Kube World at SUSECON – The Rancher Journey Continues

SUSECON is only a few weeks away, and the excitement is starting to build. While working on my keynote, I took some time to look back on how much has happened since SUSE completed its acquisition of Rancher Labs in December of last year. It’s just unreal how fast things are moving. It hasn’t even been six months, and more things have happened than many companies can accomplish in a year or more.

What struck me is how every integration has done more than combine the two companies’ workforce and products. There has always been a third entity kept in mind in every stage of the operations: our users.

SUSE is an open source company. It’s in the SUSE DNA as much as it was in the DNA of Rancher. That’s why the acquisition made so much sense – joining with SUSE was like meeting someone and instantly becoming fast friends, with that feeling like you’ve always known the other person. We don’t quite finish each others’ sentences, but we both place the community first in the list of things that matter. As things have moved forward in the first months of 2021, that common goal of lifting up the community has been the fuel in our open source development engine.

For many companies, the product value chain starts with, “How much can we sell this for?” and ends with, “How can we keep customers from leaving?” The result is a poisoned offering that treats customers like an exploitable resource that companies strip mine.

At SUSE, the conversation starts with, “How can we solve a problem together?” and ends with, “How can we do more?”

I love working in the open source model because everything is collaborative. Open source changes the rules of business. It changes the perspective from two parties sitting across the table to two parties sitting on the same side, looking at how to solve the same problem.

We build the products and features that the community tells us they need to deliver their own products and services to their users, who then do the same. Each link in the chain makes the following link stronger.

At Rancher, we were always coming up with new ideas. Some moved forward, others didn’t, and some, like K3s, went farther than we ever imagined because the community took hold of it and said, “Yes! This is what we needed.”

SUSE is a leader in innovation. We’re coming up with solutions today that we hope change what tomorrow looks like. We’ll tell you about some of them at KubeCon and others at SUSECON. They’re all designed to be open and interoperable, deriving from a core of flexibility, freedom, choice, and access.

Join me at SUSECON where I’ll be giving a keynote at Kube World to discuss how Rancher fits into this strategy at SUSE. I’m excited to share with you how Kubernetes and Rancher are playing a foundational role in SUSE’s strategy, the latest in Rancher capabilities and tell more about the newest cutting edge open source projects.

I look forward to meeting you there.