If you like to grow plants, you know that there are three main things they require for growth: water, sunshine and good soil. If you supply all these, your plants will grow healthy and strong, putting out new leaves and colorful blossoms in their season.

I feel exactly that way about our DeltaV SaaS SCADA growth. We’ve expanded organically by identifying and supplying the top three things our customers need for better production. Much like water, sunshine and good soil without any one of these the chances of growth drops quickly.

“Dear Producer,” the email should read. “I want to tell you about a problem I have on well number 10. It’s—well, it’s just not producing like it should. I think there may be a liquid loading problem. In truth, this has been building up for a while, and I was afraid something like this would happen. What should we do?”

I don’t know if you ever read advice columns, where people write in and ask for help with relationship issues. Sometimes it’s interesting to see what the columnist has to offer as a solution.

It’s pretty amazing to watch the pace of mergers and acquisitions these days. Oil and gas producers are working hard to maximize investments in an economy that’s better than it was, but still not where everyone would like it to be.

Even so, it’s one thing to sign a contract to acquire a new field, and it’s another thing to handle the new field’s SCADA systems, data and controls. The question is, do you accept the system that’s there and train your people on yet another software package? Or do you spend possibly tens of thousands of dollars and weeks of time replacing their system with your own—and if you do that, what happens to the legacy data they’d already collected?