TAKE 5 with Ocean ICT: ET Works Ltd

ET Works—a specialist Seagate partner—has a strategic alliance with Seagate to resell the innovative Lyve™ portfolio. This OceanICT special edition TAKE 5, Darren Biggs, Geoscience Services Manager, ET Works, joins ON&T to offer more insight into ET Works’ services.

What role does your company play in marine and ocean information and communication technology (ICT) space?

ET Works is an IT services & solutions provider and value-added reseller for some of the world’s leading technology vendors. We’ve been in business since 1993 and have 30 years of experience in supporting our clients in the energy and offshore sectors in terms of their acquisition, processing, project, data management, and IT needs. We have helped create innovation in HPC, storage & tape technology, and Geoscience Services and now lead the way in Next-Generation Software-Defined solutions with specialist technical skills in hyper-converged platforms, multi-cloud, DevOps, and self-service automation. We’re here to help our customers navigate their IT needs and find the best possible systems and solutions.

(Image credit: ET Works)

How do you see breakthroughs in ICT capabilities shaping the evolution of the ocean industry?

Data is key. It’s the primary requirement, asset, and commodity of almost every company at Oi 2024. It’s been around since the very beginning, whether that was the early mapping of the continents, oceans, and trade routes through to our modern acquisition of seismic, multibeam, bathy, and environmental data that help us site anything from telecoms to offshore wind farms. Acquiring, analyzing, managing, and storing that data nowadays requires modern computing, telecoms, robotics, storage, and processing. ET Works is there to support our partners in adopting the latest technologies, whether that’s AI and ML, GPU processing, or Cloud VDI, to leverage global teams. What we can achieve now with the best ICT solutions is to shrink and simplify those problems—letting users collaborate effectively and efficiently.

Are there any recent or upcoming launches/projects/milestones/announcements you want to share with us?

We’re here at Oi 2024, partnering again this year with Seagate LYVE, with the ‘speed to data’ message at the top of the list. The roadmap for the technology has advanced even further since the last event and we’re looking forward to talking to some of our existing customers about the new 122 TB SSD units that are going to provide even greater capacity for ‘big data’. This provides even greater flexibility and integration with the ‘data transfer as a service’ options and Cloud integration. We’ve had so much positive feedback from our customers adopting the technology, and it’s proving to be a key part of the systems architecture that we’re deploying. Taking a holistic approach, we’re aligning this with our small-form-factor, low-power, self-healing clusters from SCALE that provide a fully hyper-converged, virtualized environment that’s compact enough to fit on not just manned acquisition vessels but also the latest generation of USV/ASV. This level of integration is really going to be a game-changer.

(Image credit: ET Works)

What are you looking forward to most about Oceanology International 2024?

As always, meeting our existing and new customers is always a big draw for us, but it’s equally exciting to see what other vendors and technology companies are doing in the marine space. It’s a very special event to attend, and there’s always something to see and people to talk to.

The future of ocean-based ICT hinges on…

ET Works tagline- Evolutionary Technology. The use of our oceans is changing rapidly, and to compete, we’re going to need to evolve our use of technology, too.

ET Works will be exhibiting in the Oceanology International 2024 Ocean ICT Pavilion—powered by ON&T Magazine. You can find them at the Ocean ICT pavilion in S201 on the Oceanology floor to chat more about the ICT solutions for the ocean industry.