The new platform, Vodafone Unified Performance Management (UPM), will give Vodafone customers a consistently faster and more reliable mobile network experience. It is currently being deployed across the eleven European countries where Vodafone operates and will inform the way Vodafone plans, builds, and manages its network over the next five years.
“As the needs of our 300 million plus mobile customers evolve so will our network using this new platform," said Johan Wibergh, chief technology officer of Vodafone.
"It is a global data hub that gives us a real-time view of what is happening anywhere on our network, uses our global scale to manage traffic growth cheaper and more efficiently as customer data consumption grows by around 40% per year, and supports the full automation of our network by 2025.”
Once live, Vodafone will be able to gather billions of network performance data points from a cloud data pool, using the new platform. It will replace over 100 existing network performance applications with a single cloud-based data source that can be optimised and analysed using AI.
The platform will inform Vodafone's 5G investment with the ability to pinpoint areas where the demand is the highest. It will also enable to add capacity and integrate new network connectivity in response to major incidents, public and political events, manage energy efficiency and restore services after severe weather storms.
“Moving data to the cloud while providing governance across multiple on-premises sites is an immense challenge,” said Vivek Gupta, director of network ai and telecom partnerships, global telecom industry solutions of Google Cloud.
“Cardinality.io’s close integration with Google Cloud unlocks immense value for Vodafone as it seeks to provide an unparalleled customer experience to its European subscriber base.”
To date, Vodafone has reported a decline in major network and IT incidents (70%) this year by simplifying and digitalising core operations. Over the next few years, it expects to resolve 80% of all incidents end-to-end without human intervention. This in turn is freeing up workforce to develop new products and services 50% faster, cheaper and at scale.
Vodafone UPM combines Google Cloud’s smart analytics portfolio and ML/AI tools with Cardinality.io’s telecoms expertise and cloud-native DataOps and analytics platform. All data is stored within Vodafone’s own on-premise data lake on servers in Europe.
“With Vodafone UPM, Cardinality.io provides the bridge that makes it possible to efficiently move data from multiple far edge locations to a centralised Google Cloud data repository,” said Prashant Kumar, chief technology officer and co-founder of Cardinality.io.
“Thanks to the Cardinality.io platform’s data virtualisation capabilities, open API interfaces and microservices-based architecture, Vodafone can choose the third-party tools it prefers for creating dashboards, reports and advanced analytics.”
