Airbus has signed a cooperation agreement with Alibaba Cloud, the data intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, to cooperate on developing a Skywise Data Centre in China.

Skywise is Airbus' open data integration platform driving digital collaboration across the aerospace value chain. Skywise helps airlines to better optimise their internal operations, to save on costs and to support safety.

By partnering with Alibaba Cloud, and utilising the local data centre, Skywise will provide tailored services for Chinese domestic airlines, as well as features and tools for data compliance required for Chinese airlines to join the platform.

"We are delighted to offer Skywise to our customers in China and to create value from data together, benefiting the industry at large, as well as promoting the application of advanced analytics in the Chinese civil aviation industry," said Marc Fontaine, Airbus Digital Transformation Officer.

Since the beginning of 2019, Airbus has begun to provide advanced analytics services to Chinese domestic airlines through Skywise. To date, Spring Airlines, Yunnan Hongtu Airlines and Zhejiang Loong Airlines have connected to Skywise. Some 1,800 Airbus aircraft are operated by Chinese airlines today.

To date, more than 90 airlines have been connected to the Skywise platform for a variety of data analytics applications, with nearly 7,000 aircraft connected to the platform.

Contributed by Airbus