More on seismic imaging and recent trade shows

First of all, my apologies for the long interval between blog posts. Q4 has been a very busy time for us – we attended two key trade shows, completed several new product releases and have been cleaning up year-end consulting projects.

In my last blog post I tried to relay the excitement we have over our seismic imaging product road map. We now know that we are not alone in this impression. We saw this first hand at SEG 2012 as interested attendees piled into our booth to hear the technical presentations featuring our current and future products (reverse time migration, elastic forward modeling, and full waveform inversion). This year’s SEG was the most successful ever for our company, the number of interested leads, meetings and general contact was the highest we have ever seen. Our recently announced agreement with DownUnder GeoSolutions was a deal that really came together during SEG. In addition to this and other direct leads, our partners Paradigm and Tsunami  also reported excellent traffic and interest. Not only did we see an uptick in software sales leads, but also in consulting leads. We had several meetings with existing clients that have already turned into new business. We also generated leads with new clients.  Overall, it was just another indication that the oil and gas sector is going to be extremely important for Acceleware going forward. We are hoping the EAGE (sort of a European SEG) show in London in June 2013 will continue this trend.

This quarter we also attended and exhibited at the SC12 a supercomputing conference held in Salt Lake City, which was equally successful with a steady stream of traffic interested in our consulting services and training. In addition to selling services, SC12 is about our partners. All of our partners including NVIDIA, Intel, Altera, AMD and Microsoft, had a large presence at SC12.  In particular it was interesting to note that both NVIDIA and Intel used Acceleware RTM benchmarks to promote their new hardware platforms. NVIDIA’s Kepler K10 and Intel’s Xeon Phi Coprocessor could see substantial demand within the oil and gas sector. We were fortunate enough to be invited to speak in a number of partner booths as well as deliver a technical tutorial as part of the conference program, providing great exposure for our products and services. Shows like SC12 allow us to participate in and even drive new HPC trends. Our customers, particularly those in oil and gas, have consistently been early adopters of new HPC technology. Our ability to help shape new hardware platform designs, and then quickly understand, adopt, and optimize for those platforms is highly valued by our customers.

On a sad note, Acceleware lost a treasured member of our family recently. Roberto Sebastien Palacio Jaramillo died in a tragic motor vehicle accident in October. Roberto will be remembered by everyone here as a gifted, tireless and creative software developer, but more importantly as a true friend, a real adventurer, and a wonderful person. Our thoughts go out to Roberto’s family in Colombia: his mother, Esther; father, Roberto; and brother, Mateo. Rest in peace, Roberto.