Ian Grierson began his career in petroleum exploration in 1968 when he joined Esso Australia as a seismic interpreter. Ian spent the next 14 years with Esso working on geological computing applications in Australia, Malaysia and at Exxon’s research centre in Houston.

He then worked at Mincom for two years. During this time, the IBM PC was first introduced and Ian, recognising the potential of personal computing, formed Encom Technology together with David Pratt in 1984. From its inception Encom committed its resources to the development of PC based technical software.

At that time, mainframes and UNIX based minicomputers dominated the exploration industry and PCs were considered by some to be mere toys.

Ian did not believe this and guided the development of a wide range of Encom products for seismic, log and map digitising, seismic mapping, risk analysis, log display and risk simulation. These products were brought to the market at a fraction of the cost of mainframe and microcomputer equivalents and allowed many independent explorers access to advanced technology at an affordable price. Those of us who were around at the time will remember fondly the acronyms for some of those early DOS programs and know how useful they were in the days before modern interpretation workstations.

Towards the end of the 1980s, UNIX was the dominant graphics platform for exploration companies and the PC was still considered to be best suited to less exciting tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting and the like. Encom, however, continued to believe in the future of the PC and made a strategic decision to focus on the development of a PC based GIS system for exploration data.

This product, GPinfo which was first released in 1990, is now in use by over 80 companies which subscribe to Encom’s petroleum information service. The software and associated data also form the basis for production of the permit map and book which Encom has supplied to the industry every year since 1989.

In the mid 1990s, Encom became aware of a problem of deterioration on the ½” magnetic tapes which were in use at the time to record seismic field data. After initial analysis which highlighted the fragile nature of these tapes, and after researching techniques for treating ‘sticky’ tapes, Ian became extremely concerned about the problem. He advised Australian Archives (then the custodians of seismic field tapes) that unless something was done to change the way in which companies were reading these tapes, much of the data would be irreparably damaged and lost forever. Shortly after this the Bureau of Resource Sciences obtained funds to begin recovery of seismic tapes held at Australian Archives’ repository at Villawood, NSW. Encom was one of three companies contracted to perform this work.

Ian committed Encom to a data recovery philosophy which required them, in many cases, to expend more effort on a recovery project than was necessary to satisfy the client. Ian maintained that Encom was in the business of recovering and protecting data and, for this reason, only the best recovery that it could perform was acceptable. Contributions such as this often go unnoticed. Without people like Ian and companies like Encom, who are committed to providing the best service they can, much of the data which has been recovered and protected would have been lost forever.

Today Ian’s vision is a reality. A PC is on everyone’s desk and Encom exports leading edge technology around the world. GPinfo continues to provide the best available permit database to the Australian industry and the Encom permit map and book are still recognised as the definitive products of their type.

Contribution to PESA

Ian has been an active PESA member since the mid 1980s and served on the NSW Branch committee from 1991 to 2002. During this time Ian developed and managed PESA’s membership database. It took considerable effort to clean up the membership records and track the constant movement of members. Ian also committed Encom’s resources to providing address labels and mailouts to members throughout the 1990s, prior to the Secretariat assuming this task. Ian’s wisdom, wit and hard work proved invaluable to the NSW Branch during his time of service as a committee member.