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SUSE , the august Luxembourg - based undefendable source company , has long been a household name in IT roofy in Europe , but it ’s never quite manage to capture the U.S. marketplace , where competitors like Red Hat and Canonical are far better known . Yet , just like in the cloud world , where a lot of participant are desire for AI to reshuffle the playacting field of study , so , too , does SUSE hope that AI will give it a new entranceway into the U.S. market — together with its recent movement to moredirectly challenge its competition . The companionship on Tuesday is announcing its AI scheme and SUSE AI solution , a Modern vendor- and LLM - agnostic generative AI platform .
Ahead of the promulgation , I exclusively spoke with SUSE CEO ( and passe - Red Hat executive director ) Dirk - Peter van Leeuwen and Pilar Santamaria , the company ’s recently appoint VP of AI , about the unexampled armed service and SUSE ’s overall strategy with regard to AI — but also open source in general .
“ The vision of SUSE is to bring in the infinite likely open beginning to the enterprise , ” van Leeuwen , who became SUSE ’s CEO in March 2023 , assure me . “ We do believe that this open root model is giving us an countless potential ; it just go along evolve faster than any other development model because it ’s exponential . It ’s super iterative . And because it ’s unfastened , people utilise this for many different things than what the original developer wrote it for . We ’ve attend this all in the internet , with AI , with all the things that are happening around us . It ’s all beat back through open author . But of course , as we all have a go at it , for enterprise customers , you need a picayune bit more than just memory access to code . You need support , you need protection , safety . And most significantly , you need to be sure that your product will be supported for long terminal figure . ”
The question of long - term support is what got SUSE tofork CentOS and fend for survive customerswhen Red Hat changed its development exemplar for the popular Linux - based operating system last year . That , van Leeuwen said , has leave in a “ grand uptick ” from former CentOS users who are migrating to SUSE ’s branching . “ client really like to tap into this opportunity of switching vendors without switching software , ” he said , comparing it to roving phone users just swop out their SIM to get on another web . “ In software , you could never do this except with open germ , and that ’s really what I want to achieve with this offer . ”
He also mention that a wad of these enterprises then take a look at SUSE ’s overall portfolio , which besides its core Linux offerings also includes Kubernetes service Rancher and security system service NeuVector , which the company acquired under former CEO Melissa Di Donato . During a time when enterprises are looking to consolidate weapons platform , that ’s a major reward . But SUSE itself also went through its own wad of ownership changes over the years and that has n’t needfully help it position itself in the market .
“ SUSE has been , and still is and always has been , an awesome company , ” he said . “ But the downside for SUSE as a company has been that it ’s run short through quite a few acquisitions . And when you go through these acquisitions , you get a Modern management , a lot of stuff gets reset , and the world is moving very fast , veracious ? ” SUSE , he said , has always done well in its work with SAP , which helped it grow in the European market , but the U.S. has remained a challenge .
“ In the U.S. , SUSE has never really reached brand recognition . That is something we ’re do work on as well . Because U.S. client in particular are in many pillow slip not even cognizant of the existence of SUSE . We ’re gruelling to pronounce for U.S. customers . And so there are things for us to work on . But they ’re not the hardest thing to do , because we have the products and we have the solution and customers like this , ” he said .
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He strain that Rancher is already a strong brand in the U.S. , so the society plan to colligate that nigher to the overall SUSE mark and get those customers to bet at more than just its Kubernetes offering .
AI is obviously the other area where SUSE think it has an opportunity to mature . At its inwardness , the company insure itself as an open source infrastructure player — and the next frontier there is supporting AI workloads , after all .
The new SUSE AI solution — which itself is open reference , of course of instruction — is squarely get at aid its customers put AI workloads into output , and to do so in a secure and privateness - first way . It ’s deserving noting that it ’s not a training result but is stand for to help businesses utilise their own models or open - weight creation models like Meta ’s Llama .
“ Many companies can not really use generative AI because they find that they have to give their data to third political party . essentially , they do n’t feel they can drive in AI — and if you do n’t get , you ’re the data . That ’s it , ” SUSE AI VP Santamaria said . And even if they do n’t mind that , then a mint of company face compliance issues because a vender may not be able to vouch where in the public the data is processed .
Santamaria argue that until now , there was n’t an candid source result on the market that gave enterprises the freedom to run these LLMs in their own cloud or virtual private cloud — combined with the accession controls and certificate result they call for . “ This is the first solution in the market with these components , completely turnkey , and deployed in minute , not in days , ” she say .
She emphasize that the party consider that users must have the exemption to deploy the models of their pick , maybe fine - tune up or augment with a ship’s company ’s own datum using retrieval - augmented propagation . But at the same time , the industry is move so apace that many users also do n’t want to lock themselves into a single seller that may or may not be at the forefront of what ’s next .
The idea here is for the solution to be modular , allowing multitude to choose the transmitter database of their choice ; for deterrent example , to build a root that best suits their needs .
One of those customers is Fujitsu . “ Generative AI is help to unlock conception within our creation . Our customers ’ employees already use productive AI in their individual lives and naturally need to use this engineering at work too . With our solution , they can do this in a good and protected setting , ” said Udo Würtz , chief data officer , European Platform Business at Fujitsu . “ As a trusted partner , SUSE endorse us with our GenAI product scheme through their collaborationism , expertise and commitment to option for customers . ”
SUSE ’s AI root is now available as an early - access program .
