Vodafone this week released its cloud-native Unified Performance Management (UPM) platform that the operator claims will provide a more reliable mobile experience to Vodafone's European customers.

The platform taps Google Cloud's smart analytics portfolio, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) tools, along with Cardinality.io's cloud-native DataOps and analytics platform to update Vodafone's pan-European networks more quickly and efficiently via hybrid cloud architecture.

The UPM platform, which is being implemented in 11 European countries, will allow operating companies to gather billions of network performance datapoints, effectively replacing more than 100 distinct network performance applications used today. This will provide a single source of clean data located in the cloud that companies can analyze and optimize for using AI, according to the operator.

“As the needs of our 300 million-plus mobile customers evolve so will our network using this new platform. 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," Vodafone CTO Johan Wibergh said in a statement.

Vodafone plans to process eight billion mobile network performance events each day with its platform and use that data to monitor, manage, and enhance its mobile network and "critical national infrastructure" by narrowing in on the most relevant 5G investments. For example, demand for 5G is highest in cities, travel corridors, industrial hubs, and rural areas with spotty coverage.

The platform's data processing capabilities will allow the operator to add capacity or integrate new network connectivity in response to public or political events and other major incidents, manage energy efficiency, and restore network services after extreme weather events, for example. And Vodafone claims it'll be able to do this within minutes and hours rather than days.

Vodafone, an early adopter in Google Cloud’s push into the network operator market, assures all customer data will be stored in its on-premise data lake on servers in Europe. The operators claims data will be protected with security tools like encryption, anonymization, pseudonymization, and aggregation, and is only available to authorized users.

Vodafone says it has seen major network and IT incidents decrease 70% this year as a result of simplifying and digitalizing its core operations.

Within the next few years, the operator expects to solve 80% of all incidents end-to-end without any human intervention. "By simplifying data operations at scale and generating real-time insights, the new platform will make all these processes faster, smarter, and more [personalized]," the operator explained.