What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
From Space to AI: SUSE's Hidden Tech Footprint
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
When a technology has been around for over three decades, you might assume its most exciting days are behind it. But as SUSE CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen aka DP reveals, Linux and open source are actually at the center of today's most transformative technologies - from AI to edge computing to digital sovereignty.
The conversation begins with a passionate reminder of why open source matters: it creates exponential innovation through collaboration. "None of this would have been possible if it wasn't for people sharing their ideas and allowing other people to build on it," explains DP. This philosophy has fueled everything from the internet to cloud computing to today's AI revolution.
As Europe grapples with digital sovereignty concerns, SUSE's European heritage provides unique advantages. Unlike proprietary solutions, open source inherently transcends borders while offering the transparency organizations need for security and control. DP positions SUSE as a champion of customer choice in the enterprise Linux market, supporting multiple distributions (including competitors') often beyond their official end-of-life dates. This flexibility allows organizations to maintain legacy systems while focusing resources on innovation.
Perhaps most fascinating is SUSE's approach to AI adoption. Rather than prescribing specific models or frameworks, they've built a platform that allows enterprises to choose any LLM while protecting their most valuable asset: data. Their private AI solution prevents confidential information from leaving company environments - addressing a critical concern as employees rush to experiment with generative AI tools.
Looking toward the future, SUSE's technology already powers everything from satellites to autonomous vehicles to 5G networks. Their K3S micro-Kubernetes solution is revolutionizing edge computing by enabling containerized workloads on devices as small as Raspberry Pi. It's a reminder that while Linux may operate invisibly beneath the surface, it remains the foundation upon which tomorrow's innovations are built.
Want to explore how open source can power your organization's future while maintaining control, security, and flexibility? Discover why after 33 years, SUSE remains at the cutting edge of enterprise technology.
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Hey everyone. Fascinating chat today as we talk about the world of Linux, in particular with Suze, the global leader in enterprise open source, a time when digital sovereignty, innovation, competition, iot and so many relevant topics in the Linux space are coming to the forefront. Dp, how are you?
Speaker 2:I'm very well, Evan, Nice to meet you and thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Thanks for being here. Let's start with introductions to yourself and also how do you describe Suze these days, a company that's very well known to us tech geeks and enterprise developer geeks?
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's start with that. So my name is Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen. Everybody calls me DP because it's such a long name. I am Dutch and haven't lived in the Netherlands for a long time, though. But yeah, I'm the CEO of SUSE. Prior to that, I worked in Reset for almost 19 years, so I'm an open source guy at heart, actually, so I will probably call myself an open source geek, too Brilliant.
Speaker 2:So getting to Sousa, of course everybody knows Sousa.
Speaker 2:We are a 33-year-old company, probably one of the oldest open source company in the industry, and with open source, it's always about you know the code is free, the code is open source.
Speaker 2:Everybody builds on it, so the business model needs to be on enhancing that and creating additional value, rather than trying to reduce the access to the code, or rather than try to not give people the full opportunity and the full benefit of the development of the code, because ultimately, that development in open source give people the full opportunity and the full benefit of the development of the code, because ultimately, that development in open source is what really led to the exponential innovation that we've seen in the industry, and it's not the credit of me or Suze, it's the credit to the open source community that we've seen this innovation happening, whether it's from the internet to the cloud, to AI, to all the things that now go at a tremendous speed. None of this would have been possible if it wasn't for people sharing their ideas and allowing other people to build on it, because that's what creates the exponential innovation.
Speaker 1:Indeed, and it's a wonderful testament to global collaboration and it's just a bright light in the industry. However, there are some big question marks. Digital sovereignty is getting a lot of attention right now. How do you see the open source movement balancing local control with this continued collaboration? Where does Suzy fit in this picture?
Speaker 2:Yeah, maybe let's start with open source in this picture, because open source is um is not limited to any borders, right? So digital sovereignty, uh, shouldn't have any issue with open source. The source code is accessible to anybody. It's not owned by anybody in any particular region or geography. It it's accessible to everybody. You can see what the code does, you can see how it's built, you can read its documentation. So there is an inherent safety associated to open source that allows it to be very suitable in a digital sovereign world without having to worry about okay, does it come from this country or that country? Because it really doesn't come from any particular country.
