Halliburton Landmark improves user experience with Amazon AppStream 2.0

Halliburton provides products and services to the energy industry. Landmark provides Exploration & Production professionals with configured enterprise software to maximize asset value. Landmark’s Geosciences Suite, a DecisionSpace® 365 solution, helps energy customers characterize the subsurface with clarity. Landmark delivers Geosciences Suite to users around the world as a cloud-native service via the cloud platform.

End users traditionally accessed Geosciences Suite through Landmark-managed virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) where Landmark managed the VDI software, as well as the underlying compute, storage, and load balancing resources. Landmark sought a managed solution that would aid in reducing their operational overhead, improve user experience and the time required to onboard new customers and users, without a reduction in performance.

Landmark worked with the AWS End User Computing (EUC) team and identified Amazon AppStream 2.0 as a good fit for this situation. With AppStream 2.0, administrators create images that include Geosciences Suite and supporting applications. These images run on fleets of powerful, GPU-accelerated streaming instances. One image may be used by multiple fleets, with different instance sizes, to meet the needs of different user personas. The instances have low-latency connections to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances that provide supporting services such as persistent storage.

End users authenticate with their existing credentials, and stream Geosciences Suite using the Amazon DCV protocol. DCV provides high-quality, high-resolution streaming. It also encrypts data in transit, adapts to changing network conditions, and can use UDP streaming to improve performance under challenging network conditions.

During their evaluation, Landmark adopted the latest GPU-accelerated instances to increase performance. After extensive testing, they found that AppStream 2.0 met or exceeded their requirements. As a managed service, AppStream 2.0 also allowed Landmark to improve ongoing operational efficiency. Administrators apply application and operating system updates centrally, then validate and deploy updated images to fleets. They create scaling policies that adjust the capacities of these fleets according to schedules and in response to demand.

“With AppStream 2.0 streamlining deployment and management, we can now devote more time and resources to enhancing our industry-leading geoscience applications. This means we can focus on what truly matters: providing exceptional cloud-native user experiences for our customers, rather than managing VDI infrastructure.”

– Chandra Yeleshwarapu, Senior Director, Products, Customer Experience & Business Development, Halliburton Landmark

To discover more about AppStream 2.0, explore the Getting Started guide today. To learn more about Geosciences Suite and other iEnergy® cloud offerings, contact a Landmark expert.

About the authors

	Dylan Barlett is a Senior Developer Advocate on the Amazon WorkSpaces team. Previously at AWS, he worked with global customers as an End User Computing Specialist Solutions Architect. Outside of work, he enjoys traveling and home improvement projects.
	Haley Niven is a Solutions Architect at AWS focused on oil field service companies. She loves finding solutions to complex problems and leading teams to create lasting solutions for her customers.
	Trevor Beahm was an End User Compute Sales Specialist supporting global accounts at AWS. He assisted multinational customers in embracing and using EUC services on a global scale.