In this episode of the Pipeliners Podcast, Russel Treat is joined by Chris Viator, Muddy Boots Support Lead at EnerSys Corporation, to discuss the transformative role of cloud solutions in field operations.

The conversation explores how cloud-based tools enhance efficiency, streamline workflows, and address challenges faced by field technicians and back-office teams alike. The episode also examines the evolution of technology in oil and gas operations and the growing importance of cybersecurity in cloud-based systems.

Cloud Solutions for Field Operations Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms

• Chris Viator is the Muddy Boots Support Lead at EnerSys Corporation. Connect with Chris on LinkedIn.
  • EnerSys Corporation is a frequent sponsor of the Pipeliners Podcast. Find out more about how EnerSys supports the pipeline control room through compliance, audit readiness, and control room management through the POEMS Control Room Management (CRM Suite) software suite.
• Muddy Boots provides field operations software for pipeline operators to manage critical areas such as measurement, maintenance, work orders, site diagrams, shift logs, and well lists.
• EFM (Electronic Flow Measurement) has become a preferred method of natural gas measurement.
• Cloud-Based Solutions: A system where hardware and software are centralized and accessed via the Internet, eliminating the need for on-site installations. Examples include web apps accessible on various devices like tablets or laptops.
• Field Operations: Activities carried out by technicians or analysts in locations such as well sites, pipelines, or measurement stations. These often involve environmental challenges like heat, cold, or remote access.
• Read the White Paper about XTO’s Muddy Boots Pilot
• API (American Petroleum Institute) is a national trade association that represents all aspects of America’s oil and natural gas industry.
  • API maintains a comprehensive Manual of Petroleum Measurement Standards (MPMS). The manual is an ongoing project that periodically releases new chapters and revisions of existing chapters.
  • API MPMS Chapter 21.1 (API 21.1 or 21.1) describes the minimum specifications for electronic gas measurement systems used in the measurement and recording of flow parameters of gaseous phase hydrocarbon and other related fluids for custody transfer applications using industry-recognized primary measurement devices.
  • Learn more about purchasing API standards.
• Automatic Tank Gauge (ATG) is an electronic device that measures levels of liquid in a tank. By monitoring the level of the liquid the ATG can perform leak tests of the underground tank and with some additional accessories can also monitor underground pressurized piping for leaks.
• Measurement Analyst: A professional responsible for managing and analyzing data from field measurement equipment to ensure accuracy and compliance.
• Multivariable Meter Calibration: The process of verifying and adjusting meters that measure multiple variables (e.g., flow, pressure) to ensure accurate readings.
• As-Found, As-Left: A term used in measurement to describe the state of an instrument before and after calibration or maintenance, ensuring any discrepancies are documented.
• Back Office: Refers to administrative and analytical operations, such as data review, quality assurance, and compliance checks, typically conducted away from the field.
• Cybersecurity: Protective measures and protocols to secure data and systems from unauthorized access, breaches, and threats. Key for both cloud and on-premises solutions in critical infrastructure.
• GIS Chip: A component in devices like smartphones or tablets that enables geographic information system functions, such as location tracking.
• SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition): A system used in industrial operations, like pipeline control, to monitor and control equipment and processes remotely.
• On-Prem Cloud: A cloud environment hosted on a company’s premises but managed using cloud principles, combining local control with modern infrastructure benefits.
• Web-Based Apps: Applications accessible through a browser, often requiring Internet connectivity but increasingly designed with offline functionality, such as data caching.
• Native Applications: Software specifically designed to run on particular hardware or operating systems, often used for field-specific tasks requiring robust performance.
• Cybersecurity Perimeter: The boundary around a network that is protected from external threats through security protocols, monitoring, and penetration testing.
• Critical Infrastructure: Essential systems and assets, such as pipelines or power grids, that require robust security and operational reliability.
• Opportunity Cost: The potential value lost when resources (time, money, etc.) are spent on one activity instead of another, relevant in evaluating operational efficiency improvements.
• Regulatory Compliance: Adherence to industry standards and regulations governing operations, data accuracy, and safety, a key concern for pipeline and measurement systems.
• Data Caching: Temporarily storing data locally to enable functionality when Internet connectivity is unavailable, critical for remote field operations.

Cloud Solutions for Field Operations Full Episode Transcript

Russel Treat: Welcome to the “Pipeliners Podcast,” episode 368, sponsored by EnerSys Corporation, providers of POEMS, the pipeline operations excellence management system, operations and compliance software for the pipeline operator to address safety program management, control room management, and field operations. Find out more about poems at enersyscorp.com.

