“Cost is a big driver, but cost is not the only driver,” said Manoj Leelanivas (pictured, third from right), chief operating officer of Juniper. “If you look at [it] geopolitically across the world [and] what’s happening, data privacy is a big thing. People want to protect their domain, their individual unique secret sauce as much as possible, so there is that, and the big thing is sovereignty … Do you want to depend upon a hyperscaler, which is from a country which is not very friendly to you? There is a lot of momentum going on with every country, every sovereign nation trying to build their own secret sauce because this is the new arms race, AI is the new race.”

Leelanivas and Juniper executives, Raj Yavatkar (right), chief technology officer, Praveen Jain (third from left), senior vice president and general manager of AI clusters and cloud ready data center, and AE Natarajan (second from right), executive vice president and chief development Officer, spoke with theCUBE Research’s John Furrier (left) and Bob Laliberte (second from left) at the Seize the AI Moment event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed cloud fatigue and how the new “arms race” is creating a need for best-of-breed solutions in data privacy. (* Disclosure below.)

Companies seek data privacy, data sovereignty

On-prem centers may be the best solution for companies looking to host data within their region at a lower expense, according to Natajaran and Leelanivas. The latter estimates that over a period of three years doing on-prem costs half as much as cloud.

“People are extremely paranoid and concerned about data privacy, so they are looking at ways and means to actually do that,” Natajaran said. “We see people build out data centers on-prem with AI clusters for not just learning, but also for inference. Inference is something that needs to be very, very close to where the user and the edge is.”

Juniper looks to offer the speediest network connection with a horizontal architecture. Vertical integration can be more expensive, Yavatkar suggests, while a horizontal one allows Juniper to use the most advanced technology at every layer.

“You have a vertically integrated architecture, you could argue it provides the best solution,” said Yavatkar. “But with the introduction of open ecosystem where you start providing components from different players and still integrating them to provide the best solutions, creating [a] competitive environment for multiple places to do that leads to a better industry outcome …  The open ecosystem model will allow us to deliver best of breed solutions at lower cost.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the Seize the AI Moment event: 

Here’s the complete event video playlist:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Seize the AI Moment event. Neither Juniper Networks Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE