“Our MTC engagement helped us … overcome barriers and improve our product’s performance by 500 percent in some areas.”
Sathiya Namasivayam, Director of Development, P2 Energy Solutions
As P2 Energy Solutions began to redevelop one of its key products, the company faced a decision about which technology to use. The company visited a Microsoft®TechnologyCenter (MTC) and opted to use the Microsoft .NET Framework. After nearly two years of development, P2 Energy Solutions returned to the MTC and was able to improve product performance by up to 500 percent and strengthen its development standards for future projects.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published October 2007
Business Needs
In 2003, leading oil and gas technology providers merged to create P2 Energy Solutions. The company has continued to acquire and integrate world-class product lines to become a comprehensive source of exploration, development, production, and management solutions in the energy industry.
P2 Energy Solutions offers industry-leading land/lease management solutions for oil and gas companies. In early 2005, the company decided to update its system of integrated land-management applications—known as Tobin LandSuite—both to ease deployment by moving from a client/server architecture to a Web-based architecture and to increase performance in several areas. P2 Energy Solutions also sought to streamline customers’ use of the product by including advanced workflow processes and updating the user interface for greater appeal and increased productivity through fewer mouse clicks.
The company’s high-profile customers in the energy industry participated in an advisory boardto help shape the desired functionality and features of the upgraded product.
However, P2 Energy Solutions wasn’t sure whether to choose Java or Microsoft® .NET technology and the Composite UI Application Block (CAB) for product development. “We wanted a framework that would support fast development and the creation of a high-quality product,” says Sathiya Namasivayam, Director of Development for P2 Energy Solutions.
Solution
To help P2 Energy Solutions better evaluate its choices, Microsoft invited the company to attend an engagement at the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in Austin, Texas. During the three-week Architecture Design Session, which took place in June 2005, five P2 Energy Solutions employees worked with MTC architects to isolate product features and convert them to operate within the Microsoft .NET Framework. After careful consideration of the tools and technologies, the company chose to move forward with the.NET Framework and its suite of tools. “We were excited about the possibilities with .NET and saw that we’d be able to conduct rapid application development,” recalls Namasivayam.
P2 Energy Solutions called on Microsoft to provide ongoing support for Enterprise Land (ELAND), its new version of Tobin LandSuite. P2 Energy Solutions developers cooperated closely with Microsoft consultants and architects, using Microsoft Visual Studio® Team System and Foundation Server tools and technologies to plan, design, build, and monitor the application as it evolved.The company also used several technologies provided by Microsoft to craft a more scalable, extensible solution, including Microsoft ASP.NET, the Microsoft Enterprise Library, and the CAB, the foundational piece for the client implementation.
P2 Energy Solutions used many agile development practices such as well-defined short-term and long-term goals, judicious buy versus build decisions, sound programming techniques, effective project management, and an off-shore development team to complement its team in the United States and facilitate round-the-clock development.
After spending nearly two years in development, P2 Energy Solutions knew ELAND was an improvement over the older version.But the company wasn’t yet satisfied.
To stress-test its solution, P2 Energy Solutions again used the Microsoft Technology Center facilities to identify and resolve scalability and performance bottlenecks. Says Namasivayam, “After we conducted beta tests, some of our internal testing revealed dissatisfactory performance of the new system. We wanted to improve the speed for system load, unload, logon, and navigation.”
P2 Energy Solutions visited the Austin MTC in June 2007 for a two-week Proof-of-Concept engagement. MTC architects conducted a line-by-line evaluation of ELAND and provided feedback about how to tune it for optimal performance. The group used Visual Studio Team System and Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Test Load Agent to perform load and stress tests, capture performance statistics, and identify bottlenecks. “The P2 Energy Solution Smart Client was one of the largest Composite Applications based on the Composite UI Application Block (CAB) to date that we encountered at the MTC,” says Christian Thilmany from Microsoft. “By using the CAB framework, we were able to quickly make the necessary adjustments to hit our performance goals.”
The MTC architects also identified and resolved a few security issues and provided a communications channel to Microsoft development groups. “We received fast answers to issues as they arose, which meant that everyone’s time was focused on improving our product,” says Namasivayam.
P2 Energy Solutions made substantial progress at its MTC engagement and released ELAND according to schedule in September 2007. The final product integrates smart and thin clients, application and data servers, and business intelligence components based on technologies, standards, and tools that target the Web as the underlying infrastructure
Based on a service-oriented paradigm, ELAND embraces open standards such as XML and Web Service Definition Language (WSDL). The solution ties together distributed clients and data while retaining the advantages of the feature-rich Windows® client platform.
Benefits
P2 Energy Solutions came away from its MTC experiences with a better, more production-ready product, and it did so significantly more quickly than it could have on its own. The company also stands to make future gains by applying to upcoming development projects the key lessons learned during its MTC engagement.
Says Mark Eikermann, Senior Vice President of Development for P2 Energy Solutions, "Our product helps independent oil and gas companies better meet the increasing demands of managing land assets. A project of this magnitude would not have been possible without the participation of our customers. Their expert business process knowledge and design input, in combination with our technical and product expertise, have created a best-in-class product that
meets the needs of our customers both now and for many years to come."
Performance improvement of up to 500 percent. Thanks to the MTC, P2 Energy Solutions was able to meet its goals. “Our MTC engagement helped us address several performance bottlenecks that we identified during internal pre-release testing. We were able to overcome barriers and improve our product’s performance by 500 percent in some areas,” says Namasivayam. In addition, ELAND is highly scalable. “Because of the technologies we chose, our solution can quickly scale either up or down, catering to the needs of both very large and very small oil and gas companies.”
Faster time-to-market. P2 Energy Solutions made those product improvements three times more quickly than it otherwise could have done without help from the MTC. “We wouldn’t have been able to meet our release schedule without the time we spent at the MTC,” says Namasivayam. “At the very best, we would have met the schedule but compromised performance. The MTC made it possible to meet our customers’ timeline and quality expectations.”
Greater insight for better future development. Developers at P2 Energy Solutions produced a technically superior version of their existing product as a result of their experiences at the MTC. They now are set to do the same for future product releases.
“We gained a lot of insight into .NET technology at the MTC, and we’ve applied everything that we learned to our design and coding standards so that we can avoid issues next time and start with an even stronger basis for our technology understanding,” says Namasivayam. “We’re a Microsoft Solutions Provider and Preferred Partner, and we plan to continue to foster our strong relationship with Microsoft as the ELAND product suite matures to provide feature rich, cost-effective solutions to the energy industry.”
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published November 2007