Blog #2 – The Airbus Metaphor, Reloaded.
Alessandro Bassi
bassi@eurescom.eu
Eurescom GmbH
Programme and Project Manager
The Airbus Metaphor, Reloaded.
Airbus has become a recurring metaphor for the EURO-3C project, and it’s a good one.
Decades ago, in a market dominated by American manufacturers, a group of European companies decided to join forces and build planes together instead of competing scattered and small. Nobody took them seriously at first. McDonnell Douglas, in particular, walked away from collaboration talks more than once: first in the late 1970s, and again in the early 1990s, when a near-merger between the two companies collapsed over a matter of pride at the negotiating table. History has been unkind to that decision, to say the least. Today Airbus doesn’t just compete with the American giants: it leads, by far, and there’s arguably no real rival left in its weight class. The cloud market looks strikingly similar today: while aviation once had Boeing and McDonnell Douglas towering over everyone else, the cloud universe has Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Europe, meanwhile, is scattered in a number of smaller providers that, taken individually, look like dwarfs next to the American giants.
What’s interesting is something that was announced mid-July: Airbus is moving around 900 of its applications, including ERP, CRM, manufacturing and product lifecycle systems, away from AWS and onto Scaleway, a French cloud provider, in a deliberate push for digital sovereignty.
I’ve seen up close how painful this kind of migration can be, even at a much smaller scale. A few years ago I was consulting for a mid-sized company with a data-hungry service. When they became Google partners and wanted to move from AWS to Google Cloud, the migration cost (in money, time and internal friction) was enormous, enough to shelve the project, and that was a fraction of Airbus’s footprint. For a company operating at Airbus’s scale, moving core systems from one provider to another is genuinely no small feat.
So, what does it mean? If one of Europe’s greatest industrial successes is willing to absorb the pain of a migration like this just to gain assurance over its own sovereignty, it shows where the wind is blowing. It suggests EURO-3C is positioned on the right path.
Which makes the Airbus metaphor a double one. Fifty years ago, Airbus proved that Europe could stop competing as fragmented national players and build something that could genuinely rival the Americans, through the discipline of pooling resources and playing a long game that outlasted a few bad quarters. Today, the same company is making a second point: that European strategic autonomy isn’t just a matter of hardware, aircraft, or defence contracts. It extends to something less visible but just as consequential: who holds the data, who can access it under foreign law, and who ultimately controls the infrastructure a company depends on to function.
Airbus didn’t move 900 applications off AWS because it was cheaper or easier. It did it because sovereignty, at a certain scale, becomes a strategic asset worth paying for, which is the same logic that justified building a European aircraft industry from scratch in the first place. That’s what makes the parallel land: Airbus isn’t just a metaphor for what EURO-3C is trying to achieve; it’s living proof that the underlying bet that Europe can and should build its own critical infrastructure and be willing to absorb the short-term cost of independence has paid off before, and will pay off again. Just as Airbus federated Aerospatiale, Deutsche Airbus, British Aerospace and a handful of other national players into something that could stand up to the Americans, EURO-3C’s vision is to federate Europe’s scattered telco-edge-cloud players into a credible and sovereign alternative to the US counterparts.
