Why I’m excited about SUSECON Digital – join me!

In April 2019, I attended the last in-person SUSECON held in Nashville, Tennessee. What an experience! I learned SUSE was much more than a great open source software business loved by customers and partners. SUSECON also brought together a wonderful group of employees and community members. Every station was staffed by SUSE employees, each beaming with pride and warmth. More than anything else, SUSECON was a celebration of the open source culture shared by customers, partners, community members, and employees. And, SUSECON was where I learned about SUSE’s unique take on Kubernetes and learned how NOT to pronounce SUSE!

I am really looking forward to SUSECON Digital 2021 which will take place, virtually, on May 18-20, 2021. If you are a SUSE Linux customer, this event will deliver an entirely new experience for you. As Melissa explained in her blog, this event will include keynote sessions from both Linux and Kubernetes technologists, and present 3 virtual space worlds highlighting Linux, Kubernetes, and Edge technologies. If you are a Rancher user or Rancher customer, this event will showcase the latest open source innovation coming out of the combined SUSE engineering organization, how SUSE and Rancher share the same vision of open source and open interoperability, and how Linux and Kubernetes are working together to power mission-critical applications of today and the future.

Following Melissa’s keynote, I will deliver a speech covering how the combined SUSE and Rancher engineering organization will continue to deliver innovative technologies that solve customer’s pressing problems. The experience over the past year has driven home the importance for organizations to develop and enhance, at an ever increasing pace and ever larger scale, the mission-critical applications that power their business. Linux and Kubernetes are the key technologies every organization needs to run these applications. SUSE is committed to developing not just open source products, but also truly open products that do not lock customers into a single vendor’s technology stack. We provide the industry-leading SLES Linux distro and RKE and k3s Kubernetes distro, yet our SUSE Manager product supports other vendor’s Linux distros and our Rancher product supports EKS, AKS, and GKE. The vision of “open open source” will always drive us to place the customer’s needs ahead of vendor’s concerns.

As much as I’m proud of the depth and breath of the technical program offered by my colleagues, I am even more excited about the impressive lineup of sessions to be presented by customers, partners, and other community members. SUSECON is a venue for the entire SUSE community, with all of you taking part. If you haven’t done so, please register for the event where we will all come together to learn, share, and celebrate the latest innovation successes!