Suse Champions Freedom Of Choice In Cloud Infrastructure Stack

Acronyms matter. Enterprise open source cloud infrastructure company Suse draws its name from the German language term Gesellschaft für Software und Systementwicklung mbH (software and systems development) and the firm is now very much focused on system-level cloud infrastructure management practices.

Pleasingly perhaps, while Gesellschaft is the German word for enterprise organization or company, it is also used to express the notion of a community and society; it’s an apropos parallel given Suse’s heritage in the open source model of community-first software application development and programming.

Now working to deliver a set of technologies that are aligned, tightly integrated, robustly-secured, but still essentially “open” in their ability to work with external standards, operating systems, storage functions, enterprise resource planning suites and cloud services, Suse has detailed its current progression path with a number of open statements made by its board.

Portfolio First, Then Platform

“Suse has been working hard to create and deliver a technology roadmap that enterprises will find functional, cost effective and secure. Personally, my role in that process is around 80% external (talking to users) and it might have been closer to 20% in previous roles I’ve had elsewhere,” said Brent Schroeder, global CTO, Suse. “We listen to the pain points that customers tell us about and that helps steer the ‘portfolio direction’ of our technology base – and, ultimately, from the portfolio (of software tools, services and functions) comes the SUSE platform.”

Going back to basics on all this talk of platform evolution, we have said that Suse stems from a fundamentally open source base of technologies with Linux at the center of its universe. Given the role of Suse Rancher Prime as an enterprise (commercially paid for) software toolset designed to streamline management of cloud-native Kubernetes clusters with its policy enforcement, security and support services offerings, how many open source users actually exist for this type of enterprise technology?

“Enterprise-class users of open source tools such as Suse Rancher absolutely exist and there are many of them,” confirmed Schroeder. “This type of deployment happens in a variety of scenarios. It could be a small start-up and a project team working with prototypes, but it could also be a fully-fledged business unit or entire organization’s IT department that simply chooses to run open source technologies and take the management aspect of those technologies into their own hands. Those users are part of the lifeblood of the open model and they typically also contribute back code commits and more to the technology base.”

CTO Schroeder’s words come at a time when the company is now rolling out a significant new set of software-as-a-service options for customers who want to be able to tap into the operational expenditure (as conversely opposed to traditional capital expenditure outlay on technology) of SaaS. It’s a time when both the CTO and Suse CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen feel the company has got its house in order.

“We’re really now at a point [with the Suse platform] where are staking our claim in the cloud infrastructure market… and that means the hybrid cloud-native space extending from on-premises deployments, to public cloud and outward to edge computing installations,” said van Leeuwen. “The inherent strength in Suse comes from our deep kernel-level knowledge and capabilities that go all the way through the stack up to the application level… and this is why we talk about Suse as an end-to-end infrastructure services company. That being said (even though we offer a complete stack technology proposition), it is not in our nature to force a complete stack on any customer at any level… and anyway, that approach would not align with the open source philosophies that champion systems of meritocracy that we have established our business upon. In our view, if a technology doesn’t add business value, then it should not be deployed, it’s as straightforward as that.”

IT Market Consolidation, A Reponse

The freedom of choice van Leeuwen promises is manifested in enhancements that Suse now comes forward with for its core suite of Linux solutions. The company says it has moved forward with software engineering designed to address the market consolidation currently going on in the information technology industry. This consolidation (resulting from acquisitions, the death of some legacy solutions and the divestiture or retirement of technologies from platform vendors who no longer wish to support some toolsets) reduces choice for enterprises in terms of their IT infrastructure, so Suse says its enhancements reinforce its commitment to supporting customers with an open and ecosystem-first approach.

