KAPPA was created in September 1987 by two former Flopetrol-Johnston Schlumberger engineers who specialized in well test interpretation and production logging: Dominique Bourdet (1951-2003) and Olivier Houzé, who has been the Managing Director since Dominique left KAPPA in 1991.

Our story begins with a research contract for the development of analytical well test solutions for Elf in Norway. Then, as the PTA software market was already crowded with products acknowledged as ‘industry standards’, the idea was to continue to develop a Pressure Transient Analysis (PTA) research and consultancy company, not really involved in software at all. However, in the absence of a reasonable (read affordable) third party solution, a first set of routines was developed in order to perform the consultancy work. The initial specification was to combine a strong technical content and interaction / logic based on the methodology of the Bourdet derivative. The program would execute, by default, the successive steps required to perform an analysis using this methodology. In short, make it good, make it strong and make it easy.

After a year, and with a first set of routines ready, the first commercial efforts generated absolutely no consultancy work but, a little surprisingly, clients liked what they saw and the routines were turned into a commercial product, Saphir. The initial marketing was ‘word of mouth’ and by 1990 Saphir became the primary source of revenue. Very soon the first Saphir Corporate license was signed for the then Mobil. Olivier Allain, now KAPPA Technical Director, joined KAPPA in 1990, at the time Dominique was leaving.

The first generation of Saphir, released in 1988, was DOS based, written in Fortran and used GKS graphics. The second generation, released in 1993, was multi-platform (Windows, Macintosh and Unix-Motif), written in C (later complemented by C++) and used XVT graphics.

In 1994 KAPPA decided to develop a second product, Emeraude, for the interpretation of Production Log (PL) data. The market for such a package was not proven, but it was also the occasion to go through the useful learning curve for our third generation of development; 100% objects written in C++ on top of the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC). Emeraude was released in 1996, it proved to be viable and instantly became the leader of its small, but expanding, market. Saphir was then ported to generation 3 and released in 2000. It was at this time that Saphir became the world leader in PTA software, and there are now more than 2,000 active commercial Saphir licenses.

The development of Topaze in 2003 was a result of the demand for sophisticated Production Analysis (PA). This need originated from the proliferation of data coming from Permanent Downhole Gauges (PDG) and the fact that this data was stretching the handling capabilities of transient analysis software. Such data demanded specific treatment and a seamless transfer between PTA and PA software. This also gave rise to the development and release, in 2004, of our fourth product, Diamant, a Permanent Gauge Reservoir Surveillance tool.

Increasing the number of products bought its own new set of issues. Users of several of our products argued that they would like to have all of the applications under one environment to save them time and reduce the double handling of data and objects. This demand was at the origin of the specification of our fourth generation of software. Ecrin, released in September 2005, became a single environment workstation solution including Diamant, Saphir and Topaze. In 2008, Ecrin v4.10 was extended to include a full field reservoir model called Rubis. In 2009, this was complemented by a Well Performance Analysis (WPA) module, Amethyste.

Diamant was originally a workstation tool, allowing individual engineers to perform their own treatment of PDG data. It transpired that most companies wanted this to be done under a single process shared by all engineers. This was the basis for the development and release, in 2005, of the equivalent server solution, Diamant Master.

In the meantime the company has grown from two engineers working in a Paris servants quarters to something a little more substantial. By 2008 KAPPA had around 80 employees, mainly engineers, half of them in France and the rest spread between our regional offices in Houston and Bahrain, or on a plane or in a distant client office. Financially, over the last ten years KAPPA has grown at a strong and sustainable annual rate of 20%. We do not answer to banks or shareholders (being 80% employee owned) which means we can listen only to our clients.

Training and Consulting, the original idea behind creating KAPPA that had initially failed to get off the blocks, now accounts for 25% of KAPPA activity.

KAPPA is now preparing for the development of its fifth generation of software. But this is another story.