. To support its expansion and future growth, BKV realized that it needed to unify the data from its siloed legacy data systems. “As an energy company that believes in making actionable change toward sustainability today, it was imperative that we had access to real-time data,” says Bryan Becker, Vice President of IT at BKV. “We needed a system that was scalable and provided built-in competencies so that our team could immediately make changes and capitalize on opportunities.”

After exploring multiple systems, BKV adopted a solution based on Amazon Web Services (AWS) from AWS Partner Cloudwick. With the support of Cloudwick, BKV migrated to Amorphic, a self-service and fully managed data cloud for AWS that makes it simple for IT, business, and data scientists to apply search, share, and analyze all their organizational data in a single location. With Cloudwick’s solution, BKV is able to apply artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) analytics to data to gain a competitive advantage in the energy industry, accelerating agility, productivity, and digital transformation.

Founded in 2010, Cloudwick is a data cloud company offering the Amorphic Data Cloud for AWS, a self-service and fully managed solution that helps organizations gain deeper insights from their data by making any data sharable, searchable, and analyzable by any user. Encompassing a built-in data catalog for search and sharing, enterprise-grade governance and security, and machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for advanced analytics, Amorphic is a production ready, self-service data cloud for all data and all workloads, natively integrating over 65 services on AWS with “single pane of glass” simplicity for better data-driven decisions across any industry.

Cloudwick’s Amorphic removes data and analytics cloud complexity for IT and data teams across AWS services. Using Cloudwick’s solution, companies can migrate all their data to AWS and modernize their legacy analytics using database, data warehousing, business intelligence, ML, and AI service capabilities regardless of available IT skills. “Using Amorphic, you don’t have to build, operate, manage, or complete any integrations or performance tuning,” says Mark Schreiber, General Manager at Cloudwick. “You get a self-service and fully managed data cloud on AWS that is production ready with zero IT development or support required.” Data users can access and use over 65 AWS data and analytics services on Amorphic—such as Amazon Redshift, which uses SQL to analyze structured and semi-structured data across data warehouses, operational databases, and data lakes, and Amazon SageMaker, which lets data engineers, data analysts, and developers build, train, and deploy ML models for virtually any use case. Amorphic facilitates self-service access to AWS services so that users can use their data with the right solutions.

With a small IT team and a desire to unify the data from legacy data systems, BKV engaged Cloudwick in July 2020 and found the AWS-powered solution to be efficient, effective, and simple to complete versus building its own solution. “One of the biggest advantages of Amorphic was that it was built on AWS, which provides access to a vast network of AWS Partners, ML and AI capabilities, as well as all of the new features that were being released,” says Becker.

In August 2020, BKV participated in a data strategy workshop with the Cloudwick team. After identifying its goals, Cloudwick and BKV initiated the migration and modernization process in January 2021. To support the project, BKV received funding from the AWS Migration and Acceleration Program (AWS MAP), which helps accelerate cloud migration and modernization journeys with an outcome-driven methodology. “The investment from AWS MAP leveled our migration to the cloud,” says Becker. “We felt valued and like AWS cared about where we wanted to go as a company.”

BKV saw immediate benefits after implementing the solution; in fact, several use cases were ready for production within 1 month after deploying Amorphic into BKV’s AWS account. “In just 7 months, Cloudwick had completely migrated and modernized our data infrastructure into Amorphic on AWS,” says Becker. “On Amorphic, our IT and data teams are able to act on our data faster, with more simplicity and with better insights, driving better business visibility and performance.” BKV found that migrating to Amorphic was 1,600 percent faster than if it developed its own custom-built solution and that it was $5.9 million cheaper over a 3-year period.

Amorphic connects BKV to tools that support the ingestion, transformation, and analysis of data from multiple sources, including enterprise resource planning, production accounting, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. For example, BKV streams data from supervisory control and data acquisition systems in near real time using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, a serverless streaming data service that makes it simple to capture, process, and store data streams at virtually any scale. ML models on SageMaker are applied to cleansed and standardized data and used to generate insights, which are then fed into custom third-party dashboards connected to Amorphic. With this visibility, BKV can perform immediate analysis on its field data as soon as it is available, produce insights, and make decisions to streamline its operations.

BKV is also automating and streamlining complex processes, unlocking significant value across its organization. One of its first use cases involved Amazon Textract, an ML service that automatically extracts text, handwriting, and data from scanned documents. BKV has more than 4,000 wells; it must collect monthly midstream reports for each well and then calculate and pay royalties to each lessee for the gas produced. This can be a complex and time-consuming process. One unit of production might yield royalties that need to be paid to dozens of working interest participants. Using extract, BKV and Cloudwick built an AI-powered solution that automatically pulls information from midstream contracts and writes the royalties to an accounting production system, alleviating the manual processing burden for its production accounting teams. “By using Amazon Textract for our production accounting, we have more accurate results because the calculations are performed by computer vision rather than a human,” says Becker. “We saw an immediate return on investment by using AWS and the capabilities built into Amorphic.” With its solution built on Amazon Textract, BKV calculates royalties in a matter of hours rather than the hundreds of hours per month it had needed for manual data transcription.

Now positioned for future growth, BKV can apply predictive analytics to over 4,000 oil and gas wells across the United States, improving uptime and production revenue. Because BKV can see data as soon as it is available, it can act on new acquisitions immediately, further increasing its agility. Migrating to Amorphic has facilitated digital transformation across BKV’s organization, empowering employees to focus on innovative solutions. “We want to use the capabilities of AWS and the imagination of our people to help us leap forward and become the energy company of the future,” says Becker.

With the support of Cloudwick, BKV has achieved single-vendor simplicity, streamlining data system management. On Amorphic, BKV can access, use, and have the support of a modern data architecture solution, which reduces the friction of troubleshooting and managing multiple vendors. “On Amorphic, we have all the data tied together in a normalized structure with high-quality governance,” says Becker. “Now, we can fully take advantage of the data we have and use it to our benefit across our organization.” BKV uses AWS Glue, a serverless data integration service that makes it easy to discover, prepare, and combine data for analytics, ML, and application development.

By using Cloudwick’s cloud native Amorphic solution, BKV has achieved an entirely serverless infrastructure and no longer needs to provision or manage servers, reducing manual tasks for its IT team. The company can scale to support new use cases and acquisitions without needing to procure hardware or invest in on-premises infrastructure. “I don’t have to wait for new servers or new storage to be delivered in order to scale,” says Becker. “I can make a couple clicks within Amorphic and rapidly provision computing assets on AWS.” Instead of managing infrastructure or responding to outages, BKV can focus on developing new applications to work with the business’s data, such as ML models on Amazon SageMaker and forecast dashboards. Cloudwick is continuing to add new AWS-powered tools to Amorphic, which BKV can use to advance its data analytics capabilities.

On Amorphic, BKV has the tools and capabilities necessary to perform advanced analytics and unlock the full power of its data. The company is continuing to work with Cloudwick to advance its capabilities. “We are supporting BKV in skills empowerment for its business users,” says Schreiber. “We are helping employees understand the types of datasets that they need to create so that they can make better decisions and improve visibility on production systems.”

In 2022, BKV plans to develop new applications, use cases, analytics, and assets on Amorphic. For example, it plans to connect data from its geographic information systems to Amorphic and develop a mobile application that summarizes data from legacy applications. “At BKV, we want our teams to use the latest and greatest technology but also be able to support our older applications,” says Becker. “On Amorphic, we make sure that our teams have all the tools that they need to gain the most value out of our data.”