Boeing engineers crawl over a computer to work on an aircraft design. (Boeing photo / Bob Ferguson)
The multi-billion dollar competition to provide Boeing cloud computing services is over and the winner is… a three-way split. Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft will all receive a share of the business, Boeing announced today.
In a LinkedIn post, Susan Doniz, Boeing’s chief information officer and senior VP for information technology and data analytics, called it a “multi-cloud partnership.”
“This represents a significant investment in the digital tools that will empower Boeing over the next 100 years,” she wrote. “These partnerships bolster our ability to test a system — or an aircraft — hundreds of times using digital twin technology before deploying it.”
Doniz said Boeing will become more cloud-centric with “global scalability and elasticity without having to predict, purchase, maintain and pay for on-premises servers.”
Financial details related to the multi-cloud partnership were not disclosed.
Historically, most Boeing applications have been hosted and maintained through on-site servers operated by Boeing or third-party partners. You could argue that Boeing’s expansive intranet paved the way for today’s cloud computing services.
“Marketing and performing computer services is a whole new way of doing business,” said Boeing President TA Wilson in 1970 when Boeing Computer Services was founded.
In recent years, Boeing has moved from its own legacy computing infrastructure to cloud providers. For example, in 2016, the company chose Microsoft Azure to handle a significant portion of its commercial aviation data analytics applications.
At the time, that was considered a “significant victory” for Microsoft, but Boeing has also maintained relationships with AWS, Google and other cloud providers.
Some had expected Boeing to choose a primary provider as a result of the just completed bidding process. Last year, The Information quoted its sources as saying the deal could be worth at least $1 billion over several years — and that Andy Jassy, who is now Amazon’s CEO, called it a “must-win.” for AWS saw.
But if Boeing chooses one member of the cloud troika over the others, it cares not to tip its hand publicly — to the extent that today’s announcement consistently lists the three companies in alphabetical order. (If you happen to know who the big winner is, drop us a tip.)
This post Amazon, Google, Microsoft? Boeing chooses all 3 for cloud services
was original published at “https://www.geekwire.com/2022/amazon-google-or-microsoft-boeing-chooses-all-of-the-above-for-cloud-computing-services/”