[background music]

Announcer: The Pipeliners Podcast, where professionals, Bubba Geeks, and industry insiders share their knowledge and experience about technology, projects, and pipeline operations. Now your host Russel Treat.

Russel: Thanks for listening to the Pipeliners Podcast. I appreciate you taking the time. To show that appreciation, we give away a customized YETI tumbler to one listener every episode. This week our winner is Christopher Thanos with Marathon Oil. Congratulations, Christopher. Your YETI is on its way. To learn how you can win this prize, stick around till the end of the episode.

This week Chris Viator, our Muddy Boots support lead here at EnerSys Corporation, is joining us to talk about cloud solutions for field operations. Hey, Chris. Welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast.

Chris Viator: Hey, Russel. Thanks for having me. How are you?

Russel: I’m doing well. For the listeners, we already did this once, but something happened. The files disappeared, so we’re getting to do it again.

Chris: It’s clearly such an important topic that it needs to be revisited.

Russel: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely right. Look, let’s dive right in. First, if you don’t mind, give us an introduction. Tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to be working with Muddy Boots.

Chris: The big bio pic, I grew up in south Louisiana, got a lot of familiarity with oil and gas out there when I was a little young. Quite a while now, it feels like. I spent some time in the United States Navy, which gave me an opportunity to get to college.

From there, after pursuing a degree in economics, I found myself in the measurement analyst role at CenterPoint about 10 years ago. I fulfilled that analyst role across multiple companies, including Energy Transfer, for about 10 years. Here I am.

Russel: That’s very cool. What’d you do in the Navy?

Chris: I was a sonar technician. I was in a nuclear submarine. If anybody’s familiar with the old Tom Clancy “Hunt for Red October” fun of the early ’90s, I was the guy with his hand over the microphone, listening in, and then giving all the reports, and saying he’s tracking the Russians and all that stuff.

Russel: I bet that was fun.

Chris: Yeah, it’s about the length of it I could talk about.

[laughter]

Russel: Yeah, I know. I know how that works. Listen, I asked you on so we could talk about using cloud solutions for field operations. Maybe a good place to start is ask you, what is your take on the transformation that’s going on around field operations? How are we doing things now, and how ought we be doing things?

Chris: The way we’re doing things now, from what I’ve experienced and extrapolated from the field regarding measurement and data acquisition, we’re still moving around about 20 years behind.

We’ve got guys on laptops installing individual pieces of software, spending their time going from place to place needing to update, gathering the material they need at the site, doing their testing and whatnot, but then still needing to report back to home base, as it were, to get any updates they need for that individual piece of software.

As the conversation we’re going to have, the way we’re moving forward is more of a flexible, cloud-based solution for that, where everything is essentially in-house under one roof. A good way to articulate it is a broad-based operation solution under one house.

Russel: I’m old enough that I remember people doing field work using various types of forms and clipboards, and then taking all those forms at the end of the day and stuffing them in an envelope, mailing them to the head office. In the history of that, it’s interesting.

I remember very early in my career seeing people do that, and then the fax machine started to come out and proliferate. That was probably in the mid-80s. All of a sudden, instead of mailing all that stuff, everybody would start faxing it in. They’re still running around doing it on forms.

There were various places in West Texas that I remember that were out in the middle of nowhere, where all the trucks would start rolling up about three, four o’clock in the afternoon. They’d be completing all their paperwork, and there’d be a whole line of fax machines available to folks where they could walk up and fax their stuff back to the office before they went home.

It was interesting. That was a major leap forward at the time. All of a sudden, instead of having to wait three to five days for the mail to get through, now you’re you’re getting those reports same day, but still a lot of opportunity for inaccuracy, just because of people writing things down and then other people having to interpret that and type it into a computer.

Then we got to where we are now. We started using laptops and putting software on those laptops to collect all that information, but you still had to go back to the office and plug the laptop in to sync all the data back.

That got rid of a lot of the data entry errors because there’s no transcription required, but it still wasn’t ideal because you got all the cost associated with managing all that software on a laptop and managing the process to sync that data back to servers.

The cloud really transforms all that, where I don’t need to install any software. All I need is a browser or a Web app on a phone or a tablet. All of a sudden, I can do my work. That’s a big difference from what we’ve been doing historically. What do you think, fundamentally, Chris, people are looking for in that process?

