SUSE kicked off its SUSECON 2025 conference this week in Orlando with a keynote introduced by Dominic Laurie in his role as comms director… who handed immediately over to SUSE CEODirk-Peter van Leeuwen.
Talking about the need to keep things running and manage existing systems at the same time as shouldering the need to innovate across new AI-powered environments, van Leeuwen said he has spoken to a lot of CEOs and CIOs in recent months who bemoan the need to spend money on legacy systems when they really want to be putting more expenditure into new and emerging platform technologies.
“We want to restore some of the balance that has gone for firms in that position [where choice has been restricted due to legacy systems]. The key elements in our portfolio help organisations to do this… we were the first company to really come forward with an enterprise Linux offering and today we know that many organisations now run mission-critical environments on our platform,” said van Leeuwen.
Referring to SUSE’s multi-Linux support, van Leeuwen described the power of choice that the company is working to engineer into its total platform offering.
User showcase session
An opening keynote session invited spokespeople from Deutsche Bank to take the stage. The company described how it switched “hundreds of servers overnight” to SUSE Enterprise Linux with no downtime and, subsequently, the power to continue to run continuously with functions including live patching and in-place-upgrades.
A second user session featured Switch, one of the largest datacentre operators in North America. With the company operating multi-gigawatt systems, it has put a good deal of effort into building a sustainable datacentre environment to deliver the business-critical services it is known for. Running the infrastructure for this level of operation has been possible (we were told) with SUSE as a critical element.
Third up in the user section, Aussie Broadband brought some life into proceedings with a recap that covered the last twenty years of its business. Having experienced exponential growth through Covid, the company chose to work with SUSE to minimise downtime across its core ISP and customer services.
SUSE Cloud Elevate for MSPs
As part of the day #1 announcement roster at SUSECON, the company detailed news of itsSUSE Cloud Elevate Program for Managed Service Providers*(*MSPs). This is a new programme specifically designed MSPs to be able to sell SUSE’s SaaS suite of Enterprise Container Management open source solutions via AWS Marketplace (a digital catalogue with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors) for users to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
According to a Canalys report, over 54% MSPs will now be using SaaS marketplace to buy products.
“In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, MSPs need easy access to the right solutions that fit the unique business needs of each of their customers,” said Christine Puccio, global VP, AWS Cloud, SUSE. “Expanding our partner programme to further support MSPs in meeting these customer demands really underscores SUSE’s ongoing dedication to SaaS solutions for our customers, open source ecosystem and our collaboration with AWS.”
MSPs will now have access to a range of SUSE Cloud and Rancher SaaS solutions, including SUSE Cloud Observability, SUSE Application Collection and (soon, at the time of writing) SUSE Rancher Hosted, allowing them to expand their service offerings. They will be able to quickly transact in AWS Marketplace through SaaS, helping MSPs achieve quicker time-to-market.
User centricity continued
SUSE continued the user-centricity element in its day #1 keynote session by showcasing its customer awards. SUSE’s CEO recognised 14 customers who the company says have harnessed the power of SUSE to redefine industries, drive business success and contribute to positive societal change.
“Our mission at SUSE is to transform open source innovations into enterprise-grade solutions, giving our customers the power of choice. Our customers are central to this mission,” said van Leeuwen. “By honouring these outstanding customers and shining a light on the incredible innovations and business results they’ve achieved through collaboration with SUSE, we reaffirm our mission and values as leaders in open source and as true partners and co-innovators with our customers.”
Pumping the audience for the rest of the SUSECON show with her obviously well-polished inspirational speech was colonelNicole Malachowski. While these fist-pumping gung-ho sessions generally do down better with North American audiences compared to more reserved European observers, Malachowski arguably elevated the energy levels in the room appropriately.
Onward to the rest of the show…