SUSE, the long-established open source company based in Luxembourg, has long been a household name in European IT circles, but has never been able to capture the US market, where competitors like Red Hat and Canonical are better known. However, just as in the world of the cloud, where many players hope that AI will level the playing field, SUSE is also hoping that AI will give it a new entry into the US market – along with its recent moves to challenge its competitors more directly. The company on Tuesday announces its AI strategy and SUSE AI solutions, a new generative AI platform for suppliers and MBAs.
Ahead of the announcement, I spoke exclusively with SUSE CEO (and former Red Hat CEO) Dirk Peter van Leeuwen and Pilar Santamaria, the company’s recently appointed VP of AI, about the new service and SUSE’s overall strategy regarding AI — but also open source general.
“SUSE’s vision is to bring open source’s unlimited potential to the enterprise,” said Lee van Leeuwen, who became SUSE CEO in March 2023. “We believe this open source model gives us endless potential; it continues to evolve faster than any other development model because it is agile. It is very iterative. And because it is open, people use it for many different things than the original developer wrote it for. We have seen all This is on the Internet, with AI, with all the things happening around us that’s all driven by open source but of course, as we all know, for enterprise customers, you need a little bit more than just access to code You need security, security, and most importantly, you need to be sure that your product will be supported in the long term.
The issue of long-term support is what prompted SUSE to fork CentOS and support existing customers when Red Hat changed its development model for the popular Linux-based operating system last year. This led to a “huge spike” in the number of former CentOS users migrating to the SUSE fork, Van Leeuwen said. “Customers really like this opportunity of switching vendors without switching software,” he said, comparing it to mobile phone users who simply swap their SIM card to access another network. “In software, you can only ever do that through open source, and that’s really what I wanted to achieve with this show.”
He also noted that many of these companies are then taking a look at SUSE’s comprehensive portfolio, which alongside its core Linux offerings also includes Kubernetes Rancher and security service Neuvector, which the company acquired under former CEO Melissa Di Donato. During a time when companies are looking to consolidate platforms, this is a huge advantage. But SUSE itself has also gone through a slew of ownership changes over the years and that hasn’t necessarily helped it position itself in the market.
“SUSE has been, is and always will be a great company,” he said. “But the downside for SUSE as a company is that it’s gone through a fair number of acquisitions. And when you do these acquisitions, you get new management, a lot of things get reset, and the world moves very quickly, right?” He said SUSE had always performed well in its work with SAP, which helped it grow in the European market, but the United States remained a challenge.
“In the US, SUSE has never reached brand recognition. That’s something we’re working on as well. Because US customers in particular, in many cases, don’t even know SUSE exists. It’s hard to pronounce us for US customers. And so there are things we have to “It’s not the hardest thing to work on, because we have the products, we have the solutions, and we have customers like that.”
He stressed that Rancher is already a strong brand in the U.S., so the company plans to tie it closer to the overall SUSE brand and have those customers look at more than just its Kubernetes offerings.
Artificial intelligence is clearly another area in which SUSE believes it has an opportunity to grow. At its core, the company sees itself as a major player in open source infrastructure — the next frontier there is supporting AI workloads, after all.
The new SUSE AI solution — itself open source, of course — aims squarely at helping its customers put AI workloads into production, and do so in a secure, privacy-first way. It should be noted that it is not a training solution but aims to help companies use their own models or open-weighted foundation models such as Meta’s Llama.
“Many companies can’t really use generative AI because they find they have to give their data to third parties. Basically, they don’t feel like they can lead with AI, and if you don’t lead, you’re the data,” said SUSE AI VP Santamaria. That’s it.” And even if they don’t mind, many companies face compliance issues because the vendor may not be able to guarantee where in the world the data is being processed.
Until now, there hasn’t been an open source solution on the market that gives organizations the freedom to run these LLM programs in their own cloud or virtual private cloud — along with the access controls and security solutions they need, Santamaria says. “This is the first solution on the market that has these components, is completely ready and is deployed in minutes, not days,” she said.
She stressed that the company believes that users should be free to deploy models of their choice, perhaps fine-tuned or augmented with the company’s data on the use of augmented recovery generation. But at the same time, the industry is moving so quickly that many users also don’t want to lock themselves into one vendor that may or may not be at the forefront of what’s next.
The idea here is for the solution to be modular, allowing people to select the vector database of their choice, for example, to build a solution that best suits their needs.
One such customer is Fujitsu. “Generative AI helps unleash innovation in our world. Our customers’ employees are already using generative AI in their private lives and naturally want to use this technology at work as well. Through the solution, “As a trusted partner, SUSE supports us with our genAI product strategy through its collaboration, expertise and commitment to customer choice.”
SUSE’s AI solution is now available as early access software