Planes, Trains, and Cloud: Bombardier Signs $700M Deal with IBM Cloud

Canadian transportation company Bombardier will spend around $700 million over six years in an extended partnership with IBM to use its cloud services.

The deal includes IBM services and IBM cloud management of Bombardier’s worldwide infrastructure and operations. The companies said this will be one of IBM’s largest cloud partnerships in Canada.

Cloud vendors like Microsoft and IBM are benefiting from customers north of the border making commitments to public cloud. Last week at Microsoft Build 2017, electronic signature technology provider DocuSign announced that it would use Microsoft Azure data centers in Quebec City and Toronto to expand its footprint in the country and comply with local data requirements.

“Bombardier’s global decision to extend its existing partnership with IBM and move to IBM Cloud is recognition of our broad expertise and experience helping our clients transform the business of IT to be more competitive, agile and secure through cloud computing and industry services best-practices,” Martin Jetter, senior vice-president, IBM Global Technology Services said in a statement. “We look forward to further developing our relationship with Bombardier and working with the talented team there.”

In 2015, Bombardier launched a five-year turnaround plan to improve productivity and reduce costs. The company said that its partnership with IBM will help it offload cloud management and focus on its core competencies as part of this strategy.

“As part of our turnaround plan, Bombardier is working to improve productivity, reduce costs and grow earnings. This IT transformation initiative will help us better integrate globally to create a best-in-class IT organization,”  Sean Terriah, Chief Information Officer, Aerospace and Corporate Office, Bombardier said. “With IBM, we will transform our service delivery model to focus on our core competencies, and leverage the best practices of our strategic partner across our infrastructure and operations.”