From Vision to Deployment: ITQ and SUSE Partner to Deliver Enterprise AI Together

SUSE and ITQ are strengthening their collaboration to help organizations adopt artificial intelligence in a secure, flexible, and scalable way.

SUSE AI delivers an CNCF-certified enterprise AI platform that enables organizations to move from experimentation to real-world implementation—faster and with greater confidence. ITQ’s deep expertise in cloud-native technologies and engineering help customers adopt open, secure AI that runs consistently across environments—from the data center to the edge.

Turning AI ambition into real-world impact

Headquartered in the Netherlands, ITQ is a leading multi-cloud company providing support, consultancy and managed IT services, specializing in digital workspaces, hybrid cloud, cloud native platforms, cyber-resilience and AI. As demand for AI solutions surged, ITQ saw a familiar pattern emerge:

• Organizations lacked the infrastructure to run large language models (LLMs) in-house
• Security and data sovereignty concerns limited adoption
• Costs of AI experimentation in the cloud were difficult to control

A bold idea: proving enterprise AI at the edge

To demonstrate what’s possible, ITQ set out to build something tangible—a real-world proof point for secure, edge-based AI. The result? A gesture-controlled robotic dog named Q9. Powered by SUSE AI and SUSE Rancher Prime, Q9 can interpret human hand gestures in real time and respond with physical actions. 

The stack includes : Dell AI Factory Infrastructure, SUSE Rancher and SUSE AI, running NVIDIA NIMs with Open Source LLMs and VLMs, instructed by the Q9 System Prompt, a Completions API and Q9 Vision Service. 

But this isn’t just a showcase—it’s a powerful demonstration of how enterprises can:

• Deploy AI models securely at the edge
• Process data locally with near-zero latency
• Maintain full control over sensitive information

And perhaps most importantly, it proves how quickly this can be achieved.

From months to weeks: accelerating AI time-to-value – Using SUSE’s open, enterprise-ready AI stack, ITQ built the first working prototype of Q9 in just four weeks including the underlying stack.. That speed is not an exception—it’s the new baseline.

“With SUSE AI we can help customers implement initial use cases and drive ROI in a couple of months—or even weeks,”
— Johan van Amersfoort, Chief Evangelist & AI Lead, ITQ

Previously, delivering a GPU-as-a-service AI solution could take up to six months. With SUSE AI, ITQ can now deliver similar outcomes in a few weeks —a 12x acceleration in delivery speed.

Why the partnership works

At the core of this success is a clear alignment between ITQ and SUSE on:

Open by design – SUSE’s commitment to open source gives ITQ and its customers the flexibility to build without vendor lock-in—critical for long-term AI strategies.

Secure by default – With a verified and auditable supply chain, SUSE AI ensures that even highly regulated industries can adopt AI with confidence.

Consistent across environments – Whether running in a centralized data center or on an edge device like Q9, the same platform and tooling apply—simplifying operations and scaling.

Built for real-world deployment – With K3s managed through SUSE Rancher Prime, ITQ can run AI workloads efficiently even in constrained edge environments.

Beyond the demo: enabling enterprise AI use cases – while Q9 is an eye-catching example, the implications go far beyond robotics.

Together, ITQ and SUSE are enabling organizations to build:

• Intelligent customer support systems
• Secure, on-premise AI assistants
• Data analytics platforms with full data control
• Edge AI applications in industries like manufacturing and public sector

By combining infrastructure and engineering expertise, the partnership delivers end-to-end AI capabilities—from platform to production. The Q9 dog demonstrates quite literally that the future of AI isn’t just theoretical. It’s already moving.

Read the success story: LINK

Learn more about SUSE AI: LINK