A major shift is taking place in the oil and gas industry. Whereas it was hard to avoid the impression that Oil and Gas companies only adopted new technologies as a last resort in the past—or only for very specific reasons, like using cameras for security. Today, companies both big and small are realizing the necessity of emergent technology to stay relevant and profitable in a quickly changing world. Specifically, Oil & Gas companies are trending toward automation and intelligent, interconnected systems to improve their businesses.
Osperity develops and provides cloud-based AI driven intelligent visual monitoring solutions for the oil and gas industry in North America. The company was founded in 2012 in Alberta, Canada, Osperity grew out of a renewed enthusiasm for the energy industry at the beginning of the past decade. At the time, however, most of that growth was still around the “old and proven” ways of doing things, Osperity saw an opportunity to innovate within a very traditional industry vertical and create a more cost-effective and convenient solution for their end users.
Today, Osperity helps industrial companies mitigate operational cost and risk through intelligent visual monitoring that analyzes massive volumes of visual data with artificial intelligence (computer vision) and input from other systems, and distributes personalized, actionable information to end users. In particular, the platform helps clients increase productivity through virtual asset inspections, improve health, safety and environmental (HSE) outcomes with safety monitoring and automated leak monitoring, and strengthen security through proactive activity detection and alerting.
Osperity’s intelligent visual platform
Osperity’s platform delivers instant awareness of situations at remote and distributed locations, either on-demand or in the case of an event. We transfer video and data from mostly remote geographical locations over efficient low bandwidth LTE Network. Thanks to analytics on the edge devices we are able to cut down on the data sent to the cloud. Analytics in the cloud filters out false positives and provides our clients with timely accurate information—at all times.
Osperity is putting a lot of effort into analyzing data collected by the clients’ system. This data enables us to predict trends and customer needs, it also allows us to make quick adjustments to services and tools on the Amazon web services (AWS) platform.
AWS has been critical for Osperity to make this work, cost effectiveness paired with a fast and reliable content delivery network ensures our clients across North America receive exceptional response times.
A major part of our platform is AWS AI/ML image analysis. Osperity works with machine learning models extensively; testing, tweaking, and evaluating. SageMaker has been an invaluable tool, both for new experimental services, as well as production-grade features.
The key benefit of being on the AWS platform is the flexibility and on-demand nature of their products: It gives us the ability to adjust infrastructure as required based our clients’ needs. Also, as we are continuously improving our product, so the ability to quickly scale and test solutions is a distinct advantage.
The bulk of the services we use are elastic hosting option, such as EC2, Lambda and RDS – services which allow us to change our deployment strategy on demand, making it a lot easier to manage end-to-end costs. We also utilize more specialized features and services such as IAM and Route53 which have been critical for us, cutting down development costs and getting new features deployed quickly.
Overcome challenges become successful
A definite challenge for Osperity has been to shift focus from the transformative aspects of the product and make clients to look past the obvious, conventional security applications. It has been difficulty to convince clients to take a leap of faith, trusting something that has not been tried before. We really needed to understand how the value of our product would fit in and improve their business processes, driving real ROI across the enterprise. Our first midstream enterprise client really gave us an opportunity to prove our product and value.
Osperity have had many successes, but a major win was acquiring our first enterprise client. Having a company several times larger than yours believe in your vision and understand the value proposition of your product, proves you’ve managed to build something great and sustainable.
What’s next for Osperity
Osperity is currently expanding into the US and had great early success. Our company has landed several large Oil and Gas clients, and the interest in our solution is overwhelming.
We also see a lot of synergies between Oil and Gas and Mining/Agriculture. In mining we’re working with a large industry partner to bring Intelligent Visual Monitoring to the global mining market via a platform they have developed. Through their system we can deliver our exception-based alerting and inspections to a multi-purpose mining platform.
In agriculture Osperity is currently in the early stages of working with a Canadian university to develop applications and use cases within the agriculture industry as potential part of their demonstration farm.