The new enhancements include Suse multi-Linux support, which expands both support and migration capabilities for existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and CentOS Linux (the now discontinued Community ENTerprise Operating System is a free Linux distribution based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux), giving enterprises more flexibility in managing their Linux environments. This offering extends beyond CentOS migration, now supporting other commercial Linux distributions. The company says that users will benefit from “proactive security patches” to safeguard enterprise systems, no forced migrations (more freedom of choice messaging there, right?) and priority support for enhanced reliability and continuity. With these enhancements, team behind this service promise Suse Multi-Linux Support provides a flexible, secure and scalable solution for enterprises managing diverse Linux landscapes.

“We are coming up on 25 years of supporting customers with enterprise Linux,” said Rick Spencer, general manager of business critical Linux at Suse. “These new advancements underscore our long-held mission of helping customers accelerate digital transformation, reduce costs and improve efficiency.”

Into deeper product details here, Suse Multi-Linux Manager 5.1 introduces new workflow and performance improvements so that users can manage heterogeneous and distributed Linux environments with greater control and scalability. This technology offers customers choice when selecting their host operating system so that they can choose between Suse Linux Enterprise Server instances or opt for smaller footprint alternative such as Suse Linux Micro. This option is said to help organizations streamline operations and eliminate the learning curve associated with adopting a separate operating system.

Did We Mention AI?

No self-respecting enterprise technology vendor makes a platform (or indeed portfolio) evolution without artificial intelligence featuring as a key (if not all-star) element of the news stream. Suse is no different. The company’s own Suse AI is an open infrastructure platform for deploying and running AI workloads. Refreshingly, this is not another agentic AI function or smart automation toolset designed to help replace defined human workflows; instead, this is technology designed to help organizations keep up with today’s pace of enterprise-scale AI innovation. Updates to this platform enable cost predictability and optimization, improved security and adaptability to changing business demands.

“Through close collaboration with our customers and partners since the launch of Suse AI last year, we’ve gained additional and invaluable insights into the challenges of deploying production-ready AI workloads,” said Abhinav Puri, general manager for portfolio solutions & services at SUSE. “This collaborative journey has allowed us to bolster our offerings and continue to provide customers strong transparency, trust and openness in AI implementation.”

Puri and team says that companies now seeking ways to incorporate AI ethically and ssecurely while maintaining data control and cost transparency can use this product to get insights into AI workloads, LLM token usage and GPU performance. There is also increased functionality to support the development of agentic workflows. Wiith enhanced security features, including LLM guardrails, Puri promises that the upcoming Suse AI product release will address these concerns.

Suse AI now enables the implementation of agentic AI workflows, helping users take actions and make decisions related to the state of their IT infrastructure in respect of the AI functions it supports. This service provides tools and blueprints to help manage and execute development of these workflows. By implementing agentic workflows, Puri suggests that customers can focus on high-value activities by reducing repetitive tasks, accelerate decision-making in real time or experiment with solutions to uncover patterns to drive innovation.

Suse AI helps customers protect sensitive data and maintain compliance. The technology employs zero trust security using predefined rules to analyze data and content, prevent data leaks and detect adversarial inputs. Puri says that implementing Suse Security helps prevent data leaks by recognizing sensitive data in outgoing packets, monitors and secures sensitive data in transit to help with compliance and detects adversarial inputs by filtering and monitoring incoming data.

Company Persona

In terms of maturity, technology proposition, collective staff personality or mindset and overall brand, this is not the Suse of 25 years ago… or, in more practical terms, this is barely the Suse of five years ago. Now two years into his tenure at the helm, CEO van Leeuwen spent almost two decades at another high-profile enterprise Linux company known for its scarlet-colored bonnets, so he knows the ropes in this space. His poised persona may help express where the company is as a whole today.

Engagingly thoughtful and considered, van Leeuwen is the kind of CEO who makes sure he shakes everyone’s hand in a large meeting room as they enter and leave, while he looks them in the eye. As open source continues to come of age and enterprise open source software tools now proliferate across cloud computing topologies, Suse appears to be growing in confidence with an end-to-end technology infrastructure stack that goes from the operating system kernel, through network and management layers and all the way through to the application. For some of its competitors, that’s enough to turn them green with envy.