A new partnership between Microsoft and Boeing announced on Monday, July 18, will use Microsoft's intelligent assistant Cortana to make Boeing servers smarter and will move Boeing's suite of digital aviation applications over to Microsoft Azure.
Microsoft has announced the partnership on its blog post. According to the company, by using Microsoft big data and artificial intelligence applications, Boeing will be able to make its offerings better for airlines that use them.
By centralizing digital aviation applications on Azure, Boeing will be able to analyze large set of data from multiple sources. The Cortana Intelligence Suite will help airline operators to efficiently schedule pilots and cabin crews, to manage effectively inventory or proactively schedule maintenance based on the data intelligence they gather from the cloud.
According to TechCrunch, this partnership is still in its early stages. For the beginning, the focus is on the potential for Boeing to expedite certain tasks by using Microsoft software. The project will use data analysis on the info processed daily through Boeing's systems with the aim of eliminating effort and time wasted on frequently repeated processes.
In an industry like aviation, the connected systems are at risk that hackers would try interfering with those systems. Both Microsoft and Boeing will ensure that their system designs are secure.
According to Business Insider, this move is part of Microsoft's strategy to focus more on its cloud business and its growth. Last quarter, for instance, Microsoft's cloud services like Azure generated $10 billion.
The Microsoft Azure cloud boasted 120 percent year-over-year growth. By 2018, the company aims to reach $20 billion from cloud related services.
The interest manifested by the high-tech giant in the cloud technology comes at a time when the overall PC industry is shrinking. Since Microsoft did not invested significantly in the still growing mobile market and lacks a credible smartphone platform, the company counts on Azure cloud platform as a source of future revenue growth.
