Case Study: Thales Digital Factory achieves rapid innovation and 99.7% uptime with VMware Tanzu Application Service

How Software Innovation and Agility Brought Thales to New Heights

Thales, a global aerospace, transportation and defense company with thousands of software engineers, needed to modernize how it builds and delivers software as customers demanded faster, more innovative digital products. Its traditional, functionally organized development lifecycle was slow—taking months or years to reach production—so Thales created a Digital Factory to adopt modern practices and accelerate delivery.

The Digital Factory runs on VMware Tanzu Application Service (on Microsoft Azure and other clouds), using automation and integrated CI/CD to provision environments in hours, embed security via DevSecOps, and support hybrid deployments. The change boosted developer productivity and autonomy, cut time-to-start coding from weeks to hours (with some MVPs reaching market in months), and delivered high reliability—averaging 99.7% uptime—while meeting diverse customer deployment and security requirements.

Thales Digital Factory

Stéphane El Mabrouk

Head of Operations