Reconnecting and co-innovating: Reflections on SUSECON 2023

At SUSECON 2023, I found a forum to collaborate, innovate and find solutions, face to face, with customers and partners. It was a chance too for our open source community to re-connect in the same physical space for the first time since 2019. And it was an opportunity for me to listen. 

Enterprise open source isn’t just a business, it’s a passion for many people too. Much of our success comes through the efforts of developers in the upstream community – it was great to meet some of you again and good to see the openSUSE stand getting lots of visitors.  

In the enterprise world, the needs of your customers and partners drive your best ideas and solutions. Great products are often not enough.  So, again, it was great to meet those customers and partners, working with us – and sometimes even with competitors in their own industries – to make their world better with open source.  

Two more things struck me this time in Germany.  

First, watching customers chat to my colleagues on the keynote stage, and meeting them afterwards, it was amazing just how different all their use cases are for SUSE products and services. The variety of our ecosystem has been fundamental to the continued success of open source over these last three decades. This was evident again in Munich. 

It is fantastic to see Orange using open source software to transform their industry to a disaggregated, collaborative and cloud native model.  

Similarly, SUSE has successfully helped BMW to innovate and drive its cloud native agenda.  

In a totally different industry, US defense and security solutions leader, Kratos, has disrupted the space industry using SUSE’s Edge solution.  

By making the right partnerships through the stack, with Rancher, and the open source community, Fujitsu are helping organizations in the UK Public Sector, the German Federal Employment Agency and a large player in the financial services industry to accelerate necessary change. 

From on premise to the edge and everywhere in between, we are there providing support and ideas. We have been a leader in open source for over 30 years. We’ve seen many waves of innovation – from the rise of virtualization and the emergence of cloud computing to rapid progress in cloud native, Edge, and AI. There’s so much choice now, and we’re helping customers navigate it. 

The second thing that stood out was just how highly many customers and partners rated the quality of support they get from us. This is the core of being a true enterprise open source partner. Your customers have to trust that you will help them navigate an increasingly complex world. They told me we are configurable. We offer excellent value. We provide security, speed and deployability. That’s a great foundation to build SUSE on. 

Open source is all about having the freedom to innovate at speed. You can only do that with the connections that we’ve made. With customers large and small across so many different sectors, and across so many different use cases. Also, connections with partners: with hyperscalers, ISVs, distributors, and hardware vendors. And with upstream developers, without whom enterprise open source providers like us can’t thrive. This is our ecosystem that comes together at events like SUSECON.  

The shared kernel of our ecosystem is having the same set of values: it’s about technology that’s open. Technology that understands customer needs. Technology that connects upstream with enterprise.  

I’d like to thank everyone who helped to put SUSECON together. It’s a lot of work and a great effort to organize.  

You can see the keynotes, and so much more on SUSECON Digital – do sign up to this link. It’s entirely free, and it’s a great way to learn about what we are doing at SUSE and to hear from some of the best minds in the opensource. It starts on Wednesday this week (28th June). 

Reflecting on the last few days in Munich, I feel energized and inspired. This event represents the best of open source.  

I’m excited about all that we will achieve together between now and SUSECON 2024.