IBM Consulting helps Airbus achieve full autonomy while sustaining the A220 Programme.
After acquiring a majority stake in the A220 aircraft Programme, Airbus, a leading aircraft manufacturer, was operating within the constraints of the shared IT infrastructure of the seller. Not having full control of the IT environment impeded Airbus’s capacity to undertake the digital and business transformation necessary to meet their strategic objectives. Airbus aimed to achieve full autonomy in 18 months—from July 2023 to January 2025—removing all dependency on the seller, while continuing their industrial ramp-up.
However, the integration of applications and infrastructure into Airbus’s environment was not without challenges.
The complexity of the integrated landscape posed a considerable obstacle as it compromised numerous legacy applications. Previous attempts at separating from these systems had yielded suboptimal results due to complex upstream and downstream integrations between systems and global collaboration with 300+ suppliers.
To successfully execute this transition, Airbus needed a robust partner capable of navigating this complex IT environment and facilitating a seamless move to the cloud in a highly regulated environment—in less than 18 months—for all 100+ integrated applications. These integrated applications represented the backbone of the A220 Programme, including product lifecycle management (PLM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), manufacturing execution systems (MES) and customer services.
Moving to the cloud and becoming an autonomous entity was paramount to maintaining Airbus’s competitive edge in the dynamic aerospace industry. Not only was the move to the cloud fundamental to improving the A220 Programme, it served as a foundation for their broader ambitions of scaling and transforming A220 operations.
Airbus relied on IBM Consulting® whose team strategized a hybrid cloud approach to migrate critical workloads to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This strategic move aimed to:
- Decouple Airbus’s systems and operations from the A220 acquiree, becoming an autonomous company in less than 18 months with IBM owning cloud migration of all A220 integrated applications supporting core business operations
- Maintain integrity and efficiency of the A220 Programme by ensuring data integrity and compliance during migration and minimizing operational impacts
- Support business growth by providing a robust, agile and resilient IT infrastructure
Applications and data were moved to Airbus’s GCP tenant based on the following steps:
- Step 1: Executing a successful move of 800+ virtual machines (VMs) from the seller’s on-prem environment to the seller’s cloud tenant
- Step 2: Cloning 550+ VMs from the seller’s cloud tenant to the Airbus cloud tenant, setting up more than 200 interfaces and configuring all of Airbus A220’s 100 core applications supporting critical business processes in PLM, ERP, MES and customer services.
IBM also helped modernize and transform some critical applications to align with the A220 Programme standards.
IBM Consulting delivery teams used IBM® Consulting Advantage for Cloud Transformation built with IBM watsonx® technology for key program support materials and internal workflows, which boosted accuracy and enabled faster, better-informed decisions.
The highly integrated ecosystem of applications and processes, as well as the high volume of data involved, led to a complex migration. By finding the right vendors and experts to tackle the task, IBM seamlessly consolidated multiple solutions to deliver a unique customer experience. These solutions included:
- IBM Power® for Google Cloud: By leveraging the IBM AIX® platform, a seamless lift and shift was enabled from an on-prem solution to the cloud platform with native integration to other cloud services.
- Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCvE): GCvE is the platform of choice for as-is migration of VMware workloads from on prem to cloud.
- Google Cloud NetApp Volumes (GCNV): GCNV was used to migrate NFS storage from on prem to cloud.
- Red Hat® OpenShift®: OpenShift was used to host IBM Instana® VMs in a cloud container.
- IBM Terraform® and Red Hat Ansible Automation: The IBM Terraform tool and the Red Hat Ansible Automation platform were used for infrastructure as code automation to accelerate cloud build and migration.
- IBM Aspera®: IBM Aspera is a high-speed data transfer solution enabling secure and scalable movement of large files from on prem to cloud to accelerate migration.
- Advanced cloud-native firewalls were deployed to secure network traffic and enforce a zero-trust security model.
- Robust load balancing solutions were implemented to ensure high availability and efficient traffic distribution.
- Dell Data Protection Suite (DPS): DPS was used to efficiently back up and replicate to, from and between hybrid cloud environments for maximum data mobility.
- IBM Instana®: IBM Instana is an observability platform for real-time infrastructure and application performance monitoring and management.
Red Hat technologies were critical for the success of this project:
- Over 300 Red Hat Linux VMs were cloned, adjusted and migrated, with wide a range of Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions. Most of the VMs were transferred using VMware HCX, reducing the downtime to a minimum.
- Over 30 OpenShift containers were deployed to host the IBM Instana monitoring tool.
- Ansible playbooks were heavily used to deploy software and packages.
With this strategic migration, IBM Consulting facilitated Airbus A220’s digital and business transformation journey by allowing for all A220 applications to be completely separated from the seller in a new cloud environment. It provided the required scalability to support the strategic objective of aircraft production ramp-up. With this autonomy, A220 is not dependent on any operations performed by the seller.
In a rapid 18-month period, Airbus successfully separated from the seller as planned, while increasing the production cadence from 6 to 10 aircraft per month.
The IBM Aspera technology accelerated the transfer of over 1 billion files and more than 2.5 petabytes of unstructured data by four times the speed of a traditional file transfer approach. This 18-month project provided Airbus with an Airbus-owned IT environment and positioned them for future growth and success.
IBM Terraform played a pivotal role in the deployment automation of most of the infrastructure and server components deployed on the cloud platform, accelerating by a factor of more than 10x those deployment times.
IBM’s approach allowed Airbus to maintain the integrity and efficiency of the A220 Programme, with no operational disruption. Within just a few days following the transfer, the A220 Programme was operating in nominal mode. The environment was stable, and operational performance was comparable to or better than the previous year’s performance levels with a 15% increase in the number of production work orders closed per day at the Mirabel plant and a 20% increase in engineering releases evolution per day.
Engineering Supplier Collaboration solutions were also migrated to cloud regions in Europe and Asia. They were previously installed on prem at Airbus’s suppliers. With the new solution, Airbus has accelerated supplier onboarding time significantly, reduced required investments from suppliers from $1 million to around $150,000 and lowered latency for suppliers collaborating with Airbus.
End users experienced a 30% performance boost on core systems such as ERP, leading to an enhanced user experience. Financial month closures processing was expedited by up to 40%, finishing 7 hours earlier while facilitating faster detection of any cost or revenue discrepancies. Material requirements planning (MRP) jobs have also improved performance by 45%—finishing 11 hours earlier than the 20+ hours they took previously—allowing for quicker identification of material requirements, while batch job executions have seen a 50% improvement.
With full autonomy ensured through the hybrid cloud migration, Airbus is now poised to partner with IBM on the next phase of modernization. As the primary partner for A220 application management services and platform engineering services, IBM will continue to play a vital role in Airbus’s success, not only sustaining the performance and efficiency of their cloud infrastructure but also driving innovation.
This next phase will focus on optimizing operations, enhancing agility and unlocking new value, ensuring Airbus maintains their competitive edge while achieving greater ROI through reduced costs and increased efficiency.
Airbus is a leader in developing sustainable aerospace for a safe and united world. The Company constantly innovates to provide efficient and technologically advanced solutions in aerospace, defense and connected services. In commercial aircrafts, Airbus designs and manufactures modern and fuel-efficient airliners and associated services
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