SUSECON Wrap-Up: Tuesday April 21

The first full day of SUSECON 26 put a sharper point on a long-standing SUSE conviction: choice is the strategy that carries companies through volatile times. SUSE used today’s stage to show how open, interoperable infrastructure continues to help multinational organizations modernize workloads, accelerate AI and keep control of their data.

For global enterprises, the stakes have rarely been higher. Escalating geopolitical tensions, rapid AI adoption and a growing wave of regulatory frameworks are reshaping approaches to infrastructure and risk. SUSECON is meeting that moment with customer stories and partner momentum that all point in the same sovereign direction.

At a glance

• • For anyone not in Prague, SUSECON is SUSE’s annual forum for global IT news, evolving strategy and customer-driven innovation.
  • Across Tuesday’s keynotes, workshops and demos, SUSE made the case that choice is what keeps enterprises resilient during periods of change.
  • As NIS2, DORA and the EU AI Act take hold, enterprises need infrastructure that strengthens control, resilience and compliance.
  • New SUSE research found that 98% of enterprises prioritize digital sovereignty, and more than half are already taking dedicated action.
  • Tuesday brought a series of announcements, including the launch of the SUSE AI Factory with NVIDIA, that illuminate a resilient path forward.

Choice as the connective thread

SUSE CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen opened the day with a keynote built around five customer-led pillars: sovereignty with open standards, operational efficiency, workload modernization, hybrid cloud management and innovation with AI. Joined on stage by John Fanelli of NVIDIA and Mirko Reuter of Airbus, he framed choice as the practical expression of every pillar. When customers can choose their stack, their cloud and their path forward, they gain the resilience that global operations increasingly necessitate.

Advancing modernization across the stack

Enterprises across the globe aspire to move from AI pilots to production, but traditional data centers were not designed for agentic AI, analytics or simulation workloads. Coinciding shifts in the virtualization market are accelerating migration demand, adding additional complexity and strain. 

Today brought a set of announcements that address both fronts at once:

• The SUSE AI Factory with NVIDIA will provide enterprises with the ability to turn complex AI experimentation into a secure, sovereign, and scalable reality.  It is an end-to-end “digital factory” for the enterprise, embedding the leading-edge capabilities of NVIDIA AI Enterprise into the rigorous governance of SUSE AI, empowering you to assemble & deploy mission-critical AI workloads anywhere.
• Chief Strategy Officer Frank Feldmann made the case that SUSE Virtualization is a safe landing for enterprise workloads. Our new partnership with Cloudbase Solutions, a leading contributor to OpenStack for Windows and Hyper-V, delivers VM migration as a service with scalable lift-and-shift automation for Linux and Windows workloads alike.
• Chief Customer Officer Imran Khan welcomed Nomura and the Swiss National Supercomputing Center to the keynote stage. Nomura’s “Lift and Fit” program showed how Kubernetes can anchor the shift from infrastructure-as-a-server to infrastructure-as-code. The Swiss National Supercomputing Center shared how open, standards-based infrastructure is supporting scientific research at a national scale.
• In addition, we announced that the SUSE portfolio is now available on the Oracle marketplace, giving customers another seamless procurement path to SUSE’s solutions.

Modernization is hard-won work, and no single product or partnership can eliminate its challenges. Today’s presentations and demonstrations reinforced the importance of meeting customers at their diverse points of friction, from outgrown infrastructure to unsustainable virtualization costs. In these various contexts, SUSE remains committed to helping customers progress on their own terms and timeline.

Building the sovereign ecosystem

Throughout the day, digital sovereignty anchored the conversation. In their keynote and demo, SUSE’s Andreas Prins and Rossella Sblendido walked through the practical pathways enterprises are using to build resilience today. SUSE research released this week reinforces a growing shift toward sovereign postures. We found that 98% of enterprises are prioritizing digital sovereignty, and more than half are taking dedicated action. 

To match that demand and build on our leadership in sovereign services orchestration, we introduced the Sovereignty Specialization for SUSE One Partners. The currently invite-only program will fuel a collective push for open, interoperable services that help organizations make sovereign decisions about technology, data and people. By combining SUSE Sovereign Premium Support with a curated partner network, enterprises will gain the operational flexibility to localize workloads and keep innovation moving.

Momentum backed by the ecosystem

These advancements are directly informed by the market, fully aligned with open standards and strengthened by a partner network that spans silicon, cloud and systems integrators. Customers from financial services to the public sector are already leveraging these new technologies and synergies. And SUSECON is making it clear how a shared foundation is raising resiliency as we approach the next decade of sovereign, AI-ready enterprise IT.

The conversations continue all week, and so does the momentum. Check out some snippets from today in this video, and make sure to follow SUSE on LinkedIn to catch the rest of the highlights from SUSECON 2026.