Speaker 2:But when it comes to digital sovereignty, in the sense of protecting data and protecting companies from using or having data go across geographies into different data centers stored in different geographies, there, it becomes important for customers to be able to depend on vendors that are capable of isolating their work from certain countries, certain borders that are set by the users. That is something that SUSE does really well. Now, this is a real, particular European issue. Now, this is a real, particular European issue. It stems from the recent Trump administration pushing Europe to stand on their own length and, as a result, europe is making a lot of effort to make sure it can do that by sourcing more local, by trying to get more local design, the local-owned business, to compete for projects and workloads. And, given that we are a European company very unique honestly, in this IT industry, we have benefit, not something that we designed this for, but it's a benefit that we have being a European company. We are very, very suited to help the European customers, for whom digital certainty has now become a very big topic.
Speaker 1:Fantastic and the beauty of Linux is that there are so many choices. But that's also a challenge for enterprise users, a very crowded Linux market. So how do you describe Suzy, the sweet spot? Where do you really stand out in this crowd?
Speaker 2:Honestly, I wish the Linux market was more crowded than it really is, because if you look at it, there are flavors, there are many different flavors, but if you look at the adoption of those flavors, it comes down to really two vendors that are in this market supplying enterprise workloads for Linux or supplying Linux for enterprise workloads, I should say, and that's obviously Red Hat and that's us. And what is important for customers, but also, I think, for the open source community at large, is for those customers to have choice, because open source's business model is really based on giving these customers choice, not so much based on the code they use but based on the service that's associated with it, that makes it viable, that supports it for the long run, that keeps it stable for 10, 20, 30 years, depending on what the customer needs are, and in that framework of being able to use the great technology that Limit is. But do it by choosing a company that fits best for you and maybe a combination of multiple customers, multiple companies. That is where the choice comes in, and we feel very strongly, and so do our customers honestly, that we need to be careful that this choice does not erode, unless you really end up not having that choice as a customer. So our sweet spot in this market is really to come and help customers to be able to benefit from multiple Linuxes, from multiple Kubernetes, flavors, or from multiple AI kind of workloads, infrastructures and managing it at scale, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud, whether it's on this cloud, that cloud or the other cloud or in between clouds. And there we have a very unique proposition where we are, I would say, almost selfless in allowing customers to decide which sort of like set of different vendors they want to use and how they want to manage them.
Speaker 2:Because ultimately, what we do is we do have, of course, our own Linux, which is a super great product, is less, but we also manage all the others. Super great product it's less, but we also manage all the others. If you have another Linux of any type, we will support it and we will allow you to manage it, even in a heterogeneous environment of multiple Linux vendors, because that's ultimately what open source has always been about, right you don't want to stifle your customers in terms of what they can do. You don't want to force them to use your own management tools and to then be stuck to a single vendor. So this whole multi-vendor principle that stems at the source of open source is what we are bringing to life to our customers and we, honestly, we support Red Hat and we support it longer than Red Hat does.
Speaker 2:And customers like that because it takes away a lot of stress in terms of managing your legacy environments, because a lot of this Linux has become legacy.
Speaker 2:It's hard to believe, but it has become something that is there now for so long that customers are starting to worry about old versions and what do I do and how do I maintain those? So, yeah, we are very strong in supporting those older versions, even if they're not our own, so that customers can continue to focus on innovation and go into that native and using all the great and latest new technologies, especially now when it comes to AI, where there's a massive demand for implementing AI workloads in a super fast moving. I mean, nothing has moved as fast as AI is now moving. Whatever is hot today is all in three months and it grows at a crazy speed and enterprises are using it. So there, too, platforms and infrastructure is required for customers to use it at scale without having to worry about the infrastructure below. But really being able to worry about can I keep up with this pace of innovation and can I stay competitive?
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. Speaking of challenges, you've seen the CentOS Linux going end of life. What does that meant for your customers? How have you approached this shift? What does it mean for you as an opportunity?