Chris: In the near future of measurement, what anybody would want is a tool that’s going to make their life out in the field simpler. From my experience, being in the field is quite different from being in the office.

Anything that may seem like a small quibble in the office could be a real big deal out in the field. Trying to find a place to actually enter your data on the laptop, maybe you’ve got it set on the hood, set in your lap, anything like that.

What we’re seeing with cloud-based tools, there’s a lot of things. Number one is your ability to access on anything that’s got a Web app. You’re looking at tablets, phones, laptops. Probably don’t want to do a multivariable meter calibration on a phone, but the tool’s there. It’s available for you.

We can get into some of this later with specificity of the tools, but a lot of what we’re seeing with cloud-based software is more flexibility. That allows a field technician to be able to enter his data in more quickly and more conveniently, which is going to save him…

Let’s say it saves 10 to 15 minutes per meter test. He’s doing four to six a day. Those numbers explain themselves. You’re saving an hour or two per day. What you’re getting out of that is…You spoke to a monetary cost with current software, but you’re also looking at a time and opportunity cost as well, that you see a benefit from when using cloud-based software.

Russel: It warrants digging into this a little bit more. I asked the question. Really, there’s two viewpoints to this. There’s the viewpoint in the back office and the viewpoint in the field. What the back office wants is they want the data as soon as they can get it and they want it to be accurate. That’s fundamentally what they want.

They want to look at those meter tests, those meter calibrations, the as-found, as-left. They want to look at all that and make sure that the numbers that are coming in and they’re going through daily in the back office are right and will stay on top of it and not drop behind.

The flip side of it is what the user in the field wants is they want something that’s convenient and easy to use. To your point, for anybody who’s not worked out of a truck, it’s very difficult to communicate how different that is.

Even if you’re working around instrumentation and equipment, there’s a big difference between working in the lab in the office and hooking everything up and getting it working with your laptop versus being out at the site and hooking it up and getting it to work.

The sunlight’s a big factor. The heat or the cold or the wind, all that’s a big factor. Because of that, simple things like navigating around a screen can be a real pain.

Chris: To even add to that from an analyst’s perspective too is understanding, every time a technician needs to go out, let’s say for troubleshooting specifically, that’s a trip that costs time and money. That trip can sometimes be dangerous, given the road conditions, given any other number of things.

I worked with offshore assets for a while. Having a transmitter fail means sending a guy on a helicopter offshore. From an analyst’s perspective, I need to be able to provide him all the information he needs to make sure he’s got the right tools and the parts.

What you end up, with some of the current setup, is there’s still a communications gap. What other value there can be in cloud-based software is tightening up those communication gaps, being able to work directly with our guys out in the field to give them exactly what they need, when they need it, so we’re not wasting trips. We’re not putting guys in dangerous conditions.

Having just come back from Canada last week, I got some experience with understanding what it’s like to drive three hours out into the middle of Alberta in icy road conditions with no visibility. You don’t want to send a technician out there if he doesn’t have to be.

Russel: That’s right. The other comment you made, simple things like, if I’m working on a laptop…I have to fire up the laptop. I’ve got to navigate and start up an application. I’ve got to do that every time I get to the site. That’s the case in some situations. It’s not like it’s a huge amount of time. It’s like three to five minutes, but you do that five times a day. That’s 30 minutes.

If you’ve got other things you can do to make the data entry a little bit more efficient and you’ve got other things you can do to make the transfer of the data back more efficient and if you can get 15 minutes less time per site visit to do your calibration or witness, then you can get one more a day.

Those kind of things add up. They add up in a big way. One of the things that cloud does is it allows you to do that. We probably ought to talk a little bit about what is the cloud, for people that don’t know. I’ll do this. Then I’ll let you comment on it.

A lot of people don’t understand cloud. Cloud basically means that the hardware and the software is in some centralized point. Rather than me buying the hardware, installing and maintaining the software, maintaining all the cybersecurity around all that, what I’m doing is I’m just buying access to the solution itself.

That could be delivered a whole bunch of different ways. There’s things you have to do to make sure that it meets the cyber requirements and such. Fundamentally, it just means that I’m not installing hardware or software. I’m just using the tool. In your experience, do you think people get that? Do you think they get the distinction? I’m talking about the user community.

Chris: Sure. In fact, what I was just thinking to myself is I don’t think they get it when it’s explained that way, but I do think they get it when you’re able to explain how they already interact with cloud data on a pretty regular basis.

