Tim Dobush, Geosoft’s CEO, said, “In recent years, we have extended our technology and service offerings to address growing customer demand for companywide data management solutions and integrated application platforms. Our solutions, built on Geosoft DAP and partner acQuire and ESRI technologies have been successfully deployed in major exploration companies and government agencies around the world. Our Global Solutions Group will build on this foundation, leveraging enterprise technologies, and our relationships with global customers and strategic partners to solve exploration IT challenges. We’re excited to extend our support for companies seeking enterprise solutions to help manage their growth and opportunity.”

John Mertl was named executive director of the GSG. His responsibilities will include strategic direction, market and business development. “I’m excited by the opportunity to support exploration companies seeking to deliver world-class exploration IT solutions to their front lines,” said Mertl. “In a market where geoscientific resources are a scarce commodity, it’s critical that our clients can focus their resources on exploration rather than on managing information technology. Better management of their data and technology can provide significant efficiencies and competitive advantage.”

According to Mertl, “Geosoft Global Solutions will focus on eliminating the complexity of exploration IT and delivering scalable, flexible capabilities throughout the exploration workflow, backed by the high level of service our clients have come to expect from Geosoft.”

Geosoft also said it has strengthened its relationship with ESRI, a geographic information systems (GIS) software developer, through a new collaboration to deliver integrated software and data management solutions for the mining and geosciences sector. Zinc and metallurgical coal producer Teck Cominco is the first mining company to participate, recently selecting Geosoft and ESRI as their global exploration IT solution providers.

Geosoft said Teck Cominco entered into an agreement that will enable Teck Cominco to deploy a scalable, integrated solution comprising Geosoft’s data server and application software along with ESRI’s ArcGIS and acQuire technology, across Teck Cominco’s global operations. The agreement, said Geosoft, establishes an interoperable software platform capable of addressing Teck Cominco’s growing exploration data management needs, and supporting collaboration between regional offices and horizontally across their operations, and vertically from exploration to resource calculation and engineering groups.

“We selected Geosoft and ESRI technology because we saw a strong fit with our need to establish a solid data foundation, and company-wide standard for our exploration systems,” said Bob Holroyd, director of global exploration technology for Teck Cominco.

Teck Cominco’s decision to deploy a global exploration technology solution followed a company-wide assessment that identified the opportunity to make exploration more efficient by increasing access to the company’s large database and maximizing its use and value in regional targeting and evaluation of new opportunities. Paul Roberts, senior project geologist with Teck Cominco headed up the review.

“When we looked at how we use and extract value from our geochemical, geophysical and geological exploration data, we recognized that technology had revolutionized every aspect of how we collect, analyze and share our data for the purpose of exploration and finding new discoveries. Based on our understanding of how the data fits within our workflow, we see tremendous advantage in having a global solution that makes it possible for us to efficiently manage and direct the flow of data to our geologists when and where needed. We also have projects that span several countries, and having the ability to share data, across our regional operations in a way that is geopolitically seamless is a new capability that supports the development of more opportunities.”