Thankful For Our Partners

SUSE has always been a partner-oriented, channel company, and that hasn’t changed. What I found when I joined was that we have partners who are passionate, driven and just as obsessed about getting the best outcomes possible for our customers as we are at SUSE.

As it’s Thanksgiving week in America, I hope our global audience will indulge me as I highlight a few partners that we’re thankful for.

First up, let me highlight a story that Simon Ebentheuer, Digital Account Executive, for SUSE shared with me earlier this year. A large supplier of instrumentation products in Switzerland placed an order for what was a complex offering, which Dell managed to turn around within three hours for the customer. We are so grateful for partners like Dell, who make it easy for us to package our joint solution to customers. Thank you, Dell!

Having personally met Nordicmind, our distributor and CSP fulfilment agent for the Nordics earlier this year, I know first-hand the passion and energy that they bring to our business. The team in the Nordics and I are very grateful for the work that Nordicmind does to get our Managed Service Partners in the region up to speed. They have been tireless in explaining the value that SUSE brings so MSPs can be more competitive through a series of enablement webinars and one-to-one calls. Nordicmind, thank you!

We move on to the wonderful news that SUSE was selected by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) as the winner of “APN Technology Partner of the Year Award 2020 for the DACH region” in the APN Partner Awards. There have been many highlights and breakthroughs during our decade-long partnership with AWS. The latest – SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is now validated to run customers workloads that require low latency and local data processing, on AWS Outposts, which is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to customer premises. This is a partnership that keeps on growing and strengthening. Thank you, AWS!

This is also the season to be thankful for partnerships based on trust, and that is what we have with Google. Together, we have enabled numerous customers with migrating SAP applications to the cloud. When issues arise, as one did earlier this year, we can count on the Google team to act quickly and address the issues – demonstrating what it means to be “partners” in practice. Thank you, Google!

It’s always gratifying when a partner gives us kudos. Recently, Cognizant won in the category: 2020 Microsoft Partner of the Year: SAP on Azure. This was based on their work for a customer in Switzerland, where they implemented several automations on top of SAP S/4HANA systems on Azure, including one-click SAP disaster recovery solutions designed to improve resiliency, reduce errors, and speed recovery time. The result? A modernization of IT processes resulting in 95 percent of the client’s infrastructure build becoming automated. In their acknowledgement, Cognizant said:

By collaborating with SUSE to design innovative, future-proof -clustering architecture based on SUSE solutions, there was a zero impact transition of SAP applications with innovative high-availability architecture.

Thank you, Cognizant for your partnership – together we can help our customers transform their infrastructure for greater agility!

There are many other partners that I and the rest of my team are thankful for – too many to mention in this blog.

And that’s why we announced at this year’s Digital Partner Summit that we were launching the SUSE One Partner Awards. We want to acknowledge the lengths that our partners go to in service of our joint customers. A recap of the partner award categories for 2021:

• Partner of the Year
• Rising Star
• Social Impact

There will also be specialized awards for:

• INNOVATE Partner of the Year
• BUILD Partner of the Year
• SELL Partner of the Year
• MANAGE Partner of the Year
• SERVICE Partner of the Year
• TRAIN Partner of the Year

I can’t wait to recognize our partners for your commitment to helping our customers simplify, modernize and accelerate innovation in what has been a challenge-filled year! A huge thank you to the whole SUSE One Partner community!