VMware officially launched its previously known Project Maestro under a more generic name, but provided a bit of spicy mustard by striking a deal with German telecom-giant Deutsche Telekom on an open virtual radio access network (vRAN) project.

The boldly named Project Maestro is now in the market under the more straight-laced VMware Telco Cloud Automation tag. The software platform is designed as an orchestration and automation layer underpinning current 4G LTE and 5G networks.

Gabriele Di Piazza, VP of VMware’s Telco Products and Solutions business, explained that the name change was deliberately made to emphasize the automation capabilities of the platform.

“What we are shipping is broader than just orchestration,” Di Piazza said. “We are evolving our portfolio from covering core network edge networking radio access network. Our plan is really about automation and you can see that reflected in the name.”

Di Piazza said the platform remains focused on helping service providers accelerate their time to market and onboarding of virtual network functions (VNFs), cloud-native network functions (CNFs), and network services. Service providers can use the platform to build and automate network services on top of VMware’s telco NFV platform, and it also enables interoperability across operators’ environments including core and edge as well as public and private clouds.

VMware has so far tested interoperability with VNFs and CNFs from Affirmed Networks, Metaswitch, Altiostar, Mavenir, Altran, VeloCloud, and Avi Networks.

Project Maestro was first unveiled last fall at VMworld Europe. It was one of a number of unveilings that focused on security, Kubernetes, and the telco cloud.

With the name change VMware is also increasing its efforts to help operators drive revenues from their upcoming 5G deployments. And in turn, that revenue should bolster VMware’s bottom line.

“As customers are looking to their 5G buildout, we see increasing interest in VMware solutions as key enablers of this critical transition,” VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said during the vendor’s most recent earnings call.

On its DT partnership, VMware is using the O-RAN standard to construct a vRAN platform that works with both 4G LTE and 5G networks. It uses standards-based Intel processors and the FlexRAN vRAN software reference platform to run vRAN workloads on top of VMware’s telco cloud platform.

The platform also uses a VMware-developed RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) that can adopt O-RAN open interfaces to support real-time radio resource management that can be delivered as an application running on top of the platform. Cohere Technologies and Mavenir are also contributing to the effort.

The platform is undergoing testing at DT’s headquarters in Bonn, Germany.

Di Piazza linked the vRAN work to VMware's acquisition last year of artificial intelligence (AI)-based vendor Uhana. Its core technology can be deployed in an operator’s private cloud or in its public cloud infrastructure and includes a stream processing engine that ingests subscriber-level network telemetry from the RAN, the core network, and over-the-top (OTT) applications.

“[Uhana] also infused an incredible amount of IP and intellectual capital on radio technology switching,” Di Piazza explained, adding that by using Uhana’s AI and statistical modeling technology it’s able to gain higher spectral efficiency for optimizing the scheduling and the processing in a radio network. He also noted that the vRAN work drives more cost efficiency by moving toward a cloud model using lower-cost, off-the-shelf hardware and open software.

“You can lower the cost of opex and capex and therefore make the radio more accessible and reachable,” Di Piazza said.

The move also propels VMware more deeply into the burgeoning vRAN space. There are currently multiple open source groups targeting this space, including Mavenir’s Open RAN Partner Ecosystem, the Telecom Infra Project’s OpenRAN Initiative, the ORAN Alliance, and Cisco’s Open vRAN Alliance.

Di Piazza said that this partnership is working with three “market making companies” in VMware, Intel, and DT that are “working at the CEO level on this.” And then there are the other partners like Mavenir that is providing the application and cohere with the scheduling, estimation, and re-coding of the platform.

“This is a real ecosystem that you can play in and deploy and we want to show that this is just not a science experiment,” Di Piazza said. “This is driving toward something that is going to lead through to deployment.”