VMware snapped up its second artificial intelligence (AI)-based vendor this month, announcing it would acquire Uhana, which uses AI and deep learning to automate network operations and optimize application performance. The deal follows on the heels of VMware buying Texas-based Bitfusion and bolsters VMware’s push to support 5G deployments.

Uhana’s core technology can be deployed in an operator’s private cloud or in its public cloud infrastructure. It includes a stream processing engine that ingests subscriber-level network telemetry from the radio access network (RAN), the core network, and over-the-top (OTT) applications. It uses that data to provide real-time, per-subscriber visibility.

It also has an AI engine that can discover and predict anomalies in the network or the application, prioritize anomalies by their estimated impact on overall operations, infer the root cause of the anomaly, and recommend ways to fix the issues.

This can reduce costs, improve operational efficiency, and allow an operator to offer a differentiated or customizable application experience that can generate new revenue streams.

Uhana founder and President Sachin Katti in an interview with Monica Paolini, founder and president of Senza Fili, said that the company is building an AI-enabled control plane engine for mobile networks.

“We apply principles of real-time AI to learn and then tune the control plane for network optimization, automation and application acceleration in mobile networks,” Katti explained.

Financial terms of the deal were not announced. Uhana’s founders came out of Stanford and started the company in 2016. It has raised an undisclosed amount of money from New Enterprise Associates through a pair of funding rounds.

VMware plans to integrate the Uhana platform into its Telco Cloud and Edge Cloud portfolio and use it to enhance its Smart Assurance and Smart Experience products.

“In some ways, the shift to 5G marks the ‘cloudification’ of the telecom industry, which requires a new paradigm and mindset,” wrote Alex Wang, vice president of corporate strategy and development at VMware, in a blog post on the deal. “After the transaction closes, we expect Uhana’s capabilities to round out our telco portfolio and help customers continually improve their networks.”

Shekar Ayyar, executive vice president and general manager of telco and edge cloud at VMware, recently told SDxCentral that the company’s 5G efforts are focused on management, operations, automation, and security. “We’re now working with an increasing number of telecom carriers. Over 70 providers are using us on the network side for some form of NFV,” Ayyar said, adding that more than 90% of carriers are using VMware technology in their IT data centers.

“The most exciting part of this in terms of 5G would be the companies that are using us for either the NFV architecture or SD-WAN deployments into the branch,” he said. “The extent of operationalization of the core network for carriers on NFV is expanding quite rapidly.” VMware also believes the next round of innovation riding the 5G wave will be defined by efforts to virtualize the RAN.

VMware touted its Bitfusion deal as boosting its ability to support AI and machine learning  workloads in its core vSphere virtualization platform. The Bitfusion platform focuses on the virtualization of hardware accelerators like graphic processor units (GPUs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) to bolster computing power. Its software platform decouples those specific physical resources from the servers where they reside so that those resources can be shared across the environment. The virtualization of these accelerators is traditionally done in hardware, which limits how those resources can be allocated across an organization.

Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager for VMware’s cloud platform business unit, explained in a blog post that this will help its customers “more efficiently use AI technologies on-premises and in hybrid cloud environments.”