Data analytics specialist Cardinality has secured a deal to provide its data analytics processing capabilities to Vodafone. Working with Google Cloud, Cardinality is part of a multi-country performance monitoring solution that replaces over 100 network performance applications currently ticking away in Vodafone’s networks.
Called Vodafone Unified Performance Management (UPM), the platform combines Google Cloud’s analytics and ML/AI tools with Cardinality.io’s cloud-native DataOps and analytics platform. All data is stored within Vodafone’s own on-premise data lake on servers in Europe.
Vodafone said that it already has a more reliable network by “digitalising its core”, and by iplementing the ML and AI-led performance management solution, hopes to resolve 80% of network issues without human intervention “within a few years”.
As this 2018 piece that TMN ran on Cardinality makes clear, the company built its business case on its ability to manage data flows into and out of the data lakes and analytics engines that operators deploy. In this case that is Google Cloud, with whom Vodafone has partnered for its big data analytics functions. Allied to that was its cloud-native devops approach that meant it can take advantage of open source and other data streaming and management tools, letting telcos or their partners write their own algorithms to run their own use cases. it can also be deployed in a number of environments, from the edge to the centralised data centre.
“With Vodafone UPM, Cardinality.io provides the bridge that makes it possible to efficiently move data from multiple far edge locations to a centralized 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.”
The company previously had a public implementation with Telefonica, but the Vodafone deal provides more recent evidence of its key capability. It anounced a tie-up with Google Cloud in August last year. I said at the time the companies were working “to deliver a joint analytics solution that integrates the Cardinality.io platform with Google’s Big Query, Dataproc, Datafusion and AI/ML suite in a hybrid cloud at a major European telecom operator spanning its operations in various countries.”
