ConocoPhillips Announces First Oil Production from the Eldfisk II Project

From ConocoPhillips:

ConocoPhillips Announces First Oil Production from the Eldfisk II Project

January 5, 2015

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HOUSTON – ConocoPhillips (NYSE: COP) today announced first oil production from the Eldfisk II project in the Norwegian North Sea.

"Eldfisk II joins Ekofisk South as the second major project startup in Norway since late 2013," said Matt Fox, executive vice president, Exploration and Production.  "These projects will increase ultimate resource recovery and extend the field life of this premier legacy asset for years to come."

Eldfisk II, along with Ekofisk South and other projects offshore Norway, will add approximately 60,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day to the company's production volumes by 2017.

The Eldfisk II project includes plans to drill 40 new production and water injection wells. One of four pre-drilled wells is currently online, with the remaining three anticipated to come on stream this month.  Production from the field will ramp up over the next three years as additional wells are brought online.

The Greater Ekofisk Area, located approximately 200 miles (300 km) offshore Stavanger, is comprised of four producing fields: Ekofisk, Eldfisk, Embla and Tor. Crude oil from Greater Ekofisk's producing fields is exported via pipeline to Teesside, England, and natural gas flows via pipeline to Emden, Germany.

ConocoPhillips (35.1%) operates the Greater Ekofisk Area. The other Ekofisk co-venturers are Total (39.9%), Eni (12.4%), Statoil (7.6%) and Petoro (5.0%).

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About ConocoPhillips

ConocoPhillips is the world's largest independent E&P company based on production and proved reserves. Headquartered in Houston, Texas, ConocoPhillips had operations and activities in 27 countries, $55 billion in annualized revenue, $119 billion of total assets, and approximately 19,000 employees as of Sept. 30, 2014. Production from continuing operations, excluding Libya, averaged 1,520 MBOED for the nine months ended Sept. 30, 2014, and proved reserves were 8.9 billion BOE as of Dec. 31, 2013. For more information, go to www.conocophillips.com.

Political Conventions Can Learn From Reality Shows - Media Equation Joe

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Monday, August 27, 2012

Political Conventions Can Learn From Reality Shows - Media Equation

By DAVID CARR

If the political conventions were managed like a typical television show that was losing audience, think of the meetings that would be held during the run-up.

TV Boss: “The cast is uninspired, the plots are unbearably boring and if I see one more man-on-the-street interview with someone covered in buttons wearing a funny hat, I’m going to snap.”

The tribal rituals of conventions — “Mr. Chairman, the people of the great state of Iowa, home of the finest hybrid seed corn ... ” — have their charms, but don’t seem relevant given that we’ve already been immersed like so many tea bags in a permanent presidential campaign through dozens of debates and thousands of dispatches on the Web and on cable television.

Both parties know they have a problem on their hands — they are making a television show that networks are reluctant to broadcast and viewers are reluctant to watch — and they have responded in different ways. The Democrats have gone leaner, cutting the number of days from four to three, and for a second consecutive cycle are leaving the convention hall for the final day by moving the president’s speech to a stadium.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are shining up the programming side of the equation for an event that was scheduled to start on Monday, but has been pruned by a day by Mother Nature and Tropical Storm Isaac. The G.O.P. has built a richly appointed $2.5 million stage and hired a former news producer from NBC to make sure things proceed in a television-friendly fashion.

But everyone knows that what is under way is not a news event so much as reality television. The conventions feature all the preening of the Westminster Dog Show, but none of the drama or actual competition. No matter how shiny the production, it will not satisfy a growing public need for verisimilitude and authenticity.

“A big part of the pleasure of reality TV, the bulk of television programming these days, is in the teasing out of what is real and what is not,” said Susan Murray, a professor of media, culture and communications at New York University. “Live political debates can give us these real moments, but the conventions do not. They’re so tightly scripted and rehearsed that there is little room for that kind of pleasure for a viewer.”

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.

