“Bringing geoscience data and teams together seamlessly is where we see the most potential,” a senior Seequent mining business leader has told a large customer gathering in Perth, Western Australia, on the back of the Bentley Systems unit’s recent major Leapfrog geoscience modelling software release for 2024.
The event heard while Seequent is naturally focused on leveraging major advances in technology with its software design, product integration is increasingly vital and so is responsiveness to the particular pressures on users in industries such as mining.
“Mining is evolving rapidly, driven by digital transformation, AI, ESG and importantly, the evolution of the workforce where automation is changing the skills of the future,” veteran mining technology leader and Seequent mining segment boss, Pieter Neethling, said in Perth.
“We see geoscientists continuing to make a massive contribution to this future … but it will require adaptation to succeed.
“It’s clear that geoscience workflows need to evolve to help meet the demands of the future. The industry requires integrated workflows to enable better data management, centralised knowledge and continuity across the entire value chain, from exploration through to mine closure.
“Our belief is our products, when integrated, can deliver higher value.
“How much more can geoscientists contribute to mining value chain efficiency where, for example, geoscientific modelling and analysis can help to better support permitting and license to operate, faster feasibilities, quicker construction times and faster and safer depletion of orebodies?
“The minerals demand is huge and geosciences can help in so many ways to meet that demand.”
More than 130 attendees at the Perth event heard last month’s “considerable update” of Seequent’s Leapfrog software included major code modification and modernisation “that really makes a good foundation for us to bring Leapfrog into 2025 and beyond”, according to geology, geostatistics and data science product manager, Rachel Murtagh.
“We are pretty excited about the flexibility of workflows that we will introduce,” she said.
Murtagh said Leapfrog users created nearly 200,000 geological models last year for mining, civil, energy and environmental projects.
Leapfrog 2024.1 also included changes to improve interoperability between desktop and cloud products and “unlock future hybrid workflow opportunities” through a new geoscience data platform being built by Seequent.
“Our goal is to bring geoscience teams together to unified environments, understanding and improving reconciliation, boost efficiency and the next wave of growth in mining and geosciences,” Neethling said.
“The future is not just about software. It’s about redefining workflows and unleashing the full potential of our geoscience data. A workflow-centric approach offers great benefits. It also allows interoperability with other applications and platforms.”
That includes integration with products such as Seequent’s updated MX Deposit drilling data management software-as-a-service (SaaS) and Oasis montaj data analytics offerings.
“People are switching to SaaS products … and we’re seeing 20% of all the traffic coming through our cloud services coming from Starlink,” said drilling product line manager, Tim Schurr.
“So you’re online in crazy and wild places: when you’re at the rig, when you’re drilling, you’re online, and you are up so you can use cloud services such as Imago [and] MX Deposit.
“You can [manage your drilling data] in the cloud; you don’t have to manage servers in the basement. This incredible engine which runs behind it can do anything.
“We’re putting the hammer down on MX Deposit and have some really good stuff coming next year.”
Schurr said AI that was “sweeping through every industry on the planet … is certainly here in the geosciences”.
“But what we’re seeing when we’re having conversations with geologists is that you’re no longer curious about AI [and] you’re no longer cautious.
“You kind of expect it now.”
Geology product manager at Seequent, Ryan Lee, said the company was focused on improving collaboration between geophysicists the geologists through data sharing and integration between Oasis montaj and Leapfrog.
“We’re also working to empower the geophysicists with better tools for interpreting and processing the geophysical data,” he said.
Seequent’s chief revenue officer Dan Wallace said in Perth the Christchurch, New Zealand, based business had grown to about 750 people worldwide since Bentley’s circa-US$1.05 billion acquisition in 2021. It was said to have c430 employees at the time. Subsequent acquisitions such as US cloud-based software developer Imago and Advanced Resources and Risk Technology (AR2Tech) had been combined with Bentley’s “subsurface company”.
New R&D centre, Seequent Labs, has been established around the AR2Tech team in Denver, Colorado.
New York-listed Bentley has consistently highlighted strong growth in Seequent’s initial cUS$80 million annual recurring revenue base since the acquisition without providing specifics.
Wallace said Bentley’s large civil and environmental market exposures and sales channels, and the parent’s “very compelling” E365 commercial model, had given Seequent activity outside its core mining business a “massive turbo boost”.
“We were in the foundational and formative days really of getting awareness of our brands in those markets prior to joining Bentley,” he said.
“That’s added magnitudes of users in the civil and environmental space.”
Mining sales had meanwhile continued to grow solidly as the Seequent “subsurface toolkit” expanded organically and through the group’s series of acquisitions. Was that toolkit complete?
“I would say it is never complete,” said Wallace.
“We don’t look at the market as a value chain and say we are going to check all the boxes.
“We look at the [exploration and drilling] data as valuable when it’s first collected. It’s even more valuable when it’s transformed into something useful. And it’s even more valuable the more it’s used.
“So our strategy is to make sure the transformation is efficient and make sure all the high-value data is available, so you always know where it is over time.
“[But] the reason why I say it’s never complete is because there’s so much innovation going on.
“If you look at the combination of data with cloud availability and acceptance of AI … You have got those mega trends happening that provide new innovation opportunities for both us and folks in the geoscience industry.
“We’ve been very tuned to some of the academic research going on in areas such as remote sensing.
“Where’s drone technology going? We used to have to fly geophysics surveys on fixed-wing aircraft because the sensors were big and expensive. We’re seeing miniaturisation … so you don’t have to fly planes now, you can fly drones, which also opens up a bit of a democratisation of the skills that you need to run a geophysical survey.
“It makes that information more available because the price point’s lower, and that makes the abundance of data just far more intriguing.
“There is more information being collected by different sensors, whether it’s satellite data, UAVs … It just continues to escalate.”
Wallace said Seequent Labs was a global hub for much of the company’s machine learning research and experimentation.
“We do a lot of real frontier thinking there,” he said.
“By having that labs kind of mindset and putting budget aside to incubate that [we can then have] teams that can go and work with industry and really understand what is it that we can do over a three-to-five-year horizon to help them solve their problems.”