Boeing Launches In the Cloud

The majority of the press surrounding cloud computing has been fairly abstract: how will the major players profit from the cloud, or control a user’s access to it? This week, Boeing, the Seattle-based manufacturer of airplanes, has put a more exciting spin on this coverage by launching a new website promoting its new 737 that is hosted entirely in the cloud. The site features a comprehensive view of the airplane. Users can zoom in on images of the individual rivets through the website thanks to the processing power of the cloud. Better yet, the zooming is seamless. Instead of time-consumingly clicking on 20,000 individual images, users can “fly” around the plane and enjoy smooth visual definition.

Boeing decided to utilize the cloud for the website so that it wouldn’t have to buy dozens of additional servers to deal with high traffic during trade shows and other heavily exposed events. The company is currently making roughly 30 737’s a month, but will increase that number to 42 in the next three years. The website was unveiled this week at the Worldwide Partners Conference in Los Angeles to a variety of praise.

While it’s hard to imagine the average internet browser ever legally buying a 737 themselves, the cloud storage makes great sense as both a sales tool and a promotional effort. After the initial excitement of the website wears off, Boeing will be able to scale down the amount of servers dedicated to hosting the site through Microsoft, or alternatively promote a new plane using the same amount of storage space.

While many excellent articles have been written describing how SaaS, IaaS and PaaS benefit companies, Boeing’s website may ultimately be one of the largest and easily graspable examples of this service in action. The general public is embracing the cloud slowly, but it is refreshing to see such a large corporation eagerly using the technology to its best advantage. It’s clear that cloud-based websites (and the subsequent highly skilled development teams that create them) are currently making the cloud a profitable venture. It will be exciting to see other large companies and marketing firms begin to adopt Boeing’s strategy for large scale product launches.