Extreme NOW 2026: Regaining Control of Enterprise AI and Data

On March 25, 2026, the French IT ecosystem — decision-makers, technology partners, and infrastructure experts — gathered at the Cinéma Élysées Lincoln in Paris for Extreme NOW 2026. This annual event, hosted by Extreme Networks, explored the future of networking, cloud, and next-generation technologies.

In a landscape where Artificial Intelligence is profoundly disrupting information systems, this edition highlighted an inescapable reality: AI projects are no longer merely application-level issues. Today, they require a comprehensive architectural approach, where network, infrastructure, orchestration, and data governance directly dictate a company's performance and sovereignty.

Iguana Solutions' Opening Keynote: A Timely Warning

During this edition, Iguana Solutions had the privilege of delivering the opening keynote. Led by Jean-Philippe Fourès, VP Product, the presentation immediately laid down a strong premise:

"Do not let AIs exfiltrate your data."

This statement captures the major challenge organizations face with the rapid adoption of AI. While public models initially succeeded in democratizing this technology through powerful external APIs, their limitations become glaringly obvious when it comes to processing sensitive data or integrating with core business processes.

Today, the question is no longer just which AI to use, but to demand total transparency:

• Where is the data processed?
• Who controls the network flows?
• Where is the inference executed?
• Who holds the intellectual property of the generated information?

Data: The New Strategic Perimeter

With the emergence of RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipelines, autonomous agents, and multimodal models, data is more than ever the nerve center of organizations. By relying on opaque external platforms, companies risk exposing their informational assets.

This sovereignty issue is no longer the exclusive domain of state or defense sectors; it concerns every business. Behind every prompt lies the potential transit of critical business data, customer records, financial statements, or trade secrets.

Faced with this risk, simply raising employee awareness is no longer enough. The response must be structural. Companies must equip themselves with infrastructures capable of:

• bringing computing power (AI) closer to the data source;
• auditing and controlling all processing flows;
• guaranteeing end-to-end control of inference environments.

Infrastructure at the Heart of AI Performance

One of the central themes of Extreme NOW 2026 was the critical role of the network in modern AI platforms. Once seen simply as a connectivity layer, the network is now taking on a whole new dimension.

Today's distributed architectures require massive, uninterrupted data exchanges between GPU clusters, storage, Kubernetes orchestrators, vector databases, and applications. In this ecosystem, network quality directly impacts inference latency, model throughput, and workload scalability.

This is precisely where Extreme Networks' technologies come into play. With advanced switching, network fabric, and cloud-native observability solutions, the vendor meets the extreme demands of these new architectures. The event also served as the stage to showcase Extreme Platform One, a unified network platform designed to simplify IT operations while enhancing the security and visibility of distributed environments.

Private AI or Tailored AI: Two Approaches for a Single Goal

To reconcile innovation and security, the market is shifting toward complementary solutions:

• Full Stack AI: an approach that allows the deployment of a private AI, integrated directly into the company's infrastructure. It guarantees perfect isolation of processing, models, and information flows.
• Secure APIs (like IG1 AI): an "as a Service" alternative specifically designed for strict B2B use, guaranteeing zero retention or retraining of models on customer data.

Both approaches share the same objective: delivering the power of AI without ever compromising data sovereignty.

Toward a New Generation of IT Infrastructures

The rich discussions at Extreme NOW 2026 confirmed a technological shift. AI now imposes non-negotiable prerequisites: ultra-low latency, real-time orchestration, high availability, and dynamic GPU resource allocation. In this new paradigm, the network, cloud-native architectures, and AI form an inseparable whole. Infrastructure is no longer just a cost center or technical support; it is the bedrock of sovereignty.

A huge thank you to the Extreme Networks teams for their trust and for organizing this unifying event, as well as to all the partners and experts present for the quality of our exchanges.