06 May 2011
GuildOne chief technologist Barry Kreiser talks about the development of Synergy and what is new in the soon-to-be-released Synergy 4.
At GuildOne, we've always said, "Wrap and embrace rather than rip and replace." This comes from what we set out to do with Synergy over a decade ago, which was to let companies get the most from their own data.
The first goal of Synergy v.1 was to actually get data to the people. I know it sounds like an elementary goal that you would take for granted, but people don't have the data they should. We provided a single user interface that anyone could go through to get various information from different company silos, like in the finance department, land department, production department, etc. What we were able to do with the silos of information was go in, wrap around them, and provide a corporate database rather than an individual silo.
Synergy was, and still is, a single doorway into corporate data. Various stakeholders from the different departments own the data, but don't mind sharing it. They welcome the ability to compare, correlate, and offer it up to get more use out of it. By facilitating the sharing of information, Synergy started to bridge individuals within the company, too.
We pride ourselves on this. In the spirit of co-operation, GuildOne always tries to work closely with the client, listen to what they need, and look at where there are efficiencies to be gained by building new technologies. Our development process has always been to not look too far ahead and do what the client needs today. Evolve things with the client. If you get too far ahead of the client, you’re just throwing things out there that maybe they like, or maybe they don’t.
One of the requests our clients keep making is, “We love Synergy for the speed in building these solutions, but we need a web interface. We want to go web with this.” We’ve answered that with a web layer in Synergy 4.
It’s a great tool based on GWT, a standard in the web toolkit space. There is a standard REST API for calling Synergy. If you want to call the Synergy back-end from another product such as a dot-net application, you can use the REST API and have Synergy do the heavy lifting by joining all the information and returning you a formatted report.
We have always seen the strength of Synergy as the virtual data warehouse; joining information by rapidly grabbing, wrapping, and embracing existing processes and data. The user needs flexibility in how it is presented. Maybe it’s through a third-party software application or through a rich desktop, which we have.
Now, having a web interface in Synergy is yet another view into your corporate data. There is an application builder that takes existing sequences that you built in Synergy 3 and let’s you put those into a tailored user interface.
"The time is right now for Synergy 4.
It is the answer for what clients have been telling us."
One of the big benefits of Synergy since version 3.1 is that it is a bit of a different software solution because it is a framework for building things. It’s not a classic send-some-specs-out-to-a-programming-shop-go-through-a-huge-programming-cycle-and-get-back-a-static-solution. When you add another column to the database, you have to go back to the programming group and reprogram.
Rather, Synergy is very dynamic. It’s a modeling environment where you can go in and adapt the solution as your company grows and changes. You go into the sequence, change it, and – BOOM – it’s live.
Synergy grows with your organization. It adapts to the changes. The biggest constant in the oil and gas IT space is that of change. Things evolve. Things improve.
Synergy 4 is a very important milestone in GuildOne’s history. It is a culmination of years of development and years of vision. And we are very excited about sharing that with existing and new clients.
Synergy isn’t just a software package. It’s a philosophy of doing business.
