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* Software makes digital copies of assets like oil platforms
* Company sells software, rather than keeping in-house
* Aker, Lundin sharing real-time data from oil production
By Shadia Nasralla and Gwladys Fouche
STAVANGER, Norway, Sept 19 (Reuters) - When the owners ofNorwegian oil firm Aker BP decided to digitise itsassets and operations, they searched high and low for the rightsoftware company. But they failed to find a suitable one.
So instead they set up their own, Cognite https://www.cognite.com,to create digital maps of Aker BP's oil industry assets,integrating data from equipment such as pumps, heat and pressuresensors, maintenance records and even staff rotas to improveefficiency and safety.
Less than two years later, Cognite is selling its softwareto Aker BP's rivals and one competitor, Sweden's LundinPetroleum, has even agreed to share its real-timeoilfield data with Aker in what they say is an industry first.
"This will be the first time two different operators, or oilcompanies, will share operations/production data live from twoproducing fields, that is between Edvard Grieg and Ivar Aasen,"a Lundin Norway representative told Reuters.
By combining all the data that typically sits in differentdigital silos - such as matching flow sensors with the piece ofmachinery they actually sit on - Cognite says its software canhelp reduce maintenance costs, extend the lifespan of equipmentand avoid damaging breakdowns.
Digitising industrial assets can also mean fewer people needto be offshore, less downtime for oil platforms, more targetedmaintenance and better analysis of information such asgeological data and valve pressures.
For Lundin Petroleum, sharing information from its EdvardGrieg field on the Norwegian continental shelf with Aker BP'sadjacent Ivar Aasen field makes sense because getting morereal-time production data from a rival in a similar geologicalarea could help it improve its own oil output.
"Aker BP's view is that, unlike seismic data interpretationfor oil exploration, operational data is not a strategicknow-how to be protected," said its chief Karl Johnny Hersvik.
For Aker ASA, the biggest shareholder in Aker BP andCognite, the Lundin Petroleum deal is part of its plan to createsoftware for an industry that can be improved and refined themore it gets used by different clients - rather than justfocusing on an in-house model for Aker BP.
"The value that Cognite's technology brings to the Akercompanies will increase with the number of customers Cogniteserves," Aker Chief Executive Oeyvind Eriksen told Reuters.
Aker ASA, which together with Aker BP owns more than 75percent of Cognite, is even considering floating the company onthe stock exchange within two years.
Controlled by Norwegian billionaire Kjell Inge Roekke https://eng.akerasa.com/About-Aker/Board,Aker also has interests in oil, engineering and constructionservices as well as fishing.
'THAT'S RIDICULOUS'
John Markus Lervik, a software engineer who founded Cognite,said it has grown from just 2 people to about 110 in 18 months,has clients in oil and shipping and is only planning 12-monthsahead for now because "things are happening so quickly".
It might seem counterintuitive to share technologicalexpertise with rivals, but by learning from usage acrosscompanies and industries, software can be improved - even if nooilfield specific data is exchanged. Improvements can then berolled out to clients, including Aker BP.
"To provide the algorithm and the software to be able to mapor connect sensors to the right equipment, that's a bigchallenge all oil companies and also other companies have,"Lervik said.
"The more companies we work with to create advancedalgorithms to do this mapping, the more advanced, the moreautomatic, that mapping will be."
While Cognite is not alone in developing systems that canlink masses of data historically kept in different systems,Alfonso Velosa at tech advisory firm Gartner https://www.gartner.com/enreckons when it comes to oil and gas, Aker is out in front fornow.
"Those systems tended to be stuck in proprietary legacysystems and this is now an approach that is trying to marry(them) together," he said.
"This is a trend that's coming down and they're just aheadof the trend at the moment in the oil sector."
Other companies looking to bring thousands of data pointstogether in the oil sector include Eigen http://www.eigen.co, asoftware firm in the United Kingdom founded by oil and gasengineers.
Chief strategy officer Gareth Davies said a new generationof people entering the oil and gas industry is partly behind thedrive to come up with better digital systems.
"The guys who come in now who are in their 20s expect tohave the information," said Davies.
"It's like, well you have to go to that system, you have toask him to log in there and he'll export it here, and they lookat you like: What are you talking about? That's ridiculous."
In one of its recent projects, Eigen digitally linked up10,600 sensors on Italian oil company ENI's Goliat http://www.eninorge.com/en/Field-development/Goliat/Development-solution/The-platform---FPSOfloating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) unit, theworld's most northerly oilfield in production.
The system brings together gas and pressure detection toprevent accidents and fire detectors, sprinklers andextinguisher systems, evacuation plans, life boats and otherdata into one stream of integrated information.
"Up until now this would have been done through a monthlyreport," Davies said. "You don't want to know it every month,you want to know now."(Additional reporting by Nerijus Adomaitis; editing by DavidClarke)