For Europe’s Economy, a Lost Decade Looms

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Friday, August 17, 2012

For Europe’s Economy, a Lost Decade Looms

By JACK EWING

FRANKFURT — The euro zone is hurtling back into recession, economists declared after official figures this week portrayed a shrinking economy. But by some measures the downturn has been under way for years.

With the exception of Germany, none of Europe’s biggest economies have returned to the level of economic output they had at the beginning of 2008, before the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States spread across the Atlantic, according to calculations by two U.S. economists, Peter Rupert and Thomas F. Cooley.

The figures suggest that Europe is already well into what could become a lost decade — a period of pernicious stagnation and wasted potential that could have lasting effects on ordinary citizens.

Economic growth not realized represents investments in education that were never made, research that was never financed, businesses that failed and careers that ended too early or never got off the ground.

“There are larger implications that people don’t think about,” said Mr. Rupert, a professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “There is a huge decline in human capital.”

Just what marks the beginning and end of a recession is not always easy to define. One common definition is two consecutive quarters of falling output. By that standard, the euro zone is technically not yet in a recession.

Most economists agree, though, that a recession is also defined by other indicators like unemployment, industrial production and investment. The closest thing Europe has to an arbiter on the question is a committee of prominent economists convened by the Center for Economic Policy Research, a research organization in London.

By the committee’s reckoning, the euro zone’s last recession ended after the second quarter of 2009, the point at which the region hit bottom and began to grow again. The economists’ panel, known as the Euro Area Business Cycle Dating Committee, has not yet begun to consider whether the euro zone is in recession again. But few people would argue that Europe, stricken by a self-inflicted debt crisis that began in 2010, has basked in prosperity recently.

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.

Legend 3D Selects EMC, Enabling Scale to 10X to Build Transformers, Smurfs, Hugo and Spiderman

EMC Press Release

Legend 3D Selects EMC, Enabling Scale to 10X to Build Transformers, Smurfs, Hugo and Spiderman

Performance, Scalability of EMC Isilon Scale-Out Storage Supports Big Data Growth for Leader in 3D Conversion and Visual Effects

SIGGRAPH 2012, LOS ANGELES, Calif. - August 7, 2012

EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) today announced that Legend3D, the largest provider of 2D-to-3D media content conversions, has standardized on EMC® Isilon® scale-out storage for all of its visual entertainment assets. Leveraging Isilon's ability to store vast amounts of high-resolution digital media, Legend3D has streamlined its management of Big Data through greatly improved production management, increased artist productivity and the creation of new production pipelines for major motion pictures such as Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Smurfs, Hugo, and The Amazing Spiderman.

Customer Benefits:

• Improved Scalability—After deployment in July 2010, Isilon was instrumental in Legend3D's growth from 50 to over 400 artists in less than a year. Due to its flawless performance and scalability for Big Data, it helped the company to accelerate its move into the 2D-to-3D media conversion business.
• Increased Performance—Today, up to 500 Legend3D digital artists can work concurrently with large image files stored on Isilon.
• Enhanced Agility—Legend3D changed its digital media work flow and increased artist productivity by over 50% due in part to better performance and scalability with Isilon, giving the studio increased capacity and eliminating delays.
• Simplified Management—Isilon's reliability and minimal management requirements allowed Legend3D to reduce storage administration from three full-time equivalents (FTEs) to one-quarter FTE.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

With major 2D-3D film conversion projects generating as much as 100 terabytes of data weekly, Legend3D's previous storage environment proved inadequate. IT staff were charged with clearing out unused data, which always carries the risk of inadvertently deleting important files. Furthermore, as a result of Legend3D's own aggressive R&D program, huge production efficiencies were created that required ever-greater throughput. As a result, storage and access to data rapidly became a rate limiting step and downloads to the artist's desktop computers over the network were sometimes too slow, impeding the artist's accelerated productivity. Legend3D needed to control the pace at which it scaled to ensure that its storage platform adapted to its existing and future high volume workflows.

