The BB Visual Group started in 2005 with the company BB Visual Solutions AS. The two of us who were the founders came from Silicon Graphics Inc with 10 years competence in delivering high performance visualization to among others the Oil and Gas Industry. We had seen that the biggest problem was the access to the data, in other words integration, and the second biggest problem was to have the visualized images distributed to the location where the users were. In other words the missing parts were a Virtual Collaborative Environment where the users could get the data visualized on their desktop or in a meeting room of a kind, not necessarily a $10 million visualization facility that you had one of on your campus and could only be run by experts. The third part was all about efficiency with the question being to develop a solution that also makes sure every step you take in a work process is documented by the system itself.

We have seen cases where the technology has been the key factor to solve the business case with big savings; that’s what our mission is about.

After we had done a successful pilot for Integrated Well Planning at Statoil in 2005 and beginning of 2006 we formed two more companied, BB Visual Development AS and BB Visual Consulting AS.

The rationality behind this was we wanted to be focused in the different disciplines. Later 2007 BB Visual Consulting AS acquired Visual Acuity Ltd. Visual Acuity was a UK based company with an office in North America. Since then we founded a BB Visual Solutions Inc., with a location in Houston Texas.

The most recent acquisition was in May 2010 when Insite Consulting AS was acquired. Insite Consulting is a strong IT Consulting firm, where the majority of the current work is software development for Ericsson Telecommunication.

This is all now The BB Visual Group or the “BB Visuals” as many choose to call us.

The focused markets for us today are: Oil and Gas, Telecommunication and Consulting within visualization in public spaces, Oil and Gas facilities and IT Consulting. We do work as a Global group and share the internal resources.

Our locations are today: Bergen Norway (HQ), Brighton UK, Rome Italy and Houston Texas.

We are seeing a strong demand for integrated solutions in the Oil and Gas market. The business analysts have been very clear that the industry has not increased the performance on efficiency you could expect over the last 10 years. Our technology has proven significant improvement on efficiency in regards not only to automatically update the databases but also generating documentation as you work on projects. The less manual work leads also to less error and the collaborative tools make you do changes efficiently and timely as you don’t have to meet physically as teams, but utilize the competence in your team there and then, and you have a new updated plan. We have seen cases where the technology has been the key factor to solve the business case with big savings; that’s what our mission is about.

We have today some great partners and will hopefully in the future have many more. The partnership program is very important to us.

The Oil and Gas business is going to change, not tomorrow or next year, but over the next 5 to 10 years. One reason is that many of the experienced people are now grey haired and they are going to disappear over the next decade. The new generation will adapt to new technology faster than ever before. We hope this will cause acceleration in usage of new tools especially in regards to collaboration. To be able to do a lot better on collaboration you also have to do more integration.

Our solutions focus in on the value chain for the Oil and Gas business. We see more centers are built and centers that are more centralizing the function. We have examples as Drilling Centers for the region or the Company, like Fields Production Centers etc., this again will require better collaboration between the centers and the field. Again that is not a technology problem it is more an organizational challenge. We have the technology you need and the experts to consult for those kinds of solutions. All is developed together with the Oil and Gas Industry.

It will be a pleasure for me to hear from you and to deal with you in any regards

All the best,

Magne Arne Brekke
CEO
The BB Visual Group