SUSECON 26 – choice equals resilience, says SUSE CEO, as customers want out from US dominance


This conference for us is about two things. It's about resilience. And it's about choice.

So says SUSE CEO Dirk-Peter ‘DP’ van Leeuwen, whose arrival at the open source software provider three years ago co-incided with the decision to delist it from the Frankfurt stock exchange and go private once again. As to why was that his priority at the time, he explains:

It was simple. I saw – and I agreed this with EQT, our private equity owners – that the opportunity is so much bigger than what a market with only 20% of the shares trading could understand. It's not an easy business: people just don't understand how you make money from free software. But if you're under public market trading, you have to explain, ‘We're not a SaaS company, but we are a subscription company’. Yet if revenues go a little bit up or down, the market reacts like crazy. 

It was such a small piece of the market that was trading, but it had full control over our stock price, so it made no sense. So, our valuation is better protected now in private...We can do what we need to do, and you've seen us do a lot of things in the last three years. But we can do it without the public eye mis-understanding what we're all about.

Indeed, that valuation has more than doubled from $2.5 billion to $6 billion under his leadership. Right now, SUSE is about resilience and choice, he says – plus sovereignty,  three concepts that the SUSE CEO believes are intrinsically linked. He says:

Resilience, because today, resilience is what we need more than ever. And choice, because choice is what gets you to resilience. In the last 12 months alone, we've seen the huge growth of agentic AI. We've seen [SUSE partner] NVIDIA becoming the first $5 trillion company. And we see the commercialization of humanoid robots using AI, and the progress in quantum computing. But threats to the supply chain and our security are also now more sophisticated than ever. It's clear just how fast AI is changing everything that we know around us, so we have to re-assess every few weeks what's technically possible and financially feasible.

But organizations also face other pressures, he explains:

Globalization and trusted alliances are being questioned. That means supply chains we once took for granted are not rock solid anymore. We're having to adapt to a new reality. And what about our partnerships? We used to be told that tying ourselves to a single, proprietary vendor would be a great idea, but when the rug gets pulled out from under you, you need the ability to respond super-fast.

Ambiguous world

And in many cases, that may mean exploring your get-out options, he says:

I know from conversations that many of our customers are now reassessing their vendor strategies. CIOs are seriously worried about how to move forward in this ambiguous world. This is the 2026 reality: you're being asked to run on quicksand. 

But how do you create resilience in that environment? Well, you do that by giving yourself choices. In 2026, you do not get resilient by being rigid and static. It's about building a business that can withstand, adapt, move and evolve. And SUSE can do that by bringing open source principles back to life, because it's not about intellectual property. It's about the support that allows you to use Open Source in a business-critical environment, putting the power back into your hands to let choice happen again.

And on that topic, the conference has had much to say. A key sub-text of the event has been enterprises turning to SUSE and other open source companies in an effort to free themselves from over-reliance on US technology.

Alongside the words ‘resilience’, ‘choice’, and ‘sovereignty’, three others have jostled for attention on the conference stage, and in side-room briefings and roundtables: ‘the geo-political situation’. That is code for Trump 2.0, and for the long tail of disruption, war, and fractured alliances seen since January 2025, Ever the diplomat, DP merely hinted at it in his keynote, saying:

Prague is such an amazing city. And it's a city that can teach us a lot about resilience. Think about what the streets outside these buildings have witnessed. It's lived under different national flags and plenty of political change, yet it stands here, vibrant, modern and free, and it's one of the most exciting cities in Europe. Prague is able to adapt and re-invent. And adapting and re-inventing are all around us right now: innovation is accelerating at a pace we've never seen before.

But he tackled the subject head on later away from the keynote, declaring: 

When we talk about digital sovereignty, it's a major topic, one that I can see is superhot – the phone doesn't stop ringing. Customers keep calling me to say, ‘We urgently need to become sovereign.’ Now, this is a market situation that I didn't create, but it is where we are. We're seeing that customers are really focused on the fact that we are a European company, and for Asian customers too. It means that we're not an American company!

