SUSE, the venerable Luxemburg-based open-source company, has long been a household name in IT circles in Europe, however it’s never quite managed to capture the U.S. market, where competitors like Red Hat and Canonical are much better known. Yet, similar to as within the cloud world, where loads of players are hoping for AI to reshuffle the playing field, so, too, does SUSE hope that AI will give it a brand new entryway into the U.S. market — along with its recent moves to more directly challenge its competition. The corporate on Tuesday is announcing its AI strategy and SUSE AI solutions, a brand new vendor- and LLM-agnostic generative AI platform.
Ahead of the announcement, I exclusively spoke with SUSE CEO (and ex-Red Hat executive) Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen and Pilar Santamaria, the corporate’s recently appointed VP of AI, in regards to the latest service and SUSE’s overall strategy close to AI — but in addition open source normally.
“The vision of SUSE is to bring the infinite potential open source to the enterprise,” van Leeuwen, who became SUSE’s CEO in March 2023, told me. “We do imagine that this open-source model is giving us an infinite potential; it just keeps evolving faster than some other development model since it’s exponential. It’s extremely iterative. And since it’s open, people use this for many alternative things than what the unique developer wrote it for. We’ve seen this all in the web, with AI, with all of the things which are happening around us. It’s all driven through open source. But in fact, as everyone knows, for enterprise customers, you wish a little bit bit greater than just access to code. You would like support, you wish security, safety. And most significantly, it is advisable to make certain that your product might be supported for long run.”
The query of long-term support is what got SUSE to fork CentOS and support existing customers when Red Hat modified its development model for the favored Linux-based operating system last 12 months. That, van Leeuwen said, has resulted in a “tremendous uptick” from former CentOS users who’re migrating to SUSE’s fork. “Customers truly wish to tap into this chance of switching vendors without switching software,” he said, comparing it to cell phone users simply switching out their SIM to get on one other network. “In software, you might never do that except with open source, and that’s really what I wanted to realize with this offering.”
He also noted that loads of these enterprises then take a have a look at SUSE’s overall portfolio, which besides its core Linux offerings also includes Kubernetes service Rancher and security service Neuvector, which the corporate acquired under former CEO Melissa Di Donato. During a time where enterprises wish to consolidate platforms, that’s a significant advantage. But SUSE itself also went through its own slew of ownership changes over time and that hasn’t necessarily helped it position itself available in the market.
“SUSE has been, and still is and all the time has been, a tremendous company,” he said. “However the downside for SUSE as an organization has been that it’s passed through quite just a few acquisitions. And if you undergo these acquisitions, you get a brand new management, loads of stuff gets reset, and the world is moving very fast, right?” SUSE, he said, has all the time done well in its work with SAP, which helped it grow within the European market, however the U.S. has remained a challenge.
“Within the U.S., SUSE has never really reached brand recognition. That’s something we’re working on as well. Because U.S. customers particularly, are in lots of cases not even aware of the existence of SUSE. We’re hard to pronounce for U.S. customers. And so there are things for us to work on. But they’re not the toughest thing to do, because we’ve got the products and we’ve got the solutions and customers like this,” he said.
He stressed that Rancher is already a powerful brand within the U.S., so the corporate plans to attach that closer to the general SUSE brand and get those customers to take a look at greater than just its Kubernetes offering.
AI is clearly the opposite area where SUSE thinks it has a possibility to grow. At its core, the corporate sees itself as an open-source infrastructure player — and the subsequent frontier there may be supporting AI workloads, in spite of everything.
The brand new SUSE AI solution — which itself is open source, in fact — is squarely geared toward helping its customers put AI workloads into production, and to achieve this in a secure and privacy-first way. It’s price noting that it’s not a training solution but is supposed to assist businesses use their very own models or open-weight foundation models like Meta’s Llama.
“Many firms cannot really use generative AI because they find that they’ve to provide their data to 3rd parties. Mainly, they don’t feel they’ll drive in AI — and in case you don’t drive, you’re the information. That’s it,” SUSE AI VP Santamaria said. And even in the event that they don’t mind that, then loads of firms face compliance issues because a vendor may not have the option to ensure where on this planet the information is processed.
Santamaria argues that until now, there wasn’t an open-source solution available on the market that gave enterprises the liberty to run these LLMs in their very own cloud or virtual private cloud — combined with the access controls and security solutions they need. “That is the primary solution available in the market with these components, totally turnkey, and deployed in minutes, not in days,” she said.
She stressed that the corporate thinks that users will need to have the liberty to deploy the models of their selection, perhaps fine-tuned or augmented with an organization’s own data using retrieval-augmented generation. But at the identical time, the industry is moving so quickly that many users also don’t wish to lock themselves right into a single vendor which will or will not be on the forefront of what’s next.
The concept here is for the answer to be modular, allowing people to pick the vector database of their selection, for instance, to construct an answer that most closely fits their needs.
One in all those customers is Fujitsu. “Generative AI helps to unlock innovation inside our world. Our customers’ employees already use generative AI of their private lives and naturally wish to use this technology at work too. With our solution, they’ll do that in a secure and guarded setting,” said Udo Würtz, Chief Data Officer, European Platform Business at Fujitsu. “As a trusted partner, SUSE supports us with our genAI product strategy through their collaboration, expertise and commitment to selection for patrons.”
SUSE’s AI solution is now available as an early-access program
