How Ithaca Energy Rebuilt Trust in Their Digital Operations.
After acquiring mature assets in the North Sea, Ithaca Energy inherited more than infrastructure. They also inherited a hydrocarbon accounting system that never quite worked.
Challenge
When Legacy Tech Fails to Land
After acquiring mature assets in the North Sea, Ithaca Energy inherited more than infrastructure. They also inherited a hydrocarbon accounting system that never quite worked.
It wasn’t just a technical failure. It was an adoption failure.
The system:
- Was hard to configure
- Relied on external support for changes
- Didn’t reflect the realities of daily operations
- Left key workflows stuck in disconnected spreadsheets
This was especially painful for the complex Stella field, where delays in reporting and data inconsistencies risked impacting performance and regulatory confidence.
With critical knowledge sitting in the heads of a few individuals – and no clear way to evolve the system – doing nothing wasn’t an option.
The Turning Point
From Frustration to Flexibility
Ithaca Energy made a bold call: rather than try to fix the old system, they’d replace it with something better. Something designed for adaptability, ownership, and speed.
Their choice? The EnergySys Cloud Platform, backed by three key drivers:
- Low-code configuration, so internal teams could build and evolve the system themselves
- Rapid deployment of allocation models tailored to complex assets using familiar tools like Excel
- Cloud-native infrastructure for easy access and low IT overhead, both onshore and offshore
The Results
Confidence Restored and Spreadsheets Retired
Just as important was the approach. Business users were involved from day one, ensuring the system was designed with the people who’d actually be using it.
The outcome was more than a new system. It was a new way of working.
With EnergySys, Ithaca:
- Fully retired legacy spreadsheets
- Embedded allocation, reporting, and validation directly into the platform
- Enabled in-house teams to update models quickly and confidently
- Reduced operational risk by removing dependency on a handful of experts
Why It Worked
This wasn’t just a technology upgrade, it was a shift in mindset.
Ithaca moved away from dependency and toward autonomy. Away from patchwork tools, and toward a scalable, supportable system.
By focusing on user empowerment and system flexibility, they rebuilt trust in their digital operations, creating a more sustainable, resilient foundation for managing their North Sea assets.
EnergySys is purely SaaS with no option for on-premise or hybrid models. We are hosted on AWS and every one of our users, including Santos, benefit from our use of a range of AWS services like CloudWatch, S3 and CloudFormation. AWS helps us manage all our users infrastructure and IT needs, reducing costs and increasing productivity. Together we provide unparalleled value and flexibility to our users.
