Enverus CEO Talks About Helping Energy Clients Plan A Path To The Future

Energy Enverus CEO Talks About Helping Energy Clients Plan A Path To The Future David Blackmon Senior Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. David Blackmon is a Texas-based public policy analyst/consultant. Following New! Follow this author to stay notified about their latest stories.

Got it! Sep 6, 2022, 08:12am EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Solar panels at the gas storage site in the Netherlands. Energy transition concept. getty As the energy transition proceeds and the energy sector becomes increasingly complex, the need for real-time, actionable intelligence and analytics becomes vital.

For energy companies of all kinds, success in this constantly accelerating business environment has created a growing need for advisory firms to provide the up-front technology, information, and analysis that allows their internal employees to effectively carry out the core functions of the business and make the connections that bring it all together. And they need it in real-time. No company has grown into this highly competitive intelligence and analytics space as effectively and rapidly as Enverus.

Founded as DrillingInfo in the 1990s as a platform that allowed upstream oil and gas operators to outsource much of their land and leasing functions, Enverus has evolved and expanded into a diverse software and intelligence company that offers a vast and constantly growing array of SaaS-based tools, services, and analytics to clients in all sectors of the energy world. With more than 6,000 clients in 50 countries, Enverus CEO Jeff Hughes now talks about his company as being “ THE energy-specialized technology partner that provides intelligent connections for the global energy ecosystem. ” Hughes is a high-energy, dynamic leader whose background is neither in energy or oil and gas but in the world of software and data services.

After almost two decades of innovating, developing, and leading solutions businesses in the hospitality, banking, and retail spaces, Hughes was brought in to lead Enverus in 2016. Enverus CEO Jeff Hughes Enverus MORE FOR YOU Here’s The List Of 317 Wind Energy Rejections The Sierra Club Doesn’t Want You To See Revisiting The Blame For High Gas Prices Why Do ‘Fracking’ Opponents Ignore Its Moral Benefits? Hughes recently sat down with me for an interview where we discussed his views about what it takes for companies to thrive in this rapidly evolving business environment and how his company tailors its solutions to support that success. Below is a summary of that interview.

Question: What’s your one-minute elevator answer when someone asks you what exactly SaaS is? Hughes: SaaS is software delivered as a service. Businesses subscribe to something typically on an annual basis, and they’re usually accessing it via the internet. It’s not a piece of software that’s installed on your workstation or located in your office.

It’s in the cloud and you’re accessing it from wherever you are, and it does something for you of high value. It creates, I think, a great cycle between customer and provider, because we as a business must do an amazing job of serving your needs — we make it so easy for you to use, and therefore, easy for you to leave if we don’t do a great job. Question: You’re in this huge, competitive market, and you have all these other companies trying to get a piece of the action.

How does Enverus differentiate itself from the competition? Hughes : In our business, you tend to find companies that are either small and vertically focused, or legacy data companies. We’re sort of the opposite of that. So, if you ask, “Who’s doing the machine learning work, and building mobile apps, and doing everything in the cloud, and leveraging Amazon AMZN in a modern way, and also in energy, which is somewhat of a legacy technology space,” that’s us.

What customers tend to come to us for are things that they couldn’t do easily in those vertical stacks. And they want to do it rather quickly. The way we think about it is we bring together these intelligent connections from data analytics and wisdom to discover previously unseen opportunities.

We’re usually predicting, automating, or benchmarking something for you. Question: Machine learning is a fascinating subject. When you look at, say, an upstream company in the oil and gas business, talk about one machine learning application an E&P company might use.

Hughes: An E&P company might want to buy some acreage and they’re not exactly sure how to complete the wells in this new area. We can simulate many different scenarios because we have a sub-surface model created with the combination of machine learning technology, and objective expertise from scientists, engineers, and financial analysts, who are experts in their domain. We understand what neighboring competitors have done, we understand everything about the environment, and can run many simulations that ultimately tell you the answer to those questions with probably 90% accuracy.

And you’ll spend your time as a customer on that last 10%, figuring out exactly how you want to do it. But you’ll know the crucial, big-picture answers before you ever buy that acreage. Question : Enverus has gone through rapid growth and diversification in recent years.

What was the key motivating factor in that transition? Hughes : Really, the key factor was this understanding that data over time would become a commodity and that what creates real value are the analytics, the things you can derive from that data. We create most of that analysis for you delivered through a web platform so you can then create a number of different use-cases and workflows that make sense to your business and then use our tool to analyze them to create rapid outcomes. Over time, we expanded into additional aspects of the energy ecosystem.

We have a big, fast-growing power and renewables business, as an example, and what you end up finding with energy is it’s all very linked. What matters in one area and for one segment has an impact on others. As we gained more and more information on the ecosystem, we ended up figuring out that we could serve lots and lots of segments of that ecosystem with various sets of analytics, data, and cloud-oriented workflows.

Making those intelligent connections is essentially what we’re able to do. We take that valuable information from various segments and create connections that really matter. It almost doesn’t matter what you’re doing, there’s probably something important that we can do for you on our platform.