Legend3D chose EMC Isilon scale-out storage so it could better handle the exploding data centric 3D conversion market. After considering other NAS solutions, Legend3D's selection of Isilon was based on the platform's ability to scale beyond 500 artists and manage a 100-node render farm. The company deployed Isilon X-Series systems for its production digital assets and Isilon NL-Series systems for nearline storage of less frequently accessed data.

Today the Isilon infrastructure supports Legend 3D's regular production space of 600 terabytes of digital images and video, VMware virtual machines, intranet servers and their robust production asset management system. To boost performance in data synchronization between different environments, the company also relies on Isilon IQ Accelerator nodes. With Isilon, Legend3D has improved storage scalability and performance, enabling dramatic business growth and innovation.

Customer Quote:

Anthony Lopez, Director of IT, Legend3D

"By selectively compressing files and moving them to the Isilon archive, we can save up to 80% of our production space for certain projects and still regenerate all the necessary data our artists need. In the future, we're looking at moving our digital assets into the cloud and using SmartPools to optimize our capacity and further improve our efficiency."

"Isilon's excellent performance and scalability helped our studio grow smoothly from 50 artists to over 400 in less than a year. Today we can support upwards of 500 artists who can concurrently accessing the system without any issues or slowdowns. Isilon has given us peace of mind."

"Our previous storage had limited performance and capacity, hindering our growth and impeding our ability to handle our ever increasing volume of production work. Isilon immediately provided us with infinite scalability along with rapid access times and the ability to better manage our digital assets."

"The ease of managing Isilon allows us to focus more on innovation instead of constantly thinking about storage. We trained our tech staff to set up Isilon in a couple of hours and we reduced our overall storage admin requirements from three FTEs to one-quarter FTE today."

Additional Resources:

• Learn more about EMC Isilon
• Connect with EMC via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and ECN

About EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset — information — in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.

Compuware and Rosetta Announce Partnership to Help Customers Ensure e-Commerce Readiness

Compuware and Rosetta Announce Partnership to Help Customers Ensure e-Commerce Readiness

DETROIT and CLEVELAND, March 29, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Compuware Corporation (Nasdaq:CPWR), the technology performance company, and Rosetta, an independent brand within the Publicis Groupe of global agencies and a member of the Compuware Partner Network, today announced a strategic partnership designed to help customers ensure that their e-commerce sites are production-ready and perform well in production.

To complement Rosetta's unmatched technology depth in e-commerce, mobile platforms and systems integration, the company will incorporate Compuware Application Performance Management (APM) solutions into its product offering. This will allow Rosetta to extend the value it delivers by offering end user performance and application monitoring.

"This partnership benefits our customers in the form of peace of mind. Our customers can be confident that Rosetta will be keeping a close eye on the performance and availability of their enterprise e-commerce applications," said Arnold Huffman, Partner, Business Development, Rosetta. "We believe that our partnership with Compuware represents a significant strategic growth opportunity by expanding and supporting our customers' Multi-Channel enterprise solutions.

Compuware APM solutions will enable Rosetta's customers to benefit from deploying Rosetta enterprise e-commerce applications that are highly available and perform well. The monitoring, analysis, reporting and alerting that Compuware APM solutions provide integrate with and complement Rosetta's enterprise class e-commerce applications.

"Rosetta and Compuware are partnering to help customers improve the performance of e-commerce projects, which today is key to revenue growth, brand and customer satisfaction," said Kimberly King, Vice President of Channels and Alliances, Compuware Corporation. "We look forward to working closely with Rosetta to bring this capability to market and deliver complete e-commerce solutions to customers."

The Compuware Gomez APM platform is the industry's leading solution for optimizing the performance of Web, non-Web, mobile, streaming and cloud applications. Driven by end-user experience, Gomez provides a unified view across the entire application delivery chain, from a user's browser or mobile device, across the Internet or a corporate WAN, in the cloud, to inside the data center, eliminating blind spots from the First Mile to the Last Mile.

The Compuware Partner Network (CPN) is an award-winning, global program for select VARS, consultants, service providers, system integrators and strategic technology alliances. This program enables Compuware customers to have access to the world's most innovative and comprehensive technology performance solutions from their preferred partner. CPN members benefit from specialized marketing, sales and support programs, industry leading technology and dedicated account management all designed to help each partner succeed. Please visit www.compuware.com/partnersto learn more.