Speaker 2:Well as an opportunity. I think the thing that was really important for CentOS is that it was a free product. Customers could use an enterprise ready sort of like Linux, without having to pay for it. That's really what CentOS is all about. So, ideally, we would have loved to see this continue so that customers who don't need the enterprise level support could continue to use the CentOS. But they can't's. Uh, you know, it's end of life, as you mentioned, so this is causing a problem for customers. Um, what we are offering them is to come to us. We have a a low-cost support solution for them whereby we will continue. The center was workloads. We're also working on building our own products for the future to be very easy to port to, to migrate to, so we're reducing the gap between versus staying where you are.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. So Suze has deep European roots. You know better than I and I'd be interested in your unique bird's eye view on the European market. Lots of amazing innovation happening, but also lots of criticism about innovating and creating more tech giant startups and other opportunities. How do you think Europeans' tech heritage is evolving and will evolve over time?
Speaker 2:I think it's a phenomenal opportunity that Europeans need to be much more aware of and invest in, because the fact of the matter is there are not that many European-led companies of scale at least there have been some startups.
Speaker 2:There are some smaller companies, but there's a massive opportunity for larger companies with European roots to grow faster and to take ownership of a market that is still very much growing and doesn't necessarily restrict itself to the European borders, because there is, of course, the American market, but there's also the Asian market, there is the South American market, there is the African market.
Speaker 2:There is a lot of opportunity out there and European technology is very highly regarded across the world and we see that ourselves. And obviously Sousa has had a very, very longstanding relationship with SAP, with whom we've been. You know, we both share the German sort of like heritage and we've been collaborating very closely and we still run a very, very large majority of every SAP workload. Those are two companies that are partnering very well. We also see new up-and-coming, larger European companies like OVH Cloud, a French host that is working closely with us to provide again along the lines of the digital sovereignty opportunity that has been presented by customers wanting more control over the data in a certain region. So we have some large partners that are growing fast as well in Europe, but there is still a tremendous opportunity.
Speaker 1:Indeed, and you know there's a whole new wave of enterprise IT innovation happening. Can't even begin to talk about the opportunities. Where do you see Suze playing in all of that innovation, particularly AI, gen AI and these new agentic architectures that are emerging? That's so intriguing.
Speaker 2:It is super intriguing, and the one thing that any emerging technology has in common with what we are doing is they all need a platform. Nothing runs without a processor, nothing runs without an operating system. On top of that, often in combination with the cloud, kubernetes, containerization. So this is the business we're in, right? So what we need to do when it comes to infrastructure is similar to what we did like 20 years ago, making databases run best on Linux. It's now making sure AI runs best on Linux, and Linux, in a way, has become more or less the default platform for innovation when it comes to operating systems. So we're in a sweet spot here. But what is important for me? Uh, as I have been gone through multiple um trends in the industry. I've seen them, I've lived in them and, and you always see, there is like the early adopter and then there's the later adopter and and whatever happens, it doesn't really matter when you adopt, uh, but the technology that has the hype, as as ai does now, for example, is now uh moving so fast. And if you go to any company and you ask for like, okay, which ai solution should I use, they will tell you exactly what they think you should use and which large language model goes on top and the whole stack, and then you're back to maybe you remember the open stack days. You're back to a very predefined stack that people then start developing their entire life, new run, only to find out that three months later, three year later, this is completely obsolete and because this is what it really is the trend right now with ai, and so what we've done? We've created a platform to run AI on, without being very prescriptive on what that platform really is. So we allow our customers to choose their own large language model and whether they want to use a GenPig or not, they can choose that too. But what our platform does particularly well is to make sure you can run it at scale and you can manage it easily. But it also offers data protection, because, when it comes to AI and AI, as you well know, is only as good as the data that it's learning from that data is not an intellectual property that needs to be protected.
Speaker 2:For many companies, because they don't want their data to go go into ai models and they don't want their data to go outside of their companies. With the hype that ai brings, many employees feel that they should take company confidential data, throw it into any last language model, uh, and and with that they have sort of often breached company policies in regards to data and sovereignty data security. So we are providing, in our AI platform, a way to restrict that from happening. So we allow customers to use their whole AI model and their large language model of choice. They can change it whenever they want to change it, to change it.
Speaker 2:But what they are certain of is is that as soon as any model or any system that runs in that environment is trying to send company confidential data outside, we will block it and we will make sure it doesn't happen. So this is a very important part of what companies are using for, when they especially know that you know a large of enterprise companies are defining ai in useless policies. The data protection is of a of a key and, uh, really a core requirement for for those companies. So we built our private ai product, which is, uh doing exactly this, and you can run this private ai in the cloud or you can run it really private on-prem, that doesn't matter. But these data protections and these flexibilities that are so important in a fast-moving world are there for them.
