Telus, or its predecessor Alberta Government Telephones (1906-1990), has been a tech mainstay in the oilpatch for, well, since there's been an oilpatch.

It's a symbiotic relationship that's driven innovation and lots of profit. Fuelled by oil company (and government) business, Canada's first digital switching equipment was installed in Alberta in 1980. The country's first competitive cellular phone service was introduced in 1982, to serve Alberta's resource industries.

Of course a lot has happened since then, and Telus now faces stiff competition for both traditional and 'value added' energy-sector business.

It's not just coming from other telecom companies. The likes of IBM, CGI, Halliburton and Schlumberger are in there, too. There's money in the oilpatch and everybody wants it. And the Telus people say they're up to the challenge.

"This is a turnaround story," says Monty Carter, managing director of Telus Business Solutions. "We have 8,000 people in Alberta and it will be up over 9,000 by the end of the year."

Carter points to the company's healthy numbers - $7.6 billion in annual revenue and $3.1 billion EBITDA for 2004.

His colleague Jeff Lowe, vice- president of marketing, energy and utilities, shows off an independent online survey done for Telus by the Canadian Energy Research Institute (CERI). "It's really a perpetual project," says Lowe, "since companies can participate on an ongoing basis and get instant benchmark data."

The online assessment requires that you sign up by contacting a Telus representative. Once you're logged in, you answer a bunch of questions and your results will be compared to the answers of 350 energy and utility companies in Canada and the United States.

So, what's on the minds of energy and utility executives? Controlling infrastructure and labour costs ranks high, as does improving the safety of field workers. Just about everybody wants better connectivity to remote sites, and improved ways of notifying citizens about emergencies and potential hazards. New industry-specific reporting requirements and regulations were also identified as an issue.

Of course, some of the 70 items had to be rated 'low' or this wouldn't be a study. Those included reducing the costs of processing seismic data, reducing the cost of modeling reservoir data, and more effectively measuring lost or unaccounted for pipeline products.

As you might have guessed, Telus is Johnny- on-the-spot with a proposed solution for most of the high-priority issues (and many of the others, for that matter.)

One example is "Camp in a Box," which combines voice, data and video services for construction sites and other facilities. It can handle everything from voice calls to security monitoring using a mix of fibre, copper, satellite, cellular and fixed wireless technologies, all Internet protocol-based. This product is already being used by five companies, Carter says.

Carter adds Telus made a decision 18 months ago to beef up its commitment to the energy sector. Millions have been invested and more than 1,000 employees are involved in the area.

Of course, one of the beauties of the Internet is that a company can do business anywhere, but Carter says Telus focuses on the Western Canadian basin.

"It's still a people-intensive business," says Carter. He points to Telus's large, secure data centre in Calgary, plus facilities in Victoria, Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. If a client is concerned about the safety of data or processing capability, for example, it's easy to arrange an out-of-province backup.

Bell Canada has taken a different approach to the oil and gas market, says Cheryl Sewell, industry marketing manager at Bell.

"We don't have a dealer network like Telus, so we have Bell-branded trucks that go out from Lethbridge to Fort McMurray," she says."They do in-vehicle installations, hardware repair, and training for our energy-industry customers."

Recognizing the potential of the oilsands market, Bell has just hired an account manager to be based in Fort McMurray and is also opening a Bell store there. Sewell says they have just over 30 employees working on oilpatch business, specifically on the wireless side, and she estimates about the same number are devoted to wired communications. She cites Collicutt Energy Services, Burlington Resources Canada, TCPL and Halliburton Canada as Bell customers in this sector.

In this "everybody-does-everything" technology donnybrook, everyone is looking for new markets and new products to sell them. Traditional phone companies are even getting into the computer business. Jeff Lowe says Telus has a new service that provides time on a Sun Microsystems hardware grid for $1 US per CPU per hour. Oldtimers may remember the computer service bureaus that used to pepper downtown Calgary. They're back and run by, of all people, the phone company.

The CERI study, which is proprietary to Telus, surveyed both Canadian and U.S. firms, so there are some interesting comparisons possible. "Reducing labour and connectivity costs for new site construction shows significant higher levels of investment planned in Canada than the United States," the study notes, probably because of oilsands projects. And our neighbours to the south are more likely to put a priority on "cross-border connectivity" than we are.

At the energy marketing and retail level, "being able to communicate more rapidly changes in pricing to wholesale and retail channels" and "reducing the costs of POS (point of sale) credit and debit transactions" ranked high.

One could have guessed that from watching the price swings at the gas station and the growing number of people who pay at the pump. Still, it's nice to see that industry executives are in touch with reality.

Utility companies were also surveyed and they wanted more efficient meter data management and better techniques for facility inspection. Improved dispatch scheduling came third with them. Telus already counts utility biggies such as Enmax and Altalink as customers, and of course they want to keep them and lure others.

This tell-us-what-you-need-and-we'll-tell-you-how-we-deliver-it approach is clearly an attempt to solidify, protect and grow Telus's position in the energy sector. If it was just a one-shot survey, it might be of limited value. But the ongoing nature of the project should keep the leads coming in.

Web watch:
www.telus.com/energyassessment

(Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)