CygNet Software Helps Atlas Pipeline Drive Down Costs, Increase Productivity Across the Enterprise

CygNet's EOP, the oil and gas industry's most advanced solution for collecting, managing and distributing data, has enabled Atlas Pipeline to increase productivity, optimize assets and reconcile imbalances between the company and its suppliers and customers. With CygNet, Atlas can now measure and track in real time the product it receives and ships, and put this information into the hands of employees across the company. Additionally, Atlas Pipeline has reduced its IT hardware requirements by 80 percent and has launched a number of new business intelligence initiatives.

"With CygNet EOP, we are optimizing our assets, making our employees more productive and launching BI initiatives that put more information at the fingertips of everyone from field technicians to C-level executives, to our customers and partners," said Tony Dionisio, chief information officer at Atlas Pipeline. "CygNet is a modular solution that's easy to expand, and the small network footprint means we can add more users and data nodes without degrading network performance. Thanks to CygNet, we have significantly reduced our total IT hardware footprint while maintaining a robust disaster-recovery solution."

About CygNet at Atlas Pipeline

Operating in the Mid-continent region of Oklahoma and western Texas, Atlas Pipeline owns and operates approximately 7,900 miles of active intrastate gas gathering pipelines that transport gas to eight processing plants and one treating facility. In total, the company has approximately 250 compressors producing 500,000 hp of field compression.

In 2006, the company purchased a regulated pipeline and had five months to establish 24x7 real-time monitoring, instead of relying on native polling engines that had no real-time functionality. The company looked at several traditional SCADA solutions, but the CygNet EOP went far beyond SCADA's limited capabilities, while being less expensive. CygNet even offered a 30-day free trial. By the end of the 30 days, Atlas Pipeline had an entire district running under the control of CygNet, and with the system exceeding operational requirements, the company went ahead with a purchase to deploy across the enterprise.

Currently, CygNet is used by more than 100 people from every department at Atlas Pipeline, including field technicians, compressor mechanics, optimization, engineering, accounting, sales and marketing, and C-level executives.

"Unlike traditional SCADA solutions, CygNet provides our broad spectrum of employees with access to real-time information that's contextually relevant for their needs and therefore helps them make better decisions and perform their jobs more efficiently," added Dionisio. "We have been extremely impressed with how CygNet brings together end-to-end expertise and best practices, from gathering the data all the way to reporting. And the fact that CygNet EOP is a complete solution eliminates the hassle and finger pointing of integrating various products from multiple vendors."

The CygNet EOP includes automated alerts that give Atlas Pipeline the ability to detect and fix problems in a matter of minutes, eliminating hours of downtime and increasing volume on the system. Support for virtualization in the CygNet solution has allowed Atlas Pipeline to reduce the number of servers from 12 to five. Access to real-time data lets Atlas Pipeline accurately track a variety of imbalances, such as the difference between a contracted flow amount of gas from a producer and the actual amount received. This capability also functions as an effective early-warning system for gas leaks and measurement problems.

"The CygNet enterprise operations platform has become the de facto enterprise solution for exploration and production because it offers companies like Atlas Pipeline a very simple value proposition," said Steve Robb, vice president of business development at CygNet Software. "CygNet helps companies run their businesses more efficiently at far less cost, while providing new capabilities to help them compete more effectively."

About CygNet Software

CygNet Software provides products and solutions that improve the operational efficiency and market responsiveness of many of North America's leading oil and gas companies. Based on a revolutionary, network-optimized architecture, CygNet is rapidly becoming the de facto standard throughout the industry. More than 100 companies rely on CygNet to collect, manage and distribute massive volumes of operations data from field, production and business systems, creating a unified information ecosystem. Users spanning every business function can view and analyze real-time and historical information to support daily operations, strategic decision making and regulatory reporting requirements. Customers include super majors, major independents and key participants in the domestic production and transmission market. Combined, these companies represent 43 percent of domestic gas production and thousands of miles of major transmission pipelines in North America.

For more information, visit www.cygnetscada.com

All products mentioned in the release are trademarks or registered trademarks of CygNet Software. All other trademarks, trade names, and/or product names are used solely for the purpose of identification and are the property of their respective owners.