In this interview, Gordon Murray, SVP of Energy & Enterprise at Quvia, formerly known as Neuron, shares his journey in telecoms and energy, highlighting the industry's challenges and opportunities—from digital transformation to AI and hybrid connectivity solutions. He also shares how Quvia is helping the industry transform remote communications by optimizing network performance, improving operational efficiency, and enhancing crew welfare with optimized onboard QoE.
Let’s start at the beginning—what sparked your interest in connectivity, especially within the energy industry?
Wow... making me think back far! I started out in telecoms, working with BT. That was over 25 (cough)... years ago! There, I was fortunate to benefit from what is revered by many as world-class ‘customer centric’ training. Since then, I have worked across B2C and B2B, delivering solutions to a large number of global and national brands spanning retail, automotive, finance and … offshore oil & gas.
I’m from the North East of Scotland, where the offshore sector value chain is all around, including global energy operators, manufacturing, logistics, and more. I found the industry fascinating and had the opportunity to join RigNet (now known as Viasat Energy Services), which delivers offshore managed comms. This opened me up to the offshore and remote connectivity world, which I enjoyed on so many levels. I immersed myself in the sector, completing a Master’s degree specialised in the energy industry and had an amazing experience at RigNet delivering solutions across the globe. I then went on to lead energy and maritime sales at Ceragon Networks, focused on low-latency, high-throughput microwave links, just as the industry’s digital transformation push was accelerating.
I love the energy sector and feel extremely fortunate to have experienced the diversity of delivering satellite, microwave and LTE solutions across the U.S., South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia! I am not aware of many industries that provide such excitement, variance, and learning opportunities. Being involved in projects that have improved the operations and the lives of people offshore and remote gives me a real sense of contributing.
The opportunity to bring Neuron—now Quvia—and its AI-driven platform to the sector felt like the perfect next step. With quality of experience (QoE) at its core, Quvia is focused on customer outcomes, both in our company culture and our approach to developing our technology. With hybrid comms becoming the standard, I see this as a pivotal moment for remote connectivity in energy, not to mention an extremely exciting journey for us all at Quvia!
What are the biggest challenges and opportunities you’d see for the industry?
The industry is facing the dual challenge of managing the energy transition while also embracing the opportunities AI brings across the value chain. Safety, operational excellence and efficiency are top priorities, with key measures such as minimising NPT (non-productive time) on offshore assets and rigs. Companies have to balance maintaining the highest levels of safety while driving efficiencies and increasing productivity output.
Within connectivity, IT/OT and telecoms specifically, there is ambiguity around how to mix traditional and newer connectivity options. Starlink shook up the market with its high-bandwidth, low-latency service. Now, companies like Eutelsat OneWeb, Amazon Kuiper, and Telesat Lightspeed are joining in, making the landscape exciting and highly competitive. These services are different from the CIR/MIR models customers once relied on, and even offer consumption-based packages. SLAs vary, so customers need confidence in performance experience, strong cybersecurity, and optimized QoS for their business needs. Balancing these technologies with traditional terrestrial services, while controlling costs and maintaining security, is critical. Equally important is ensuring a supportive crew environment to attract and retain skilled workers and prioritize their wellbeing.
All of this change has opened new opportunities for the offshore market to embrace hybrid connectivity. Across energy and remote comms, we’ve seen lots of consolidation in everything from large drilling contractors to satellite operators—and bringing technologies and infrastructures together creates natural challenges. Quvia helps companies navigate this shift and supercharge these connectivity options with intelligent network orchestration.
While there’s some commoditization going on, the opportunities for the industry and its service providers are moving towards software-defined everything, where the applications and their user-experience becomes front and centre of the end-user’s interest.
You mentioned hybrid connectivity—can you dive deeper into that and explain how Quvia helps companies navigate the shift?
It’s now common for sites and vessels to have two, three or even four different connectivity links. That includes offshore LTE, as well as LEO, MEO and GEO satellites, and even microwave and fiber are being used as part of their hybrid comms mix. Adding to the complexity, LEO and MEO satellites move by the nature of the service (Low Earth ‘Orbiting’ and Medium Earth ‘Orbiting’), and as with all wireless technologies, conditions fluctuate, which has an impact on traffic performance.