“I never thought that this would be something we would ever talk about, but it is something that our customers are already saying. They're asking about it. And they're saying, ‘We want to make sure we have solutions that are not necessarily bound to an American company.’ So, I can tell you that they're worried, because my customers tell me that firsthand. And my Chief Strategy Officer [Frank Feldmann] said that change comes at the speed of signing an Executive Order. That's exactly what our customers are afraid of. They've seen a very erratic US in the last few years, and they're worried what this could do to their business continuity.

They are not alone in seeing that, far from European regulators waging war on American companies, as MAGA supporters have alleged, it is more the case that European enterprises are alarmed at America’s aggression towards its allies, and the rising costs of doing business with an America First administration.

Plus, factor in the overreach of some US Big Techs, and the overt politicization of both AI and international trade policy by the current US administration. For example, last year’s AI Action Plan and the Executive Orders that accompanied it went far beyond the US stating reasonable ambitions to lead the market. Instead, the President made 'Culture War' statements about ‘woke’ policy, diversity, gender, and even global climate change consensus, describing the latter as “radical climate dogma” a “con” and a “scam”.

In short, AI has become an instrument of party-political power, not merely one of US innovation and market dominance. Quite reasonably, many buyers outside the US see these trends as an over-stepping of the mark by the White House’s supportive tech corporations, backing a President who, at one point last year, threatened tariffs and punitive trade sanctions on any nation that failed to buy US technology.

The result - for some European buyers, the US market now seems less like a partner, and more like a protection racket. Factor in the scraping and re-sale of data by some AI vendors, and suddenly some of the key players in the US tech sector no longer seem like they are working for us; instead, they seem to believe that we work for them, in many cases, without consent or payment.

Fears

All this creates a context for European businesses to harbor real fears about the future, and about what they may be buying in, alongside the technology. As van Leeuwen puts it:

These are things that even non-political customers are worried about, because what they also have to worry about is business continuity. And if we thought the US was the closest ally to Europe, and it is no longer that, then people start to wonder, ‘What do I need to do?’ And ‘If it could happen that all my systems need to be shut by Executive Order, how do I prevent my business from going down?’

For SUSE, the conversations he's having in Europe and in other parts of the world are more about data sovereignty, which is a totally non-political thing, he adds: 

This is very AI related. In the first wave, everybody used ChatGPT, Gemini, and so on, so that was the first wave of adoption – a very consumer-oriented one. The next was a business-oriented one, so you had Salesforce and all these things, and suddenly there were AI agents. But now the third wave of AI is where you use your own intellectual property, your data, and your company, and you're going to feed all that into an AI. And every single CIO I speak to – there are no exceptions – tells me ‘I don't want this in the [public] cloud. I want a sovereign solution.’ For many of our customers these days, sovereignty has become non-negotiable.

But with the rising tide of what one delegate called “technology nationalism”, is he worried that SUSE may have to pick a side?  His response: 

We try not to. But I think there are two points to this. One, of course, is the fact that we are a European company. But even more important, we are an open source company, 100%. And people understand that open source has no borders. You can't say ‘this product is developed in this country’, because it comes from an open source community, and the developers are all over the world. And the nice thing about open source is that, because it's super transparent and everybody has access, nobody can shut down that access. Nobody has any legal rights to say, ‘You can't use this.’ So, it's an extremely safe place to be when it comes to implementing software, because you're not binding yourself to intellectual property ownership by anybody.

My take

Make no mistake: these are bold words for a software CEO in a global market.

On another matter, since March, courtesy of an apparently well-sourced Reuters report, rumors have circulated that SUSE may be up for sale. As CEO, van Leeuwen, unsurprisingly, is unable to comment on those stories – “There are always rumors"  – but what would happen if a US player – one of SUSE’s partners, perhaps? – acquired a majority stake in the company?

Little would change, he claims:

SUSE, in its very nature, is a European company. We are registered in Europe, and everything is European. So, if we get acquired by another shareholder, even if that shareholder is American, then we would still be a European company, but with shareholders in America. And we are operating according to European laws. So, all that I can say about that is it's all speculation, right?

It is. 

But it was a fair question. And even though he is right that a European open source player would remain in both of those camps, even with a majority US shareholder, it would be the ultimate irony if, say, an AWS, an NVIDIA, or an Oracle picked up SUSE for $6 billion just as its non-US customers wanted to escape American Big Tech clutches – or, in the words of NVIDIA, its claws.