Oil and gas exploration and production (E&P) companies, in striving to meet shareholder expectations, must replace existing assets by continually seeking new reserves or growing their existing reserve base. E&P companies must also optimize the performance of their existing assets. To reach these goals, E&P companies generally seek innovative technologies that can work with their existing infrastructure, increase productivity and the accuracy of decision-making, and maximize return by protecting their current technology investment. More specifically, E&P companies need solutions that:

• allow them to deploy best-in-breed technologies from multiple vendors - they need the flexibility to choose what works best for them
• help reduce dependence on single-vendor products and infrastructure
• support multiple operating systems
• reduce procurement complexity
• give access to tools, such as software development kits (SDKs), that help in development of customized solutions

Using these criteria, in the future it is unlikely that any vendor can be the sole provider of technology solutions for these companies. Rather, it is more likely that E&P customers will need to work with vendors who provide the best strategy or environment that addresses the above needs.

As a leading provider of upstream E&P solutions, Landmark endeavors to provide technology solutions that span the disciplines of exploration, production, drilling, reservoir management, and business decision analysis and data management. Landmark has adopted a strategy to meet these challenges faced by E&P companies, and it is based on four cornerstones: innovation, integration, total asset coverage and openness. Together, these cornerstones form a powerful foundation for all of Landmark's solutions for upstream oil and gas customers. Innovation
Landmark, a brand of Halliburton, has a long history of developing innovative software technologies that meet the challenges of the upstream oil and gas industry. Development of next-generation technology accounts for 80% of R&D spending today, and with research fellows working alongside the development teams, Landmark is ensuring that innovation will continue to meet future customer needs. To complement these software innovations, Landmark has developed a full range of consulting and services that help E&P companies optimize their technical, business and decision-making processes. Integration
Expertise in the oil and gas industry is shrinking. As a result, customers must do more with fewer people to partially address this gap; personal productivity must increase. Integration helps solve this problem. Now, older Landmark applications will integrate with newer ones to facilitate access to historical data, and proven workflows. And, Landmark applications will integrate with third-party applications, so customers can use any software they choose. The ability to integrate with third-party applications has even been built into the design process. This strategy of integration means various workflows can have access to the same data so asset teams can work more closely with each other and make better decisions using all available data. Landmark delivers this capability through an infrastructure that supports modularity, enhanced interoperability and extensibility.

Total asset coverage
Landmark provides products and services assisting it's customers throughout the entire upstream oil and gas workflow continuum, from finding oil and gas to determining the most productive and profitable way to get it. This solution provides a way to manage structured and unstructured data from Geological & Geophysical, Reservoir Management, Drilling and Completions, and Production domains. Should Landmark not provide the preferred solution for a particular workflow component, Landmark will collaborate with other industry leaders to fill the gaps and deliver the entire ecosystem to the customer. In some market segments, Landmark completes the ecosystem by collaborating with horizontal technology providers to bring new offerings to the oil and gas vertical and fill the "white spaces." Also, this allows Landmark to bring new technology components to market more rapidly. Open platforms
Landmark provides platforms that support customers' in-house applications, third-party applications and its own applications. This facilitates tighter integration of workflows and increased productivity. There has been much discussion in the oil and gas industry regarding just what constitutes an "open" application or company. Generally speaking, an open platform is one that lets data flow freely between all applications and all data systems (proprietary and non-proprietary). Anything that helps fulfill this flow is considered an enabler of openness. Landmark's strategy is to meet these criteria. Open applications are often characterized by the availability of software development kits (SDKs) that allow third- party development around the platform or application. Landmark has pioneered the use of SDKs in the industry and has used them as a lever to drive standardization across key platform and application offerings.

Conversely, applications or companies that are inflexible, do not provide SDKs or support multiple operating systems, or do not work well with third parties should not be considered open. The benefits of open systems to E&P companies are numerous. One benefit is the flexibility to integrate all applications, including third-party and customer-developed applications. This prevents companies from being locked into any particular proprietary system where they have little freedom to choose best-of-breed products for their particular project. Openness also does not force customers to lock their organization into a single-vendor solution; companies can create their own workflows rather than only using those predefined by vendors. Another benefit of openness is increased productivity. Platforms and standards that are not open make it more difficult to move data and information among applications or groups within a company. Often, time is wasted translating and reformatting data instead of being spent on finding and recovering oil and gas. Open systems address this issue and thereby increase productivity. Open systems will also allow better utilization of the ever-increasing amount of data available, especially real-time data. Through openness, teams can help drive better decisions at the rig site, at the production site or in the office because everyone sees and uses the same data. A third benefit for companies is the lower total cost of ownership. Cost savings from using open-platform systems can be realized through improved efficiencies, such as increased productivity and lower capital expenditures. Due to the flexible approach in which open products are developed, customers only need to purchase the applications they require to get their job done – open systems do not force companies to make large purchases of entire workflow solutions when only a small subset of that workflow is needed.

The DecisionSpace® Environment
DecisionSpace® is an open environment that enables the integration of workflows across disciplines to help customers optimize their assets while holistically addressing uncertainty. It helps address the customer needs cited above because it is the environment that delivers the capability to integrate applications and data across all workflows. And, due to its architecture, it allows the use of not only Landmark-developed applications, but also third-party and customer-developed ones. In the end, it delivers the customer's entire ecosystem. A major benefit of the DecisionSpace environment is the ability to leverage the DecisionSpace infrastructure for in-process communication, which delivers the ultimate integration: single-application performance across multiple components within the installation for all compliant Landmark and third party applications. Conclusion
Locating and developing new reserves of oil and gas is becoming more and more difficult, yet reserves replacement is paramount for E&P companies to ensure their competitiveness and shareholder satisfaction. Therefore, E&P professionals are seeking technologies that offer greater precision and tighter integration of the total asset across petrotechnical and economic workflows, which will provide enhanced decision-making to meet their primary goals. Creating and improving such tools is what Landmark has been doing for the past two decades. When it comes to helping customers optimize their asset value and maximize reserve replacement, Landmark and the DecisionSpace environment deliver deeper insight and broader understanding.