C-Suite My first questions to the

• What is important to the business right now?

• What is the focus of the CEO, Board of directors?

• What is the competitive situation?

• What is top of mind for what they are trying to accomplish?

• How do you get the value from being in the cloud?

• How do you maximise the value that you are deriving?

• How do you make sure you have control of costs expected. And it is not bad news, it is just less growth than people were expecting over the last few years, and perhaps they over-invested.

• How do you use the cloud as a way to control spending?

One of the powerful things about the cloud and about digital transformation is that ability not to have to make speculative investments based on projections of growth. You can quickly align with whichever direction the economy is going.

If you need to grow, you grow. If you need to shrink, you shrink, and you shrink your cost structure at the same time. I think that is what digital transformation really is about.

Sometimes, instead of that kind of agility, the agility to adjust, it is framed as the ability to innovate or disrupt or respond to disruption.

And I think the cloud is very powerful for that too because innovation, it has its risks, traditionally.

One reason why companies do not innovate as much as they want to is because innovations are new and they have challenges and risks with the cloud. And with digital transformation, the goal is to reduce the risk of trying out innovations, trying out new ideas.

Amazon created the idea of chaos engineering, trying to cause failures in order to see the different ways that components need to be protected from failure. So, we engineer groundup for the best availability and resilience and of course security built into everything.

[BT] When you are talking to CEOs, what are the typical metrics that they want to know about and that you discuss with them?

[Schwartz] CEOs primarily are not focused on the details of the cloud architecture or anything like that, they are very much focused on things like innovation, getting the right skills into their organisation, driving change.

A very common topic of conversation is, we need to operate very differently as we transform and as we move to the cloud. Do we have the right people to operate in the new ways, and do we have the right culture very much on their minds? We rarely talk about the infrastructure itself. Where I can best help the executives of the customers is in figuring out how they are going to get that value.

The cloud is a big part of that transformation. And I am going to try to bring what I learned from the other companies I talked to, and especially from my own experience, bring ideas for them on how they might accomplish some of the things they are trying to accomplish. n

Boeing agrees to purchase 21 million litres of sustainable aviation fuel produced by Neste

Boeing has announced that it has agreements to buy 21.2 million litres of blended sustainable aviation fuel, SAF produced by Neste to support its US commercial operations until 2023. These agreements more than double the company’s SAF procurement from last year. Neste MY Sustainable Aviation Fuel, made from 100% renewable waste and residue raw materials such as cooking oil and animal fat waste, is blended with conventional jet fuel at a 30:70 ratio to produce the blended SAF. The purchase agreements include the supply of this blended SAF which meets strict sustainability criteria.

EPIC Fuels, Signature Aviation, and Avfuel companies will provide 2.3 Million gallons and 300,000 Gallons of this blended SAF respectively for the Boeing ecoDemonstrator flight test programme and the company’s commercial sites in Washington state and

South Carolina. Boeing will also purchase an additional three million gallons of the same blended SAF from EPIC Fuels and Signature Aviation, generating emissions reduction credits for commercial deliveries, Dreamlifter, and executive flights. These benefits are generated by a book-and-claim process that displaces petroleum jet fuel with SAF in fuelling systems outside the company’s fuel supply.

In 2021, Boeing pledged to deliver commercial aeroplanes that are capable and certified to fly on 100% SAF by 2030. SAF reduces CO2 emissions by up to 80% over the fuel’s life cycle with the potential to reach 100% in the future and is recognised as having the greatest potential to decarbonise aviation over the next 20 to 30 years. SAF is certified for commercial use and can be blended up to 50% with traditional jet fuel without any modifications in aeroplanes, engines or fuelling infrastructure.