SUSECON 26 – open source giant ushers in a resilient future with NVIDIA, Oracle, and more

One word dominates SUSECon 26 in Prague, Czech Republic, this week: resilience. ‘Your resilient future’ reads a floor-to-ceiling banner in the vast atrium at the Hilton Prague, while the word features on signage throughout the event, and echoes from the conference stage at every turn.

But why choose beautiful Prague for the Luxembourg-based open-source firm’s annual shindig? Well, history tells us it has been a resilient city since the Fourteenth Century, of course, through the rise and fall of countless dynasties and empires. So, perhaps the message is that if, like Prague, your IT infrastructure is a mix of ancient and modern, and if it is held together by the tech equivalent of pedestrian bridges, then SUSE is like the Vltava River running through it all, constant and… well, resilient. 

Or perhaps Prague just offers a central location in Europe for users and partners to meet. Who can say? Either way, delegates – who on the face of it, appear older and more senior than those at other open source or developer events – found themselves in a huge glass edifice of a hotel, while the monuments of ancient Bohemia glinted outside in the Spring sunshine. 

But has SUSE itself been resilient? It has certainly experienced its ups and downs in a 34-year history that includes acquisitions – notably of HPE OpenStack in 2017 and Rancher Labs in 2020 – and stints within Novell, Attachmate, Micro Focus, and current owner EQT AB. 

More recent events include a 2021 IPO followed by a rapid 2023 delisting from the Frankfurt stock exchange. After the financial wobble that followed, some reports suggest that the privately-held company has more than doubled its valuation to $6 billion in the years since, with “double-digit” year-on-year growth too.

Internal documents tell us that SUSE’s current revenues stand at over $700 million from more than 10,0000 enterprise customers, including the ten largest automotive firms, fourteen aerospace giants, thirteen of the biggest pharma companies, and thirteen financial services providers. 
 

A trusted and resilient brand, then. As SUSE CMO Margaret Dawson puts it:

Whether they are trying to reduce cost, implement AI, or achieve more digital sovereignty, there is a theme that keeps coming up [for users], which is this idea of resilience. For people in different places or in different organisations, it means slightly different things. But what they are really trying to say is, ‘I need to know that my infrastructure, my applications, my IT overall, can be stable, can be secure, and can be reliable.’ So, it’s pretty foundational stuff.

Sovereignty 

A new survey from the company, Navigating Digital Resilience, finds that 98% of 309 IT leaders in the US, France, Germany, India, and Japan are prioritizing digital sovereignty. Sixty-four percent believe that AI transparency will be the number-one driver of digital resilience for the rest of this decade. Dawson explains:

Organizations are often forced to choose between accelerating AI and maintaining digital sovereignty, but it’s a false trade-off. Sovereign AI makes it possible to achieve both, embedding control, compliance and innovation into the same foundation.

Then she adds:

If you think about the kind of chaos that some people are feeling right now, from geopolitical pressures to just ‘Implement AI, implement AI! But oh, by the way, your budget is cut’. That resiliency has become a greater pressure. When I talk to CIOs or CTOs, they will often express almost a feeling of being trapped. ‘I’ve got to implement AI, but I also have to reduce cost.’ And ‘I have to increase cybersecurity, but I've also still got to work with my legacy infrastructure.’ So, there is this feeling of, ‘I need to be resilient. I need to get out of this trap.

Self-sovereignty

With the world on a knife edge, few would argue with that assessment. But is SUSE itself resilient to market pressures? And what about its own sovereignty? Rumors abound of a possible sale of the company – courtesy of a Reuters story in March, quoting two sources close to the matter. So far, there has been no whisper about it at the event: Linux fans tend not to concern themselves with the vagaries of private equity finance. 

But if one were to look to the conference itself for clues about a possible buyer, then at least three companies with fat chequebooks have a high-profile presence here: AWS (an obvious potential suitor); Japanese investment bank Nomura (a less obvious one); and NVIDIA (unlikely, but not impossible, given the hardware behemoth’s interests in enterprise management software). 

NVIDIA certainly features in some of the big news today (21 April), with the launch of two linked products: SUSE AI Factory, and SUSE AI Factory with NVIDIA. Both are automated software stacks that standardize how AI applications are deployed and run. Using them allows the building and testing of applications in a sandbox, while platform teams can manage deployment through either a Rancher-based interface or via automated GitOps workflows. 

SUSE AI Factory with NVIDIA abstracts the complexity of the end-to-end stack by providing pre-validated, tightly integrated architectural blueprints for common use cases and workloads, explains an announcement from the company. Enterprises can then build on these, layering both NVIDIA and SUSE components into bespoke workloads. It also offers zero-trust security and observability by extending the value of both SUSE AI and the underlying SUSE Rancher Prime and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server runtimes into any AI workloads that are built on NVIDIA hardware. 

And by providing NVIDIA deployments with zero-trust guardrails and governance frameworks, the new platform also ensures that the underlying AI infrastructure remains stable, predictable, and hardened against emerging risks.

