“OilOffice Financial Post Feature”
Date: August 14, 2000
Location: NA
Publication by: Financial Post
Original Article Author: Ian McKinnon
(Dimitris Agouridis on the front page of Financial Post)
The newest Internet portal for the Canadian oilpatch goes live today, a vital step in its attempt to raise between $5-million and $10-million to compete in a crowded market.
Oiloffice.come is taking a two-pronged approach to the e-commerce and energy industry. It is designed to help companies sell properties and to provide project management skills that save time and money for Canadian producers that increasingly have globe-spanning operations.
“It will definitely speed up operations such as mergers and acquisitions,” said Dimitris Agouridis, Oiloffice.com’s president, who speaks in staccato bursts as words race to keep up with ideas. “Speed is a very big competitive issue in the oil and gas industry because the cycles are so fast. When things get going you want to be one of the first to get rolling.”
More than a year and $500,000 in the making, Oiloffice.com is the brainchild of Mr. Agouridis, also president and chief executive of Syner-Seis Technologies Inc., a small but diversified firm.
Oiloffice.com, which is drawing on Syner-Seis’ staff and infrastructure to keep start-up costs down, faces a number of challenges. Some rivals have much bigger pockets. For example, Halliburton Co., the worlds largest service company, paid US$55-million for a 15% interest in Petroleum Place Inc., the owner of a popular site. John Spears, a Tulsa, Okla., consultant who has studied the petroleum sector and ecommerce, predicts there will be a sharp shakeout in the next three years among the hundreds of sites established to serve the big-spending industry.
(Original article by Ian McKinnon)
The newest Internet portal for the Canadian oilpatch goes live today, a vital step in its attempt to raise between $5-million and $10-million to compete in a crowded market.
Oiloffice.come is taking a two-pronged approach to the e-commerce and energy industry. It is designed to help companies sell properties and to provide project management skills that save time and money for Canadian producers that increasingly have globe-spanning operations.
“It will definitely speed up operations such as mergers and acquisitions,” said Dimitris Agouridis, Oiloffice.com’s president, who speaks in staccato bursts as words race to keep up with ideas. “Speed is a very big competitive issue in the oil and gas industry because the cycles are so fast. When things get going you want to be one of the first to get rolling.”
More than a year and $500,000 in the making, Oiloffice.com is the brainchild of Mr. Agouridis, also president and chief executive of Syner-Seis Technologies Inc., a small but diversified firm.
He said niche players like Oiloffice.com have advantages based on industry knowledge and personal contacts that may enable them to compete with sites backed by major companies.
“You really need to have people there who understand the oil business because the users are going to be most comfortable in adapting to things that they’re already doing and placing them on the Internet,” he said. “You can’t just have a bunch of great programmers who may not understand the oil business and overcome that.”
A holder of a masters degree in geophysics, Mr. Agouridis said his Internet portal will focus on a relatively unexploited area of the oilpatch: managing, sorting and processing data. A client can order information to be crunched by a desired software package, available from Oiloffice.com or third parties, and reach decisions on results that can be viewed by a laptop.
Through alliances with service firms and consultants, Oiloffice.com intends to build up an electronic community that allows producers to outsource most of their data and service needs. Alconsult International Ltd. Has already signed up to participate. “[The producers’] business is to put money in the ground,” Mr. Agouridis said. “We’re creating a new system of how exploration can be done by capitalizing on the e-commerce applications of the Internet.”
Most of the revenue for the site will come from commissions from online services and applications. The other side of Oiloffice.com will help producers sell assets. Vendors will use passwords to screen bidders and control how much information is disclosed.
Denny O’Brien, chairman of Syner-Seis, said raising up to $10-millin will be tough but achievable. Much of the money will go to promoting Oiloffice.com’s online presence on the Web. “Why should they come to us? Because we can simplify their work and make them more efficient, and that’s what everybody is looking for,” he said.