Brendan Sullivan - RigNet

Could you start off by telling me why RigNet have decided to get involved with Future Oil and Gas as a sponsor?

We really like the theme of digital disruption. Even though we’ve been in the oil and gas for a number of years, we’ve really been helping broaden our company and diversify it into helping all drillers and operators accelerate their digital transformation. That’s everything from specialised networks that we build, all the way through to cybersecurity and up through advanced AI packages to help get them to value faster. This conference which is really not only in Aberdeen where we have one of our largest facilities in the world, it brings together a lot of the North Sea operators and drillers to talk about a very topical conversation in a very small forum that’s somewhat intimate. You can really have a lot of good conversations about things that people are doing in the North Sea and worldwide so for us, that’s a great opportunity to be a sponsor of and participate in each year.

The key theme of the conference is digital transformation, driving changes within the upstream oil and gas sector, what sort of discussions have you picked up on, what do you think is impacting the industry at the moment?

As I was talking about yesterday on panels, we’re in the second year of a five-year journey. Everybody’s trying to find more margin on a 50-dollar barrel of crude oil and so its really interesting to see what was talked about as forward-thinking things and what was possible. We’re now seeing a year later some actual results that are single digit, maybe 1% change the non-productive time that’s brought around by machine learning and AI but is literally yielding billions of dollars of savings per company. It’s really exciting to come from last year, talking about the future and now were in the middle of this paradigm shift, we’re seeing some of the results but we still have years to go but there’s no doubt we’re on a path now to really transform the industry.

Looking ahead what are the plans for RigNet for the future? What can we expect to see?

At RigNet, we’ve been talking about this for a couple of years now, we will continue to drive our core business which is connecting all these oil and gas assets on a worldwide basis. However, we’re very committed to this path on top of that, of digital transformation accelerators. Everybody is going from this single rig connected to ship-to-shore connected to remote operating centres and eventually the fully connected predictive analytic real-time oilfield and so we’ve made large investments to help anybody that’s in that five-year journey get to the next step faster.

We’re on day two of the event, how are you finding it so far?

I really like this event, as I mentioned I like the feeling of it, the theme is very topical and you have both business people and the digital transformation side as well as a lot of technical people. We have a lot of conversations a day about culture and what kind of a culture shock that type of transformation always is. So, I find all the conversations pretty stimulating and that helps me constantly think strategically.