What does your new role involve?

I’ve been brought on board to look at what Restrata does in the emergency response monitoring and tracking business. Essentially, we are looking to productise it and grow that globally. Also, to add additional products to what we already have. Currently we are focusing on emergency response, primarily in the North Sea and tracking of people and assets in the Middle East. I think the key to my role is thinking about what other solutions we can add to the North Sea business and to augment our solutions in the Middle East and bring them together.

What experience will you be bringing that will benefit your new role with Restrata?

My experience with international S.O.S was recreating products which allowed clients to have a global consistent solution and as a result of that we managed to grow our offshore oil and gas business very rapidly over a short period of time, from 50 million to 150 million in 3½ years. The ability to build a solution that is scalable across the world is what I’m bringing to Restrata. I have also been working for the last couple of years advising a number of tech start-up companies in Africa. If you look at the way emergency response is currently delivered it’s right for the use of essentially common technology. For example, the live tracking of assets, the use of live analysis of data and to be able to improve an emergency response solution.

What are the expansion plans for Restrata?

At the moment, our expansion plans are twofold. One is on the product side of things, we want to be seen as productive innovators in the oil and gas emergency response. We are about to announce a new partnership where we will be launching a new product line which will be focused on the oil and gas industry, monitoring and response for cyber threats. The second one is also on the product side of things, looking at how we can use artificial intelligence to offer an enhanced response service where AI can very quickly analyse real-time info which could be impacting the need of response. I am also looking to expand our response on the capability to the Middle East and then we would be looking to expand to West Africa.

What is the Middle Eastern market like for Restrata?

Restrata has a long history of providing very specialised design security for the Middle East. Our expansion into the emergency response side of things in the Middle East will be new, but we have a number of different companies in the Middle East engaging with us to ask us to look at their full response capability as well as ask us to think about investing to support their operations both in the middle east and across the world. We are quite excited.

Digitalisation is a big focus at the moment, what impact is this having for Restrata?

If we go back purely on the response business, the North Sea is seen as a global excellence for Health and Safety and this was built upon the regulatory environment that came out of the Piper Alpha accident. For the North Sea to continue to be the gold standard and reference point for the world, we need to start applying that kind of technologies. We also have to deliver and improve response services, we want to be at the forefront of that. The Oil and Gas industry globally is spending more money on digitalisation and we cannot leave one component of digitalisation behind. It can’t just be about production. We must also look at the health and safety component for the people operating in Oil and Gas. 7

Why is cyber security so important for the industry?

Cyber threat that has become so prevalent now in the UK and Europe. Our oil and gas clients are connected to networks and are automated in some way, which has opened them up to certain cyber hacking. That is why we are developing a cyber monitoring and response business to go along with that. This year they released a new piece of legislation- NIS Directives which is forcing all owners of critical national infrastructure, including Oil and Gas operators to harden their assets from Cyber threat. This digitalisation agenda goes hand and hand with the risk which has to be mitigated and minimised, it is quite an interesting time in the industry.