In a new release, issued jointly by Wallaroo.AI and VMware, the two companies made public a strategic agreement to collaborate on a unified edge Machine Learning (ML)/Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform that will be designed for the unique needs of global Communications Service Providers (CSP).
It’s become clear that 5G connectivity is a gateway technology that can open doors to previously unavailable profit centers for legacy industries like telco. In order to enable those new monetization opportunities, companies need to leverage AI and ML at the edge of their networks. According to the release, this VMware/Wallaroo.AI solution is intended to mitigate the many challenges involved in these implementations and help CSP drive more value from their AI projects. It reportedly will enable easy deployment, efficient inferencing, and continuous optimization of ML models to 5G edge locations and distributed networks, while also offering an operations center as a central control hub from which to observe, manage, and scale these deployments.
“Our partnership with Wallaroo.AI will equip telecom operators to much more easily put their ML to work in distributed 5G networks, whether that’s to better secure and optimize the networks themselves, or to provide low-latency services to businesses or consumers, all while removing the underlying complexity,” said Stephen Spellicy, VP, Service Provider Marketing, Enablement and Business Development, VMware.
The announced solution will be designed for easy deployment of models trained in one environment to many edge endpoints, easier testing and continuous optimization of live model accuracy, automated observability and drift detection, serving full-fidelity models even in resource constrained edge environments, and integration with common ML development environments (such as Databricks) and major Cloud platforms (such as Azure).
“We assembled the Wallaroo.AI team to have deep first-hand experience of the challenges enterprises face getting Machine Learning to actually realize value – whether in the cloud, at the edge, or distributed networks,” said Vid Jain, CEO and founder, Wallaroo.AI. “That’s why we created a software platform that dramatically improves the likelihood of success and lowers the cost for ML in production. Building partnerships for integrated solutions with leading firms like VMware allows us to offer best-of-breed solutions in different industries, and I am really excited to be working with VMware on this joint vision for telco customers.”
Both VMware and Wallaroo.AI are members of the Open Grid Alliance (OGA), which works to advance the real-time immersive, intelligent world at the edge.
