SUSE, the venerable open source company based in Luxembourg, has long been a well-known name in IT circles in Europe, but it has never really managed to capture the American market, where competitors like Red Hat and Canonical are much more known. Yet just like in the cloud world, where many players are hoping AI will reshape the rules of the game, SUSE is also hoping AI will give it a new entry into the US market – alongside its recent initiatives in favor of cloud computing. challenge its competitors more directly. The company is announcing its AI strategy and solutions on Tuesday: SUSE AI, a new vendor- and LLM-agnostic generative AI platform.
Ahead of the announcement, I spoke exclusively with Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, CEO of SUSE (and former Red Hat executive), and Pilar Santamaria, the company’s recently named vice president of AI, about the new service and SUSE’s overall AI strategy – but also open source in general.
“SUSE’s vision is to bring the infinite potential of open source to the enterprise,” van Leeuwen, who became CEO of SUSE in March 2023, told me. “We believe this open source model offers us potential infinity ; it continues to evolve faster than any other development model because it is exponential. It’s extremely iterative. And because it’s open, people use it for many different things than the original developer wrote it for. We’ve seen all of this with the internet, with AI, with everything that’s happening around us. Everything is driven by open source. But of course, as we all know, for enterprise customers you need a little more than just access to the code. You need support, you need security, safety. And most importantly, you need to be sure that your product will be supported for the long term.
The question of long-term support is what prompted SUSE to launch CentOS and support existing customers when Red Hat changed its development model for the popular Linux-based operating system last year. According to van Leeuwen, this has led to a “tremendous increase” in the number of former CentOS users migrating to the SUSE fork. “Customers really like to take advantage of this opportunity to change providers without changing software,” he said, comparing this to mobile phone users who simply change SIM cards to access a different network. “In software, this is never possible without open source, and that’s really what I wanted to achieve with this offering. »
He also noted that many of these companies then look at SUSE’s overall portfolio, which, in addition to its core Linux offerings, also includes the Kubernetes Rancher service and the Neuvector security service, which the company acquired under SUSE’s leadership. former CEO Melissa Di Donato. At a time when companies are looking to consolidate their platforms, this is a major advantage. But SUSE itself has also seen many ownership changes over the years, which hasn’t necessarily helped it position itself in the market.
“SUSE has been, and still is, an extraordinary company,” he said. “But the downside of SUSE as a company is that it has been subject to many acquisitions. And when you make these acquisitions, you get a new direction, a lot of things get reset and the world moves very fast, right? SUSE, he said, has always done well in its work with SAP, which has helped it expand into the European market, but the United States remains a challenge.
“In the United States, SUSE never really achieved brand recognition. This is something we are working on as well. Because, in many cases, US customers in particular don’t even know SUSE exists. We are difficult to pronounce for US customers. So there are things we need to work on. But it’s not the hardest thing to do, because we have the products and the solutions and customers like this,” he said.
He pointed out that Rancher is already a strong brand in the US, so the company plans to bring it closer to the overall SUSE brand and get those customers to look at more than just its Kubernetes offering.
AI is obviously the other area where SUSE believes it has an opportunity to grow. At its core, the company sees itself as an open source infrastructure player – and the next frontier is support for AI workloads after all.
The new SUSE AI solution – itself open source, of course – aims directly to help its customers bring AI workloads into production in a secure and privacy-friendly manner. It should be noted that this is not a training solution, but is intended to help companies use their own models or open weight foundation models like Meta’s Llama.
“Many companies can’t really use generative AI because they find themselves having to share their data with third parties. Basically, they don’t think they can drive with AI – and if you’re not driving, you are the data. That’s it,” said Santamaria, vice president of SUSE AI. And even if they don’t mind, many businesses face compliance issues because a vendor may not be able to guarantee where in the world data is processed.
Santamaria says that until now there was no open source solution on the market that gave companies the freedom to run these LLMs in their own cloud or virtual private cloud, combined with access controls and solutions security they need. “This is the first solution on the market with these components, completely turnkey and deployed in minutes, not days,” she said.
She emphasized that the company believes that users should have the freedom to deploy the models they want, perhaps refined or enriched with the company’s own data through retrieval-augmented generation. But at the same time, the industry is evolving so quickly that many users also don’t want to lock themselves into a single provider that may or may not be at the forefront of the future.
The idea here is that the solution is modular, allowing users to select the vector database of their choice, for example to build a solution best suited to their needs.
One of these customers is Fujitsu. “Generative AI helps unlock innovation in our world. Our clients’ employees already use generative AI in their private lives and naturally also want to use this technology at work. With our solution, they can do this in a secure and protected environment,” said Udo Würtz, Chief Data Officer, European Platform Business at Fujitsu. “As a trusted partner, SUSE supports our genAI product strategy with collaboration, expertise and commitment to customer choice. »
SUSE AI Solution Now Available as Early Access Program