Question: Renewables now is a growing piece of your customer base. Talk about how that all fits in. Hughes: The workflows are very similar.

Let’s take solar project buildouts as an example. One of the first things you might want to try to figure out is which location would work best. We’ve already captured land and ownership data, and all aspects about whether a particular piece of land is good for your project, who owns it, etc.

You’d want to understand what types of panels you might put in place, how you might want to lay them out, and the best way to connect it all to the existing infrastructure. We provide analytics capability to know the answers to these questions and better inform you regarding which projects will provide the highest return over time. An example is what’s happening in Texas.

We see an increasing need to create power in a way that connects it to the grid and creates real, lasting value. This means we need to be able to predict what prices might look like in the future and what’s going to happen with bottlenecks in the electrical grid system. We do all of that and it’s incredibly valuable for segments like wind and solar.

The workflows are actually very similar. Question: We talk a lot about wind and solar in this energy transition, and how companies are looking for ways to diversify what they do to make sure they’re able to continue to thrive in the transition. Talk about how your suite of services helps companies decide which way to move to succeed.

Hughes : First, oil and gas is not going away, and the Ukraine crisis has pointed that out in a big way. But I think what every company has resolved to do is have a smaller impact on the environment. It’s not just a matter of putting up some ESG metrics on a website.

They want to make a real difference because they know that’s what’s needed to have staying power for the long haul. Every single year, companies have to improve. And we want you to use us to that end.

We can help you understand what you should be doing more effectively. A lot of companies want realistic information so that they know what the starting place is and what the best-in-class companies are doing. We can share best practices with them and help them with a set of processes that improve their business.

It forces everybody to move faster. In these different cyclical markets, you end up having to pivot and change or you become a relic of the past. And, in a similar way, we have to keep upping our game to make sure that customers are willing to stay with us.

And really, that comes down to people. I think a lot of people who don’t understand software think of a technology company’s assets as the software they sell. The assets are actually the people.

The software depreciates over time if you don’t do anything with it. So, our focus tends to be on proper engagement, teamwork, discipline, and getting the right people on the team, and getting them energized and excited about what they do. That sounds really simple, but that’s actually the number one focus for us.

How do we retain and attract the best talent? Chris Dinkler, Chief Revenue Officer at Enverus, looks on during a strategic planning session. With . .

. [+] flexible time off and a management that trusts its team, 87% of Enverus employees say it is a great place to work. Enverus I’d say that’s been the thing that’s the most difficult, which is how to stay fresh, how to be the place where people want to build a career.

In my age group, it’s not uncommon for someone to have a job for maybe five years, and maybe before me, you might have held a job for 25 years, but today you might have it for only a year. So, we have to create reasons why you’d want to stay here. Why is this a great place to build a career? Not just a stop along the way, but to build a career.

So, I’d say that’s the thing that creates a lasting company. Question: When you look across the landscape right now at this moment in time, where do you see the biggest roadblocks impacting the various parts of the energy business? Hughes: Well, they’re what you see in headlines right now, starting with things like people; how do you get the right people on the ground? Supply chain challenges exist in every market today. The changes resulting from what’s called the energy transition today, most market participants in our space think of it as sort of an evolution that happens and has always been happening.

If you’re deeply embedded in the energy world, you know that transitions have happened forever, and they’re always part of the ecosystem. You’re constantly evolving and changing. I’d also point to the backdrop of macroeconomics, like increases in inflation affecting the costs in your business, and the need to be more efficient and effective with what you do.

You need to get cleaner and cleaner which requires you to invest more and more dollars over time. If you’re an oil and gas company delivering lots of dollars to shareholders, you still have to invest to be able to do that over an extended period of time. The good news for Enverus is that it tends to push you toward us and our solutions.

You tend to come to us looking for new ways to do something that you were doing before in a legacy way, but because the legacy way simply is not tenable for the long term, you need an alternative. Question: What kind of tools do you use internally to make sure that you’re on the right track, and that you’re staying at the cutting edge? Hughes: There’s quite a lot, but because data and analytics are at our core, we measure things quite effectively. An example is we measure usage and trends about usage with thousands of customers, so we can see patterns that are happening in what people are doing.

What are their workflows moving to and from? We track and analyze usage quite effectively. Question: This may be a dumb question, but it’s sounding as if Enverus is likely to continue to rapidly grow and evolve in the months and years to come? Hughes: I have no doubt it will. Question: The market is going to demand it, right? Hughes: You can think about it this way: We’re the largest SaaS business dedicated to energy.

Our opportunities are never-ending. Where do you think most companies picture their future, with more data and analytics or less? More machine learning or less? Do we think the energy picture is going to get more complicated or less? Do we think there’s more power required for the world, or less? We’re in a great position to stay on that horizon for at least the next 10 years. We love serving the energy space; it’s the only space we care about.

Most of our larger competitors tend to care about 10 different things, 10 different spaces. We care about one. That’s a big benefit to us and our customers.

So, if we keep doing what we’re doing, and don’t get too complicated with the strategy, we think this is a market we can serve forever. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn . Check out my website .

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