Shekar Ayyar, VMware & Sachin Katti, Uhana | VMworld 2019

Shekar Ayyar, EVP & GM Telco Edge Cloud, VMware & Sachin Katti, Co-Founder, Uhana & Professor, Stanford University, talk with Stu Miniman & Justin Warren at VMworld 2019 from Moscone North in San Francisco, CA.

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Q&A: This acquisition is helping VMware enhance AI, 5G for mobile carrier networks

VMware Inc.’s acquisition of Uhana Inc. in July allowed VMware to tap into deep artificial intelligence and machine learning experience specific to mobile carrier networks and their operations. Uhana will help to power the VMware Service Assurance portfolio, enabling VMware to offer end-to-end integrated service monitoring and network management.

“Some of the parameters, in terms of what you want to achieve, are actually quite obvious,” said Shekar Ayyar (pictured, left), executive vice president of strategy and corporate development and general manager of the Telco Business Unity at VMware. “Things like fewer dropped calls for a cellular network … figuring out what the metrics need to be and what the tuning needs to be for the network, that’s where Uhana comes in in terms of their IP.”

[Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.]

Miniman: What was the genesis and the why of Uhana?

Katti: The thesis behind the company was: Can we use AI to learn how to program the network, rather than humans having to program the network to do management or optimization? So the vision really was: Can we build a network that learns how to optimize itself, learns how to manage itself? And the technology we are building is this AI pipeline that basically tries to deliver on that for mobile networks.

The other big driver is — the way I like to think about it is that the internet is going from a means of consumption to a means of control and interaction. So, increasingly, the applications we see driving the next big decade are where we are controlling things remotely over the network, like a self-driving car. So the applications are becoming a lot more demanding on the network. At the same time … network complexity is increasing significantly. So the motivation behind the company and why I thought that it was the right time to start the company was these two trends are going to collide with 5G coming along: The applications that are driving 5G and the network complexity increasing with 5G. So that’s why we started the company.

Warren: AI is actually kind of stupid in that it doesn’t know what an optimized network looks like. We have to show it what that is. So how do you actually train these systems to understand? What is an optimized network? How does the telco define this is what my network optimal state should be?

Katti: In networking, like with any other discipline that wants to use AI, there’s not a lot of label data available. So what is the state I want to end up at? What is a problem state, or what is a good state? All of this is labels that someone has to enter, and that’s not available at scale. and we are never going to be able to get it at the scale we want it. So one of our secret sauces, if you will, is semi-supervised learning. The basic idea is that we are taking a lot of domain knowledge and using that domain knowledge to figure out what should be the right features for these models so that we can actually train these models in a scalable fashion.

If you just throw it a lot of data at an AI model, it just does not converge. So how do I construct the features? And the other thing is, how do I actually define what a good kind of end-state conditions? What’s a good network?

Miniman: Give us a little bit of an understanding as to where this fits into the networking portfolio.

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(* Disclosure: VMware Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither VMware nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)