If I’m on my cell phone, anything that’s not directly saved on the chip in my phone that I may be accessing — let’s say my photos are stored — that’s all cloud-based data.

[crosstalk]

Russel: The better examples are Google Maps. Every time I bring up Google Maps, all that data, the maps, all that stuff, is in the cloud. The only thing that’s actually going on in the phone is the tracking using the GIS chip. Everything else is cloud-based.

Chris: That’s a narrative to continue to work on, broadly speaking, about cloud-based technology, is how we already interact with it fairly often, more often than we probably realize we do.

Russel: It infers a certain kind of user experience. For example, again, using the Google Maps example, if there’s an error in the map, you don’t need to do anything to get that update to that error in the map. Just the next time you use Google Maps, that fix is there.

That’s very much what you do with cloud applications. If there’s an error in a form or you need to move something on a form, you just do it. The next time you open that form, that thing is where it needs to be. Again, it’s part of the value proposition because I can get changes out to the field a whole lot quicker, with a lot less aggravation and angst.

Chris: To go on with what we talk about regarding a layman’s understanding of cloud-based technology too, there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the security involved as well, as many people think cloud-based technology tends to be less secure. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Russel: That’s actually a really good question. My perspective on this is changing. If you’d have asked me this question five years ago, I would have been in the…The cloud is inherently less secure and is largely inappropriate for doing operations around critical infrastructure.

I actually think that the reverse is becoming true and that the cloud is more secure. I could unpack that with some tech speak. I don’t know if that’s helpful for this.

Fundamentally, because of the cybersecurity awareness and because of the things that you can do to lock down your network, lock down your perimeter, monitor your network, and monitor your perimeter, those kinds of things are easier to do, particularly for the customer, in the cloud.

There’s a big difference between…I’m installing something. Then I’ve got to make sure that I’ve got application security. I’ve got network security. I’ve got penetration security. When I’m working deeply in an app, I can actually do that better than when I have a whole bunch of apps I have to support, none of which I’m intimate with.

I actually think we’re getting to a place where cloud is becoming more secure. Nobody’s doing SCADA or operations type stuff in the cloud yet, but that’s probably coming. Just because it says cloud doesn’t mean it has to be off-prem. You can have on-prem cloud, just managed by others.

We’re going to see a lot more of that. We’re going to see a lot more Web-based apps. We should talk about that. One of the other things about cloud, for those guys that work in the trucks and have to drive an hour down a dirt road to get to a site, there’s the whole issue about what happens when I have no Internet connectivity.

Most of the stuff that’s casual applications, they just don’t work if you don’t have Internet connectivity. There are things that you can do so that you can work when you’re offline. You have to cache that data. One of the things we do in Muddy Boots is we actually…

When you’re talking about applications, there’s two kinds of applications. There’s native applications and there’s web applications. A native application is actually running something on your phone or tablet. It installs code and stores data. A web application is only using the browser. Most applications are web applications. They’re fairly advanced, but they’re web applications.

The advantage of the web application is I can push most of my updates automatically, versus a native application, all that stuff you do on your iPhone or your android where you update the app, that’s required if you’re doing a native application. Probably not as required if you’re doing a web app.

Chris: To reemphasize on that too, what you were mentioning earlier when we were still talking about lay understanding of a cloud-based tech, you were talking about how a change in Google Maps can be made centralized to that server, and next time you log into Google Maps, you’ll see that. That’s what you’re speaking to, correct?

Russel: Well, there’s that, but there’s also the issue of…let’s talk a little bit about actually doing the work in the field. Come back to that. If I’ve got to do a meter calibration and I’m using a tool, there’s stuff that exists on the server that I want to have on my device when I do the calibration.

Information about the meter, the instrument, the ranges, last calibration, all that kind of stuff. If I’m a pure web app and I’m out of Internet coverage, then I can’t get that to the device. What we do at Muddy Boots is we actually cache all that data inside the web app.

It’s in the browser, which means as long as you download your route, so you download all the meters that you could potentially see that day, at the beginning of the day, then even if you don’t have Internet activity, you can still do the work.

Then the other beauty of that is because it’s in the cache, the way the cache works is it builds up and dumps out as I move in and out of connectivity. I do my calibrations, and then as soon as I’m back in Internet connectivity, all those completed activities just automatically go to the cloud. There’s a lot of advantages to that.