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About Rosetta

Recognized nationally as a leader in the e-commerce space, Rosetta was the first agency in the world to become Smarter Commerce certified. A premier strategic partner of IBM, it has the largest WebSphere Commerce implementation team in the country and more than 100 successful implementations during its partnership with IBM.

Rosetta is a consulting-centered interactive agency engineered to transform marketing for the connected world. Rosetta drives material business impact by translating deep consumer insights into personally relevant brand experiences across touch points and over time. Their differentiated capabilities and structure have enabled them to become one of the market leaders, operating as an independent brand platform in the Publicis Groupe of global agencies. Rosetta is ranked by Ad Age among the top U.S. digital agencies and was named the #1 Agency to Watch in Ad Age's 2011 Agency A-List.

Rosetta has deep industry expertise in Healthcare, Consumer Technology & Entertainment, Consumer Products & Retail, Financial Services and Business-to-Business (B2B). The combination of a patented approach to market segmentation; technological depth across platforms and devices; world class creative, design and user experience capability; scale and integrated structure; and deep vertical industry expertise have attracted many of the nation's leading brands to Rosetta. The agency's clients include Allergan, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Bristol Myers Squibb, Johnson & Johnson and Novartis in Healthcare; Microsoft, Rogers Communications and T-Mobile in Consumer Technology & Entertainment; Coach, Express, Jos. A. Bank, OfficeMax, Valvoline and United States Mint in the Consumer Products & Retail sector; Citizens and Nationwide in Financial Services; and MSC Direct, Wirtz Beverage Group and Lincoln Electric in B2B. Rosetta is headquartered in Princeton, NJ, with additional offices in New York, Cleveland, Chicago, Toronto, San Jose, San Luis Obispo, Los Angeles and Orange County.

Compuware Corporation

Compuware Corporation, the technology performance company, provides software, experts and best practices to ensure technology works well and delivers value. Compuware solutions make the world's most important technologies perform at their best for leading organizations worldwide, including 46 of the top 50 Fortune 500 companies and 12 of the top 20 most visited U.S. web sites. Learn more at: http://www.compuware.com.

News Release from Oracle - Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2

Oracle Announces Production Release of Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 for Oracle Linux

Fastest Linux Kernel for Transaction Processing Now Generally Available

Redwood Shores, Calif. – March 13, 2012

News Facts

Oracle today announced the general availability of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 for Oracle Linux.

Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 includes performance and scalability enhancements that allowed Oracle to achieve record database benchmark results(1,2).

Based on the 3.0.16 mainline kernel, Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 also includes improved memory and resource management, and is optimized to be deployed as a virtual guest.

The Btrfs file system is now production-ready with this release. Standard in Oracle Linux, Btrfs supports data stores of up to 16 exabyte, is optimized for solid state disks, is easy to administer, and includes built-in data integrity.

In addition, Oracle is offering technology previews of the very popular dynamic tracing mechanism, DTrace, and a powerful instance isolation capability, Linux Containers, to Oracle Linux support subscribers.

Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 is included with Oracle Linux 5 and 6.

To learn more, join the Oracle Linux Online Forum, March 27th.

Record-Setting Linux Performance Plus the Most Modern Feature Set

Highlights of Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 (R2) include:

Performance Improvements: to the scheduler, memory management, file system layer and networking stack, all lend to performance advantages on any size system.

Performance Benchmarks: Oracle Linux with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel R2 has recently delivered two record breaking TPC-C benchmark results, on a small and a largesystem (1,2).

Btrfs: the “next generation file system” for Linux. With btrfs included, Oracle Linux can support large files and file systems, snapshots and checksums for data and meta-data, provides integrated RAID and volume management, and simplifies administration.

Transparent Hugepages: automatically organizes memory in larger units to reduce memory management overhead and improve stability for memory-intensive workloads.

