“We have the advantage that we are many.”

Javier Arnáez on how cooperation and open source provide Europe’s competitive edge in the global AI race.

January 2026

In Conversation with Javier Arnáez, Manager of Arsys Lab

As a long-standing player in the cloud market, how does Arsys position itself today and what are the main strategic pillars that define your cloud offering?

“As a European cloud provider, we position ourselves as a comprehensive and flexible partner, capable of meeting the needs of a wide range of customers. Our focus is to simplify all the complexity inherent in IT infrastructure.

We concentrate on four central strategic pillars. The first is service diversity. We offer a broad portfolio of cloud solutions that includes both Public Cloud and Private Cloud. All our solutions are flexible, allowing customers to deploy complex infrastructure within minutes. The second pillar is data privacy and security, the invisible core of our offering. Our third pillar is interoperability, which is essential for us to avoid any form of vendor lock-in. Finally, sustainability plays an increasingly important role in our strategy. We prioritise working with suppliers who provide carbon-neutral electricity for our data centres. Furthermore, we maintain a strong focus on efficiency in how we design and build our facilities, which ultimately minimises water consumption and reduces our overall energy footprint. Sustainability isn’t just an operational goal; it’s a guiding principle.”

Can you describe your engagement with the 8ra Initiative?

“Our engagement with the 8ra Initiative is that we provide mainly our infrastructure. As an infrastructure provider, we are currently enhancing our APIs to easily integrate our server resources with the metal orchestrators being developed by other partners in the 8ra Initiative, making our cloud capacity readily available across Europe.”

What are in your opinion the business challenges for European companies using cloud services?

“For many European companies, especially the smaller ones, managing IT infrastructure still feels incredibly complex. Many are hesitant to embrace the cloud because the solutions can appear difficult. Our main goal is to give them the technology and the confidence they need to start their digital transformation without uncertainty.”

Moving on to the industries and sectors, do you have demanding customers and use cases, for example in terms of performance or security?

“Yes, absolutely. We serve a wide range of industries, from digital firms to strategic sectors like public administration and advanced manufacturing. Our infrastructure is specifically designed for these demanding use cases, requiring low latency, high availability, and strict compliance with European data protection standards.”

Which partners do you have within the 8ra ecosystem?

“Collaboration is the entire point of this European initiative – we must avoid creating technical “islands.” We’re working with numerous partners, but our main partner is OpenNebula. They have developed a meta-orchestrator called Virt8ra, and we are integrating our dedicated server infrastructure with it. This is key because it allows end-users to manage cloud servers uniformly across different providers, ensuring full interoperability and unrestricted migration.

We maintain an open dialogue with several other companies, always looking for new common ground to strengthen the ecosystem.”

Do you have any insights on cross-border workload operation?

“That’s the magic of the cloud. Sometimes you don’t even know when you are crossing borders or not – your workload is just there, on the cloud. Our focus is providing the mechanisms so that customers can use our services, but also seamlessly use different providers and data centres at the same time.

The crucial thing is making sure everything is interoperable and compatible. A customer should be able to deploy a standard server with any provider. We always advise clients to spread their assets across different data centres and countries for backup and resilience. With the cloud, the borders are quite diffuse. As long as you are clear on the company behind the service, the security, and the interoperability features, the location doesn’t matter; you just want things to work, whether it’s in France, Poland, or Spain.”

Looking at future trends, what key elements do you foresee playing a much more prominent role in cloud infrastructure and operation, especially in areas like the 8ra ecosystem?

“We are seeing cloud operations becoming a mix of different setups, and there’s an increasing use of automation and AI. We have to use this technology. We see operations evolving towards self-optimising infrastructure, where predictive analytics and real-time data allow us to anticipate incidents and optimise resource usage automatically. It’s about trying to know what is going to happen in the near future so we can anticipate and automate things.”

What specific AI trends or demands are you currently seeing coming directly from your customers and the wider market?

“AI plays a crucial dual role for us: optimising our internal operations and serving as an external offering. Customers are demanding AI in a very easy, accessible way. We are therefore building a platform for the simple deployment of open source LLMs.

However, the major trend we see is the shift towards agents. Customers now want AI that performs real, automated actions – not just conversation. For example, building simple automated booking systems for platforms like Telegram or WhatsApp. Ultimately, AI is a fundamental building block for the next generation of secure European cloud services, empowering both providers and users to innovate.”

What kind of alignment within Europe is needed to become strong in AI?

“We need to work together if we want to have some chance to succeed. We cannot be compared with players who don’t share our European values or play by different rules. We are a small part, but we have the advantage that we are many. So we need to find a way to align. Of course, we are competitors, but we have to agree on certain fundamentals. There is a lot of open source available, and we need to use it with some logic to avoid rebuilding the exact same thing across different countries.

That’s part of what we are doing within the 8ra Initiative: build these fundamental building blocks.”

So open source plays a key role to you?

“Yes, it absolutely does. In fact, most of the important projects, even proprietary ones, rely heavily on open source code – sometimes people just don’t notice that. As companies we have the responsibility to support the open source community because it’s important. You might not see the immediate money from it, but open source is often the foundation for many things that we do.”

Looking ahead, where do you see the European Cloud ecosystem in five years, and what should ideally be achieved by then?

“We envision a mature and truly interconnected European cloud ecosystem. Ideally, Europe will have established common standards and interoperability frameworks that allow seamless cross-border collaboration between providers. This means a stronger network of federated data spaces where we can safely share data to support innovation in key sectors like manufacturing and healthcare. The goal is to achieve both technological excellence and digital sovereignty.

We hope European providers gain global recognition – not just for technology, but for our core values: openness, transparency, sustainability, and trust.”