dGB Earth Sciences, the leading provider of open source seismic interpretation software to the oil & gas industry, has recorded its best financial year since its founding in 1995 with a 35% increase in turnover during 2011.

Much of this success is down to the landmark decision in September 2009 when dGB decided to adopt the open source GPL license for its OpendTect software and provide free access to a fully functional and highly professional seismic interpretation system to thousands of geoscientists and seismic interpreters worldwide.

Since September 2009, the OpendTect software has been downloaded more than 73,000 times with, under the GPL rules, users able to take the source code and improve and extend the system, with no restrictions regarding commercial usage. The OpendTect user base today covers the entire spectrum of geoscientists from academia and research organizations through to private consultants, multinational service companies, and E&P companies. There has also been increased usage of OpendTect in non-seismic applications, such as in the analysis of geo-radar and gravity & magnetics data.

“When we brought OpendTect under the GPL license, the question we were asked time and time again was: ‘Why give so much away for free?’” continues Paul de Groot, President and Co-Founder of dGB Earth Sciences. “Our answer has always been two-fold.”

“Firstly, as an R&D minded company that spun off from TNO, a non-profit R&D organization in The Netherlands, we had an idealistic motivation and had the goal of creating a truly open platform for seismic interpretation. By providing free usage and free access to source code, we wanted to stimulate research and shorten the gap between academic research and operational deployment.”

“The second reason, however, was commercial and was based on the ‘freemium’ (free and premium) business model where, by generating a broad customer base through high quality seismic interpretation software, you can also use this customer base to sell in commercial OpendTect plug-ins from dGB; accompanying maintenance & support, consultancy and training services; and the conducting of proprietary case study projects.”

“While skeptics said that such a model would not work in seismic interpretation as there were not enough potential users to create a big enough customer base, our 2011 figures show that our model has paid off.”

Today, dGB Earth Sciences offers a wide variety of commercial plug-ins relating to attribute and processing analysis, sequence stratigraphy, fluid migration, rock property predictions, and velocity modeling. 2011 also saw the launch of the HorizonCube plug-in with a significant increase in the number and density of mapped horizons resulting in improved low frequency model building, more accurate inversion results, and more geological information from seismic.

The emergence of OpendTect across the seismic interpretation community has also seen open source rapidly becoming an accepted and cost-effective alternative to closed source solutions. Commercial users are appreciating the business model behind open source products as well as the security for maintenance & support and the guarantees that the software evolves in a direction that meets their needs.

Furthermore, whereas commercial enterprises were previously only willing to sponsor software development projects for proprietary use, such companies are today realizing the value of collaboration and the early adoption of new technologies as key to creating value from seismic data.

“We are enormously proud of what we have achieved with OpendTect”, concludes Paul de Groot. “It’s a win-win solution for all sides and, most importantly of all, for the geosciences and seismic interpretation industry as a whole.”

Tags: dGB Earth Sciences