SUSE, the venerable Luxembourg-based open source company, has long been a familiar presence in the European IT industry but has never been able to capture the U.S. market, where competitors like Red Hat and Canonical are much better known. But just as many players in the cloud world hope AI will reshape the playing field, SUSE is hoping it will give it a new entry point into the U.S. market, which comes in conjunction with its recent moves to take on competitors more directly. On Tuesday, the company will unveil its AI strategy and SUSE AI Solutions, a new vendor- and LLM-agnostic generative AI platform.
Ahead of the announcement, I spoke exclusively with SUSE CEO (and former Red Hat executive) Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen and Pilar Santamaria, who was recently appointed vice president of AI at SUSE, about the new service, SUSE's overall strategy for AI, and open source in general.
“SUSE's vision is to bring open source with its limitless potential to the enterprise,” van Leeuwen, who will become SUSE CEO in March 2023, told me. “We believe this open source model gives us limitless possibilities. It continues to evolve faster than any other development model because it's exponential. It's very iterative. And because it's open, people are using it for different things that the original developer didn't write. We've seen this all with the internet, with AI, with everything that's going on around us. It's all driven by open source. But of course, as we all know, for enterprise customers, they need more than just access to the code. They need support, they need security, they need safety. And most importantly, they need to make sure that their products are going to be supported for the long term.”
The issue of long-term support is why SUSE decided to fork CentOS to support existing customers when Red Hat changed its development model for the popular Linux-based operating system last year. van Leeuwen says that as a result, they've seen a “huge increase” in former CentOS users moving to the SUSE fork. “Customers really want to take advantage of this opportunity to switch vendors without switching software,” he said, comparing it to when a mobile phone user simply switches SIMs to connect to a different network. “You can never do this with software, except with open source, and that's exactly what I wanted to achieve with this product.”
He also noted that many of these companies are looking at SUSE's comprehensive portfolio, which includes its core Linux products as well as Kubernetes service Rancher and security service Neuvector, which the company acquired under former CEO Melissa Di Donato. That's a big plus at a time when companies are looking to consolidate platforms. But SUSE itself has seen a number of ownership changes over the years, which hasn't necessarily helped its market position.
“SUSE has been, is and always will be a great company,” he said. “But the downside for SUSE is that they've been through quite a few acquisitions, and when you go through these acquisitions, management changes, a lot of things get reset, and the world moves so fast, right?'” SUSE has always done well with SAP, which he said has helped it grow in European markets, but the U.S. remains a challenge.
“In the U.S., SUSE still doesn't have a lot of brand recognition, which is something we're working on. Customers, especially in the U.S., often don't even know SUSE exists. We're hard for U.S. customers to pronounce. So there's something to work on. But it's not the hardest thing, because we have the products, we have the solutions, we have these customers,” he said.
He emphasized that because Rancher is already a strong brand in the U.S., the company plans to bring it closer to the overall SUSE brand and get customers to look at more than just the Kubernetes product.
AI is clearly another area where SUSE sees opportunity for growth: the company sees itself as essentially an open source infrastructure player, and after all, the next frontier is supporting AI workloads.
The new SUSE AI solution (itself open source, of course) is aimed at helping customers put AI workloads into production and do so securely and with privacy first. It's worth noting that this is not a training solution, but rather aims to enable companies to use their own models or open-weighted foundational models like Meta's Llama.
“A lot of companies can't really use generative AI because they have to hand their data over to a third party. They fundamentally don't expect AI to drive them. If you don't drive them, you become the data. And that's it,” says Santamaria, SUSE AI VP. Even if that doesn't bother you, many companies will run into compliance issues because vendors may not be able to guarantee where in the world their data is processed.
Santamaria claims that until now, there has been no open source solution on the market that gives companies the freedom to run these LLMs on their own cloud or virtual private cloud, combined with the necessary access control and security solutions. “This is the first solution on the market that has these components and is completely turnkey, and can be deployed in minutes instead of days,” she said.
She emphasized that the company believes that users should be able to deploy the models freely, potentially tweaking them or even extending them with a company's own data using search extension generation, but at the same time, the industry is changing so quickly that many users don't want to be locked into a single vendor that may or may not be at the forefront of what's next.
The idea here is to modularize the solution, allowing users to choose, for example, their preferred vector database and build a solution that best suits their needs.
One such customer is Fujitsu. “Generative AI is helping to enable innovation in our world. Our customers' employees are already using generative AI in their personal lives and naturally want to use the technology at work as well. Our solutions enable them to do this in a safe and protected environment,” said Udo Würtz, chief data officer for Fujitsu's European Platform business. “As a trusted partner, SUSE supports our genAI product strategy through collaboration, expertise and commitment to customer choice.”
SUSE AI Solutions Now Available as Part of Early Access Program