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Which way to the Land of the Free again?

OPINION European aerospace giant Airbus has lined up on the runway and is pushing the throttles forward as it prepares to evict apps from America.

Airbus has named French cloud services provider Scaleway as the destination for some 900 applications, with an initial 70 getting priority onboarding, as it seeks to put critical systems and data under European control. AWS, like all American platforms, can't protect Airbus's crown jewels from Donnie the Data Burglar, so it's best to repatriate them sharpish.

This by itself shows that digital sovereignty is a real commercial driver and not something concocted by Europe as some sort of virtue signal or a bargaining chip. Nobody would put sensitive data where the Russian or Chinese states could help themselves. America is now on that list. The details of the announcement are arresting too, with the critical list including ERP, CRM, and manufacturing systems.

What isn't mentioned is supply chain management, which sure looks like a critical system from here considering that Airbus has 18,000 suppliers globally. This is a thorny problem, one that's far harder to bring home than even a 900-app migration. Supply chain management is all about moving data between companies, and of those 18,000 suppliers, 17,998 will be Microsoft shops. 

Even if the supply chain is managed through a lovely EU-hosted portal, all the supplier data will also live on those suppliers' systems. Airbus isn't ditching Microsoft any time soon because there's nowhere to go. Likewise Google productivity apps because the only place to go is Microsoft.

It doesn't matter that all of the above is as vital to Airbus pushing the tin out of the door as anything else. There's no quick fix, and no medium-term fix either. Longer term is another matter, and Airbus's announcement will figure heavily in this.

The other big lacuna in the announcement is AI. On the face of it, this is even more intractable. America is making a trillion-a-year gamble on developing frontier models and bit barn bonanzas, and if you want in, you have to be there. Thing is, Airbus doesn't want in. It has a six-pronged AI strategy, but none of those prongs involve agents or code generation or line-of-business automation. Knowledge extraction, support chatbots, decision support, flight automation – all things that can be built and deployed on-prem. Besides, would you even want your aircraft running code by Claude?

We can't truly know the mind of Airbus from what it chooses to tell us, but it looks very much like it doesn't want AI in critical systems, and where that's unavoidable, it wants to do it itself.

AI may, in time, become non-optional for businesses – much as productivity software and data interchange are now – yet for digital sovereignty to work, there has to be an EU-based market in both that can provide flight paths back home that corporates of all types can take. 

Airbus has shown that the cloud service market can work with digital sovereignty, and it did it the old-fashioned way by announcing a tendering process, in itself a market-making event. It could do the same elsewhere, but while even a big migration is a tasty target for a competent cloud service, there's no such sector for productivity and desktop stuff.

Yes, yes, of course there's Linux and LibreOffice and all that, but there's no organization that can respond to a competitive tender request for a tightly specified Office/Workspace replacement. Nobody's done that before, which, for a risk-averse outfit like Airbus, is a big red flag. There are people who have the track record of managing large projects at that level, and there are people who understand building open source, but they don't live at the same address.

The good thing about productivity software is the global market. Were Airbus and others to ask for tenders at a sufficiently large scale, the concept of a blue-chip startup made from safe hands is not only plausible but positively tempting. It would take cooperation between enterprises, which would be a big test of how seriously they take true digital sovereignty. On the plus side, building on open source means there are no secrets to shield, so American tools and American companies would both be welcome.

Once there is a market in digitally sovereign software, it becomes much easier to look ahead at AI and other hard-to-escape aspects of the American digital hegemony. A full-fat, enterprise-grade software and services market will be a wonder to behold.

It could also change a lot more than how Europe runs its digital affairs. Those in other countries, distrusting their government and fearful of persecution, will be welcome to enjoy the protection and liberties that European digital sovereignty can provide. Call it the Reverse Mayflower. As they used to say in America, you're welcome. ®