Optimized for deployment as a virtual guest: the same Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel R2 kernel image, with full support for the Xen hypervisor included, can be used to run both in hardware virtualized and paravirtualized modes.

Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel R2 also includes the following technology previews:

Built-in virtualization: Linux Containers allow multiple isolated Linux instances (containers) to run on the same host. Processes running in containers can have their own private view of the operating system, file system structure and network interfaces, and their use of server resources can be tightly controlled.

DTrace: provides a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework that is designed to quickly identify the root cause of system performance problems without rebooting the kernel and recompiling—or even restarting—applications.

Running Oracle Linux with Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel R2 fully maintains existing userspace application compatibility and certification without any modification.

Oracle Linux with Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel is extensively tested with the most demanding workloads, both on third-party servers and Oracle’s, including Engineered Systems such as Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine and Oracle Big Data Appliance – to help ensure superior performance and reliability.

With Oracle Linux Premier Support, customers can implement zero downtime kernel updates for Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel R2 with Ksplice technology.

Oracle Linux is open source with a public git source code repository and compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Supporting Quote

“Oracle Linux continues to deliver timely Linux innovations, backed by real-world testing, providing users a modern, scalable and reliable platform for their business critical workload demands,” said Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president of Linux and Virtualization Engineering, Oracle. “Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 further demonstrates Oracle’s investment in Linux technology and the community, and delivers on our goal to make Linux better for everyone.”

Supporting Resources

Oracle and Linux

Oracle Linux Customers

Wim Coekaerts Blog

Oracle Linux Online Forum, March 27th

New Innovations in Oracle Linux Webcast

Visit Oracle Linux on Blog, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube

Obama Responsible for Greater Oil & Gas Production?

U.S. Chamber’s Energy Institute Comments on President Obama’s Energy Speech

February 23, 2012

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Karen Harbert, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber’s Institute for 21st Century Energy, issued the following statement in response to President Obama’s remarks on energy delivered at the University of Miami today:

 

“As the President said, there is no silver bullet that will decrease gas prices and improve our energy security. However, there are a series of significant steps that this President could take that would lead us to a more secure energy and economic future, but this Administration has rejected that path.

 

“Today’s speech contained two fundamental mischaracterizations. The first is the notion that raising taxes on oil companies is going to lower gas prices. It won’t, and we know it won’t because it has been tried before. The result was higher prices and more imports. 

 

“The second is that this Administration is somehow responsible for the uptick we’ve seen recently in domestic production. It’s not. Because of the restrictions this Administration has placed on accessing public land, as well as the ever-increasing amount of red tape, the energy industry has moved to produce oil and gas on private lands. Also, credit is due to policy decisions made years ago in previous Administrations. The fact that the Administration would repeatedly try to take credit for this shows a troubling lack of understanding of energy production in this country. 

 

“The results of the President’s ‘just say no’ energy policy will be felt in the years to come. The facts speak for themselves. President Obama’s administration has issued 50.7 percent fewer annual leases on public lands than President Clinton’s did. Gulf of Mexico energy production is down 16 percent since 2009 and is projected to decrease even further in 2012. President Obama denied the Keystone XL pipeline permit, which would have created thousands of jobs and provided all Americans with a steady supply of oil from a friendly ally. He also has banned new offshore areas from oil and gas exploration, and recently his Administration took one million acres of onshore land rich with oil shale off the table.

 

“The American people can see that the current approach is not working. But we cannot have a constructive conversation about energy policy as long as this Administration fails to put forward any new ideas, relying instead on four year old campaign rhetoric. It isn’t enough just to be for an ‘all of the above’ energy policy in a speech. It’s time to actually propose one.”

 

The mission of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Institute for 21st Century Energy is to unify policymakers, regulators, business leaders, and the American public behind a common sense energy strategy to help keep America secure, prosperous, and clean. Through policy development, education, and advocacy, the Institute is building support for meaningful action at the local, state, national, and international levels.

 

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the world’s largest business federation representing the interests of more than 3 million businesses of all sizes, sectors, and regions, as well as state and local chambers and industry associations.