Shekar Ayyar on dominating India's AI & 6G networking future

As India accelerates its digital transformation, driven by massive adoption of 5G, cloud services, and the burgeoning field of AI, the need for a modern, flexible networking backbone has never been greater. Amidst this pivotal moment, Arrcus, a hyperscale networking software company, is expanding its presence and challenging incumbents with its disaggregated, software-centric approach.

In an exclusive interview,  Shekar Ayyar, CEO and Chairman, Arrcus, shared his vision for the Indian market, detailing how the company's flagship ArcOS platform is uniquely positioned to thrive in an environment characterized by rapid digital growth, price sensitivity, and a renewed focus on indigenous solutions.

India: A dual strategy of market growth and innovation hub

For Arrcus, the subcontinent represents a critical dual opportunity: a vital market for deployment and a global hub for talent and development. “For us, India happens to be two very important things,” Ayyar stated. “One is it is a super important market for us, particularly as cloud technologies and AI take hold. We see this as one of the hotbeds for innovation, specifically from the standpoint of networking, which is really our forte.”

The second, equally important component, is talent. Arrcus is committed to developing its technology in India, with a large presence in Bangalore and plans for potential expansion. Ayyar emphasized that finding sophisticated networking talent is a worldwide challenge, and India provides an attractive base. The country’s existing infrastructure, its vast geographic presence, reasonable 5G connectivity, and cloud presence, makes it a "very rich and fertile ground" for distributed networking fabrics, inferencing, and agentic AI adoption.

ArcOS: The 'Android' of networking delivers value and choice

Addressing the highly price-sensitive nature of the Indian market and the enterprises' need to maximize significant investments in telcos and data centers, Ayyar presented ArcOS as the liberating, open alternative to proprietary systems. He drew a powerful analogy: “We are very much like the Android equivalent in networking. Think about us as the operating system for the network, and then we can live on top of multiple hardware form factors, specifically chips that are produced by companies like Broadcom, like NVIDIA and others.” The core value proposition is threefold.

First, it enables Best-of-Breed Integration, allowing customers to combine ArcOS software with hardware silicon from vendors like Broadcom and NVIDIA, thereby preventing vendor lock-in. Second, the programmability of ArcOS leads to accelerated time-to-market, drastically cutting deployment cycles; a network function that might take legacy vendors a couple of years can be deployed in a matter of “weeks to maybe a few months”. Third, it offers a significant cost advantage, with customers typically seeing an easy “30% to 40% cost advantage” versus incumbents. This saving is further magnified by architectural simplicity, which allows customers to deploy fewer, less expensive components overall.

A hybrid go-to-market strategy

Arrcus's growth strategy in India is a measured combination of direct engagement and robust partnership expansion. Ayyar confirmed the company is pursuing a multi-pronged approach: Arrcus is engaging in direct customer engagement, having already established a foothold by working with some of the country's “largest financial institutions” with systems currently in production. Concurrently, the firm is strengthening its ecosystem through local partnerships with local semiconductor providers for generated hardware, and with multinational allies like Fujitsu, EdgeCore, and UfiSpace, who are also expanding their presence in India, ensuring customers have "plenty of choice."

Building the network fabric for AI and 6G

Ayyar elaborated on how ArcOS is architecturally designed to handle the most demanding future workloads: AI and 6G. For AI training (centralized data centers), Arrcus leverages advances in Ethernet, such as the Ultra Ethernet Consortium, to provide the highest speeds and lowest latencies. For AI inferencing (distributed edge nodes), the ArcOS fabric is uniquely built for low latency, high reliability, and secure connectivity across all points: racks, data center to edge, edge to edge, and edge to cloud/5G.

As India prepares for 6G Ayyar assures that the product is prepared enough to meet requirements for massive density and network slicing by bringing cloud simplicity to the mobile network. Ayyar cited work with SoftBank in Japan using SRV6 technology-based slices, which offers the robustness and low latency of 5G/6G, combined with the simplicity and programmability of a cloud environment.

The next frontier: Hybrid architecture

Looking three to five years ahead, Ayyar believes the next major shift will be the hybrid architecture that unifies all the disparate networking components: cloud, enterprise, and AI. “The next frontier is going to be how you bring all these things together,” he said. This converged environment will require networks to be highly flexible, constantly leveraging the rapid evolution of semiconductors. The Arrcus solution is purpose-built for this future by combining a flexible software layer that adapts to distributed compute capacity, a programmable API infrastructure for rapid service creation, and advanced metrics and telemetry for automated fault correction and inspection. Ayyar concluded, “I am pleased to say that we are looking at this as exactly the space where we are differentiated as Arrcus in terms of providing our solution to customers, both inside India but also globally.”