Sustainable digital transformation at Rolls-Royce

As the world transitions to a net zero carbon future, the industries in which iconic British brand Rolls-Royce operates are some of the most critical – but they are also some of the hardest to abate.

For over 100 years, Rolls-Royce has delivered excellence through its engines. Doing so for the next 100 years will require a transition to new ways of working. Rachel Everard, Head of Sustainability at Rolls-Royce, says: “We want to be around for 100 years more. To achieve that, we will need to decarbonise at pace.”

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Delivering excellence

The company has a really exciting role to play in helping its customers – the airlines that choose Rolls-Royce engines for their fleets – reduce the carbon they produce. In this way, it has a unique role to play in accelerating the transition to a zero-carbon future.

Rolls-Royce understood that the power to optimise carbon output lay in processing, modelling and interrogating flight data. However, Benjamin Wilkinson, Head of Technology at Rolls-Royce, explains, “The magnitude of data volume and processing power that we needed was just not really possible or feasible with an on-premises hosted infrastructure.”

New insights using Microsoft Azure

Rolls-Royce turned to Microsoft and the Microsoft Azure platform for the compute power required. Combining this with Microsoft Power BI enabled Rolls-Royce to serve new data insights to the engineering team.

Sadaf Shah, Software Engineer at Rolls-Royce, says, “Last week, we managed to run 100 billion flights in Databricks on the Azure platform – this is just incredible.”

The team say that the scalability, security and sustainability credentials of the platform were key reasons for choosing Microsoft Azure. Benjamin Wilkinson explains, “The heritage of the brand that we operate as Rolls-Royce means we’re trusted to deliver excellence and our choice of technology has to reflect that as well.”

A better future

Stuart Hughes, CIO at Rolls-Royce agrees: “Every day we’re really grateful for the elasticity and the scalability that Microsoft gives us.”

The potential for the future – both in terms of using the new data insights to drive performance improvements and in terms of delivering on net zero carbon goals – is inspiring the Rolls-Royce team to drive forward at pace.

Rachel Everard says, “The future for Rolls-Royce is really exciting. Through partnerships like the one with Microsoft, we will deliver a net zero carbon future.”