Quvia helps companies navigate this complexity by giving them complete agility and control over their connectivity. The platform dynamically orchestrates traffic to make the most efficient use of their traffic, accounting for all available bandwidth spanning multiple providers, orbits and networks. This enables customers to choose the right mix of connectivity solutions for their needs, backed by a platform that can scale as the digital landscape continues to evolve.
Adding to the complexity—new technologies bring new opportunities, each with unique functional and commercial traits. Offshore connectivity solutions must handle diverse applications running over multiple connection types, each with varying latency, bandwidth, and performance parameters. That’s where Quvia excels. We have focused on these complex challenges to elevate the offshore connectivity experience, and the results are breathtaking!
How does Quvia’s work in the energy industry differ from its work in passenger-focused industries like cruise and aviation?
What’s fantastic about Quvia’s technology is that it provides value across so many industries. The same technology that is used to improve passenger experience in cruise and aviation has the ability to help energy companies work much more effectively and improve welfare.
Quvia enables offshore energy rigs, platforms and vessels to operate more efficiently. They can do more with their existing investment, or they can expand their connectivity to fully maximise the experience and the investment for their organisation, with assurance that the expansion gains a full investment return. The result is better performance for the operation, which helps reduce costs and enhance productivity, improve crew welfare, and provide an all-around safer environment.
The ability to adopt new LEO services, integrate them securely and bond them with other technologies to improve efficiencies is a game-changer. This helps operations maintain their high level of operational reliability, while ensuring that their hybrid network is pushing data packets to the best route every moment of the day, period. Having your offshore location connected to a real-time operation center allows you to centralise skills and have support across multiple rigs or platforms. Many energy companies have moved to this model and utilise what connectivity they have for remote operations, however most are yet to fully benefit from the enhancement of our AI traffic management, which improves connectivity by a significant factor.
In recent customer deployment, we saw something simple, yet extremely important—the ability to have uninterrupted, high-quality video calls between onshore and offshore teams demonstrated quantifiable value, in addition to being a more pleasant experience. At the same time, the engineering teams reported smoother performance on key applications, while off-shift crew enjoyed better video calls and streaming. These improvements highlight the importance of reliable connectivity for everyone in remote environments. Once customers experience a network powered by Quvia, they want it as the standard for their sites and future projects.
We have discussed energy at length, and there are clear benefits for end users. What similarities and differences do you see in the enterprise markets?
Data demand is accelerating at a significant pace and, in the energy sector, Quvia is becoming the foundation of a new landscape for applications which opens up significant untapped potential. Enterprise has accelerated to become much more cloud native today, and is about exploiting that landscape. There are many synergies between the two, however the use cases and problems we are solving are often very different. Whether we are improving QoE while at the same time delivering 30% efficiency in consumption through flow management to a mobile operator backhaul solution, or, helping improve drilling data flow for the offshore energy customer while maintaining the highest QoE for their daily Microsoft Teams calls and crew services, the same Quvia core intention applies… to significantly accelerate digital experiences by providing unparalleled visibility, insights and control over their connectivity.
How does Quvia work with partners?
Quvia’s priority is improving the experience for end-customers. Through direct engagement with customers and close collaboration with industry partners, we’re uncovering co-development opportunities that empower customers to dictate their connectivity needs rather than being limited by them. Our partners see the value in what we are bringing to the sector, which is extremely important. Quvia is designed specifically for remote connectivity environments, built from the ground up with customers in mind—something this industry has long needed. With hybrid connectivity becoming the norm, our solution is more relevant than ever.
For too long, the industry has relied on solutions designed for static environments that don’t align with the unique challenges of remote operations. Quvia bridges this gap, offering a tailored, adaptable approach. It’s inspiring to see customers share our excitement for a connectivity solution that truly works for them!
To learn more about how Quvia helps accelerate digital transformation across offshore and onshore sites, check out this post and send us a note here to schedule a demo.