Speaker 1:Brilliant, what a great opportunity. So on a controversial topic here. Some say the open source movement is losing some of its meaning as more companies adopt kind of restrictive licensing and commercial demands. I won't point fingers who's doing that, but you know, how can we keep open source open and where does Suze draw the line when it comes to these practices?
Speaker 2:So we're pretty much very open and we want to continue to follow the open source principles, as I mentioned at the beginning of our talk. They are core to innovation, and whatever you do to remove the freedom that comes with standard open source usage stifles innovation. There's no doubt about it. And the question is, why is this happening? And I think that's more to the core of why we see these issues around open core or restricted this, and that of why we see these issues around open core or restricted this, and that I speak to many people, also outside of my direct job responsibility around this, and I do feel that companies are struggling to understand how you make money of open source, because that's what it's all about. Right, because you build something, you have something you need, and then you think, okay, now I need to create a business model around it, now I need to make money of it. And then hey, if this is open source, anybody can copy it, anybody can use it in the way they want, and then I'm not going to make money on it. So I'm reducing the access to the source code, or I'm no longer making it open source and I'm going to go proprietary, or I'm no longer making it open source and I'm going to go proprietary or I find a combination where I can still claim it's open source but it's really not, so that nobody can use it without paying me. These are complete wrong approaches to working with open source, in my opinion, and the companies, because we believe strongly that open source should stay open and should be freely accessible to anybody.
Speaker 2:But then it comes down to where do you compete as a vendor? And the way you compete as a vendor is the experience you're offering to your customer in using that code. And we've seen this in what I call the digital revolution, where we saw that all business models are moving more from a licensing model to a construction model and that you pay for what you use and what you need and that you compete on quality and not on IP. This is a very puristic approach to developing and selling software in an open source world, and we've got to stay pure about it.
Speaker 2:So I don't feel threatened by any other company who has an open source solution, because I make sure that my customers are getting the best possible service and that they're willing to pay the price for my service because their experience of that service is the best that they can get. So you go really down to the core of where it all matters and that's the customer. It's the customer, the customer experience. As a customer, you're willing to pay for good service and you're not necessarily willing to pay for IP or for a license that you really don't understand who you're paying and what you're paying for. So make it more tangible. Make sure that what you're selling to your customer is a tangible service and has a tangible value that customers really want to pay for because they need it.
Speaker 1:Great advice, fast forwarding a few years. What's your vision for Suze's role in the world, in the open source landscape? Are we going to see Suze-powered spacecraft or autonomous trucks, or what do you see out there?
Speaker 2:Well, we're obviously an infrastructure place where you won't necessarily see us while you still use us, and I can tell you we're already in space and many satellites are being used in many locations in cars, in self-driving cars, in all sorts of technology that you wouldn't necessarily associate with Susan.
Speaker 2:But it's actually also logical because all these technologies, they didn't operate a system.
Speaker 2:Nothing runs without it, and the best operating system to run these things on is often Linux, and Linux being Susan, being Linux is a very good choice and in this space where we see this fast, exponential growth also of adoption of new technology, IOT and all these kinds of things, we really have a unique proposition on the edge and we see that the adoption from our technology and I'm actually now more talking about K3S, which is the micro Kubernetes version that we supply as part of our venture product portfolio K3S is adopting at a phenomenal speed because it is the smallest single binary Kubernetes engine that you can use to build IoT devices on as small as in Raspberry Pi and even smaller than that and then run it at scale.
Speaker 2:So we see this grow as a really interesting new generation workload and as workloads optimize constantly, you see also smaller workloads being created that go into K3S and manage that scale of workloads being created that go into K3S and manage that scale. So that's why you see us in Satellite 5G networks are running with SUSE underneath it. There is a lot of growth opportunity for us in that space, as well as in the AI space and everything infrastructure.
Speaker 1:Honestly, Well, that's quite a mic drop moment. So, on that note, thanks very much for joining and sharing the vision. Very exciting DP.
Speaker 2:It's been my pleasure. Thank you so much, Henry, for inviting me.
Speaker 1:And thanks everyone for listening, watching, sharing this episode and be sure to check out our new TV show, next episode in September on Fox, Business and Bloomberg. Thanks very much.