Esri Petroleum & Amazon Web Services shows

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End news spot. Living near London is both a boon and a challenge. It's far from the current petroleum centre in Houston - though London is no slouch either with FindingPetroleum and PESGB activities - yet it is a hotbed of web tech like Google Campus in Shoreditch, London startups and unconferences  gallore.

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So early this month I flew over the Houston to the Esri Petroleum Conference that celebrated its 25th anniversary. I presented a paper that introduced class notes that are the feature of my landing page this month.

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Its program was as varied as it was deep. It covered all aspects of petroleum exploration, production and transportation. It featured the latest implementations by a host of operators, as well as the latest of Esri software itself. I was pleased to reacquaint myself wit the so-called PUG List session - where the industry basically puts its Enchantment Requests directly to Esri - if you missed the show and wish to get involved, there is an active online group called PUG Online you can participate in year-round and 'round the globe (PUG stands for Petroleum User Group). In fact is was the object of a LiknedIn Pulse posting on Professional Collaboration these images are from.

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Just last week I went to the London Excel Centre for a totally different kind of conference: it was Amazon Web Services' Enterprise Summit road trip's last stop in London. It talked about web services and delivery, interactive services that match  service providers with their user base, teenagers who developed a web platform five years ago with no upfront investment, web security and scalability - everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask, from an AWS perspective of course - I attended because I store significant datasets on a small AWS instance for tens of pounds a month, like 1/2M points that post faster on AWS Mapcentia stack than on desktop GIS!

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This was different in many ways - aside from the glorious London spring sunshine whilst it had rained in Houston - #AWSsummit was alight for example, my three tweets putting me in touch with a doz. people while my doz. #ESRIpug tweets lent me no follow-up. AWS Summit was by its very nature a lot broader view of things across industries like the Google shows I attended

Anything geo for ex. hardly features at all at this granularity, and that's a stark reminder of where we stand in the web IT industry @ large... think grains of sand & dune fields!

This is where we went one summer ten years ago