Chris: You’re much less tethered, as it were, to needing to have Internet connection or needing to be able to save data locally.

Russel: There’s a lot of tools out there for doing field work, quite a lot, quite a large number of them. Most of those tools assume that you have persistent Internet connectivity.

I’m aware of operators that are using tools that were maybe designed for building maintenance, and they’ve just configured them in a way that they can do their work for things other than maintenance, more like standard inspection tasks and that sort of thing.

The problem with that is, most of those tools, from doing building maintenance, I probably have Internet. I don’t worry about caching data, which makes the development and maintenance of the app a whole lot simpler. [laughs] For us, for the guys that are working remotely, we need to have the data that we need to do our work available at all times.

I want to talk about some of the other value propositions. What are some of the other value propositions for an operator in terms of using a cloud app?

Chris: We’ve covered the convenience of it. We’ve covered the ability to work offline. Again, just so it doesn’t get lost in the wake of the conversation, though, being able to push an update rather than having to go to the office, get an Internet connection, and install that update across multiple laptops.

One thing you had mentioned, and that I wanted to make sure we didn’t forget about was, when you have software cloud-based like that, you can make the update to the software centralized and see it across all access to that software. I wanted to emphasize is you’re not having to constantly deal with IT to update licenses or users or individually push updates per laptop or per field technician.

Russel: I actually talked about this in the episode with Jason DeWitt, where we talked about his project, where they rolled Muddy Boots out at XTO.

They formed a team and aligned with Muddy Boots, and they rolled out about 15,000 meters, and basically took it live one day, and then had a task group that worked long days, like 10, 12-hours days for about a week to support that rollout. They were tweaking forms and updating things and doing that multiple times a day.

Chris: They’re able to see that almost instantaneously.

Russel: Right, which was…

Chris: That is pretty impressive stuff.

Russel: For the users, they’d be at one site. They’d call, “I’ve got this problem. This needs to get resolved.” Then they would make a drive pass through Internet connectivity, get to the next site, and, all of a sudden, the change they were looking for is there. That’s pretty compelling. The fact that that’s a possibility.

Chris: To continue on to that, of course, I’m going to be a little biased here. Muddy Boots is a very highly customizable, very broad-use tool.

As a Web application, it’s capable of everything we’ve mentioned, but, also, to emphasize what you were saying about being able to make almost instantaneous changes. Working on the back end of that, as a cloud-based tool, you can provide almost company-wide feedback within a day.

Russel: That’s actually the next thing I was going to drive at, Chris.

You’re making an excellent point, is, because it’s cloud-based, and all I need is a browser and credentials to get to the data, now, if I’m a measurement analyst, I can actually see the work that’s scheduled in the field related to my meters, and I can interact through the tool that the technicians actually using to do their work. That’s pretty powerful.

Chris: It changed our API 211 form, where we want to add something that’s custom or unique to us. You make the request, you fill out the appropriate information that we’re going to need on the cloud-based end. Without any hiccups, it can be done within a day and everybody’s going to see it. It’s not going to be a matter of just one or two people seeing it, or one technician.

What I’m getting at is there’s no rollout. If you say you need a change, the change is made and it’s done. That’s a very unique to cloud-based software that you just can’t see in current technology that we use more broadly right now.

Russel: Yes, and that’s a huge offload of administrative support from the IT group that they no longer have to do. It’s a big deal.

Chris: Yeah. Going back to an earlier point, if there’s anything I’d want anybody to take away from our conversation, is we all know how crucial communication is in our field.

What a cloud-based software really does well as it closes a lot of those communication gaps. If it doesn’t immediately, it can build the tool to close the communication gap because we don’t know. There’s often too many cooks in the kitchen or…

Russel: There’s also things we do that where the communications or the hands-off are more complex, particularly when we’re doing things like we’re using third-party service companies to run our calibrations.

One of the beauties of Muddy Boots is I can give that guy a login and set them up as an affiliate, and now they’re working in the same system. They see that they have access to the same data. I have access to their forms the minute they’re completed.

There’s a lot of lift that happens with that, a lot of flexibility that happens with that, that with other kinds of solutions or approaches, you can do it. It’s just that there’s a higher-level administrative burden to doing it.

Chris: Exactly.

Russel: The other thing I want to talk about, and this goes back to one of the things that Jason DeWitt talked about, and what he talked about is one of the underlying justifications for the product their project in the first place, and that was, as a larger operator with thousands of well sites and thousands of meters, they needed a mechanism in order to standardize work.

