Airbus Defence and Space Selects Google Cloud Platform as Preferred Partner

October 18, 2016 - News

Airbus Defence and Space has launched One Atlas, a new basemap streaming service delivering access to its satellite imagery over the world, fully refreshed within a 12-month period. It is powered by Google Cloud Platform.

This service is a major leap forward for enabling access to satellite imagery for our customers by leveraging the power of Google Cloud Platform and Airbus Defence and Space technologies. A completely new approach in data storage, hosting and dissemination has been implemented utilizing Google Cloud Platform to ingest the several hundred Terabytes of data annually required by One Atlas. This will bring value to all our clients for a wide range of applications such as infrastructure preparatory studies, land management, agricultural lands and crop species mapping or even tree cover change detection in regions prone to deforestation.

"Our team at Google Cloud is dedicated to helping businesses find success with public cloud and innovative technologies, such as cloud machine learning. We're excited to collaborate with Airbus Defence and Space to create new products and transform existing business models through the power of Google Cloud Platform" said Carl Schachter, VP of Google Cloud Platform.

Google Cloud Platform was selected from seven public Cloud providers due to its high-end technology, security resilience and strategic fit with Airbus Defence and Space’s business and development roadmap.

"All satellite data collected each day are automatically processed and made readily-accessible in a global imagery library that is stored in Google Cloud Platform," said Bernhard Brenner, Head of the Intelligence Business Cluster at Airbus Defense and Space. "Google Cloud Platform's global scale, low latency and infrastructure capacities in Europe give us the required performance, flexibility and scalability for current and future data volumes, ensuring a high level of service for our customers."

Additional investigations into the use of Google Cloud Platform and other Google tools are currently ongoing at Airbus Defence and Space, e.g. the integration of other datasets such as TerraSAR-X radar data and WorldDEM into One Atlas, or the development of analytics services such as change detection and automatic object extraction. Very promising results have already been obtained from using Tensor Flow, an open source library for machine learning, and Cloud Machine Learning for automatic cloud detection.

About Airbus Defence and Space

Airbus Defence and Space, a division of Airbus Group, is Europe’s number one defence and space enterprise and the second largest space business worldwide. Its activities include space, military aircraft and related systems and services. It employs more than 38,000 people and in 2015 generated revenues of over 13 billion Euros.