Meanwhile, organizations can satisfy the regulatory requirements of legislation such as the EU AI Act, says SUSE, while providing a single point of accountability across the stack, including NVIDIA AI Enterprise components. Thomas Di Giacomo, Chief Technology and Product Officer at SUSE, explains:

AI developers, users, and operations teams are in a Catch 22 with AI: they want to innovate quickly, but must also secure these types of workloads, agents and processes, to ensure full auditability before fully running them in production. SUSE AI Factory with NVIDIA gives them a one-stop solution for end-to-end stability, security and sovereignty.

John Fanelli, NVIDIA’s Vice President of Enterprise Software, adds:

Enterprise adoption of AI is accelerating, creating demand for infrastructure that ensures data control and governance for regulated workloads. Our collaboration with SUSE addresses this requirement by delivering an open, full-stack AI Factory built on a foundation of security and sovereignty.

Rhys Oxenham is SUSE’s VP of AI. He explains the thinking behind the twin ideas:

SUSE has been providing the infrastructure for AI capabilities for the last 18 to 24 months, but we realised is that there was a critical missing link in our portfolio, and that was creating an assembly line for organizations to onboard, provision, lifecycle, manage, observe and secure AI infrastructures across the various different deployment footprints. So, we are introducing SUSE AI Factory that will help bring that turnkey digital factory experience to our customers now. 

This solves a number of critical user needs, he pitches:

First, it solves the innovation gap, which is all about ‘How do I as an enterprise, onboard applications, frameworks, and AI capabilities, knowing that these will change rapidly over the next few years?’ 

And the second one is the location gap, when it comes to digital sovereignty, freedom, choice, independence and autonomy in the underlying infrastructure. Being able to provision and manage that infrastructure anywhere is of critical importance. Enterprises need the ability to pivot whenever the business demands it. 

And the third is about operations – actually deploying and managing infrastructure and AI workloads and all of the connections in between, like the GPU drivers and the integration. This needs to be managed at scale, so doing full consistent operations, consistent tooling, lifecycle management, full cluster integration, observability and security is critical.

The final piece of this is the persona gap, if you like. When you look at how you deploy and manage AI workloads. We’re providing the pipelines and the workflows that enable the bridge between that individual and the engineers that are provisioning at scale.

As for NVIDIA's role in all this, he explains:

With SUSE AI Factory with NVIDIA, we're taking that pipeline, that assembly line, and we are supercharging it with NVIDIA AI Enterprise. So, it’s all the goodness of NVIDIA AI Enterprise – the NVIDIA inference micro-services, the optimised models, the NemoClaw agent toolkits, and all the integrations – and we're bringing them into the SUSE AI Factory experience.

The news

Another big beast with an acquisitive track record also has profile at the Prague event in the form of Oracle, at least, in terms of breaking news. SUSE today announced that the entire SUSE portfolio is now available on the Oracle Marketplace and can be deployed on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Christine Puccio, Vice President of Partner Strategy and Business Development at SUSE explains:

SUSE’s availability on Oracle Marketplace further extends our commitment to the Oracle community and enables customers to easily reap the benefits of SUSE Linux and cloud-native solutions. We look forward to leveraging the power of OCI to help us achieve our business goals.

Also today, SUSE has announced the launch of Sovereignty Specialization for its SUSE One Partners, making it easier for customers to replace existing proprietary stacks with resilient, open-source solutions enriched with sovereign services from a trusted partner ecosystem.

Meanwhile a new automated migration partnership is designed to transition virtualized workloads from VMware and public clouds over to open-source infrastructures. By integrating the Coriolis migration tool from partner Cloudbase Solutions into the SUSE Virtualization stack, IT teams can now migrate virtual machines with zero service interruptions, claims the company. This addresses the technical barriers associated with infrastructure modernization, specifically the risk of downtime and manual data transfers.

Peter Smails is SVP and General Manager of Cloud Native. He explains:

We talk quite about about SUSE’s role in the sort of post-VMware reality. We make no secret of the fact that we see ourselves as an excellent alternative: we see ourselves as that modern alternative infrastructure layer for virtualization. But a core challenge with that is getting there. Having the virtualization substrate is important, but one of the biggest challenges that organizations now face is, how do I get from where I am to where I need to be from a migration standpoint? 

So, Cloudbase’ Coriolis migration tool is going to provide significant benefits to customers, primarily around the automation at scale of virtualized workloads. This is all about addressing the challenge of the manual labour, of doing migrations on your own. Plus, the related risks of downtime, having to take applications offline in order to do the migration. And the associated licensing costs, and how you manage a sort of dual-licensing, dual-cost environment.

The tool and the integration are going to benefit customers in two primary use cases. One is more from a cloud-native standpoint, where I can re-patriate VMware workloads to SUSE virtualization, so Coriolis is integrated directly into the SUSE virtualization stack. And the second thing is it provides the automation for repatriating hyperscaler-based VM workloads back on prem, again to a SUSE virtualization substrate

So, it's all about helping expedite migrations, automating that, providing non-disruptive migrations for all your different workloads to SUSE’s infrastructure.

My take


In short, come on in, the Vltava is lovely. More announcements and exclusive interviews to come from SUSECON 26 in Prague.