Again, a cloud solution gives you the ability to do that in a unique way. Because I have a central point of management for all of the forms and all of the data that I’m using, I can normalize how the work actually happens by normalizing the data and normalizing the forms.

Chris: What you’re speaking to is a measure of standardization to an extent, correct?

Russel: Exactly. If I’m running a Daniel orifice meter senior fitting, and I’m going to do a plate inspection, one of the ways I get people doing that all the same way is I have them all use the same form, set up the same way, in the same sequence.

Let’s say that I am working in the field, and I’m doing something simple, like an orifice inspection, and I want to reorder five things on a form. That is a trivial thing in a cloud solution. I make that change in the host, I push that out to the field, and they’ve got it immediately.

If I go back to a solution where I have software and it’s installed on people’s laptops, and I want to reorder five things on a form, the only way I get it to all those laptops is every single one of those laptops has to be updated. Now, all of a sudden, a simple change becomes a complicated, expensive rollout process. Again, it goes to the overall value proposition of the cloud.

Chris: To even add to that, from a field perspective, that’s less time you’re having to go back to the office. [laughs]

Russel: Yes, that’s right. Exactly right.

Chris: As an analyst, what I always focused on was I didn’t want to send these guys where they didn’t need to go, and I didn’t want them to spend too much time, either out in the heat, out in the cold, any of those things.

A cloud-based tool, being able to push those things and not waste their time making trips back and forth from the office is valuable across the board. Not just in the field, but from the home office, being able to facilitate that work.

Russel: There’s a lot of value in knowing that where your tech is and what they’re working on, and whether they’re ahead or behind. In other words, they have slack in their schedule.

I need you to do this, but yeah, I can wait a week on this site. Because of its volume and where it is, I don’t need it right now. I can wait a week to get it done and drop it in their schedule at a point in the future when they’re at the site.

Chris: Even better yet, with some of these tools, the technician can make that decision as well.

Russel: Sure. That’s exactly right. Lot of possibility, and that goes right back to your point about communication. Let me say what my takeaways are, and then I’m going to ask you to grade me. Then we’ll flip it and do the same thing. My takeaways are, first off, you probably shouldn’t be afraid of the cloud. It’s got a really compelling value proposition.

Secondly, anything you do in the field and you’re going to do it on smart devices, you got to deal with what happens when I don’t have Internet connectivity.

Then lastly, it’s all about streamlining the work in the field and communicating effectively between the field and the back office. Fundamentally, that’s what you’re trying to get better at all the time. Those are my takeaways from this conversation. How would you say I did, and what would your takeaways be?

Chris: I’d say that’s a passing grade, Russel.

[laughter]

Russel: Thank you very much.

Chris: Yeah, that’s pretty much on point. You stole some of my bullet points. I don’t think it was fair that you got to go first.

[laughter]

Chris: For me, the more time I spend with these tools, the more that I learn and discover just how valuable…

Again, for me, from my personal background, both in the military, out of the military, working in the office, not working in the office, communication, and being able to formalize and streamline communication so that everybody can be almost instantaneously on the same page is an invaluable tool that most small and large companies may never actually reach.

The best tools that you can provide to your team, such as a cloud-based tool, are going to be able to close in those things. I could give a thousand examples of where I’m coming from, but I’ll keep it simple, is we see a lot of miscommunication and a lot of loss from miscommunication, and even when it comes down to everything from unaccounted-for gas in the office to safety out in the field.

What we’re going to see moving forward as more cloud-based and Web apps technology gets adapted, is we’re going to be able to close a lot of those loops.

Russel: You’re absolutely right. I agree that’s the future. Look, thanks for coming on. Good job for your second time to be at your first time on “The Pipeliners Podcast.”

Chris: Fingers crossed, there’s not a third.

[laughter]

Russel: The technology is all working correctly.

Chris: Yes, sir. Again, I want to say thank you again for having me a second first time.

Russel: I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of The Pipeliners Podcast and our conversation with Chris. Just a reminder before you go, you should register to win our customized Pipeliners Podcast Yeti Tumbler. Simply visit pipelinepodcastnetwork.com/win and enter yourself in the drawing.

If you’d like to support the podcast, best way to do that is to leave us a review, and you can find instructions at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com.

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Russel: If you have ideas, questions or topics you’d be interested in, please let me know, either on the Contact Us page at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com, or you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. I’ll talk to you next week.

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