I recently spent a couple of nights in the middle of the Arabian desert (close to Abu Dhabi) and then a couple of nights in the middle of the Indian Ocean in the Maldives. A 4-hour flight separates the two places.

Both these places bring images to my mind – mirages, surreal landscapes and things beyond this earthly world. If you could peer into my brain, you would see the contrasts imprinted there somewhere between breathtaking physical beauty and harsh reality.

What devoured all my thoughts was the extreme effort man has made to live in these extreme conditions. Whether it is an ocean of water or sea of sand, people have staked a claim and live in these places.

The world’s largest sand desert is called the Empty Quarter Desert. The desert spills over into Oman, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. And it has earned its name. It is empty – very empty – except there are towns with hotels there too. It seems impossible that people living in such extreme conditions would even consider that someone would come to visit them!

On my visit, our driver told us his tale of helping his co-worker get his car unstuck from the sand. Mind you, it was the middle of the day, in the middle of the Empty Quarter desert. Pulling the car out was the easy part. It required simple physics and two Land Cruisers to overcome the sinking effects of the sand around the tires. But the heated sand proved more challenging. Their feet, in their open sandals, got severely burned. In the end, they resorted to wrapping their feet with their shirts.

I had heard the crazy notion of cooking an egg on the sidewalk, so I asked him, “Can you cook an egg in the sand?”

“Easily!” he said. “You can even prepare tea in the sand.”

Imagine that! Boiling water by placing a container of it in the sand. That is extreme heat!

Such an inhospitable environment may seem like a terrible place to work, but the drilling industry has been drilling in deserts and oceans for decades. Rich resources seem to reside in remote areas.

Another remote and hostile environment for drilling is offshore, in the ocean. Offshore wells can be found in water depths over 10,000 feet. Presently, there are drilling platforms in nearly every ocean in the world.

When considering how hard oil companies have to work to get to oil reserves, I am reminded of the expression, “Where there is a will, there is a way.” I also like to think that, “Wherever there is oil, there is a well” too. Whether it is an ocean of water or a sea of sand, someone is drilling somewhere and needs a software solution to handle their well data. I like to think PVI will always be there with them in every environment, in every place around the world.