Buying European: The Moment for Digital Sovereignty is Now

As a Dutch citizen responsible for SUSE’s EMEA region my interest in buying European is both deeply personal as it is professional. The same goes for the many awesome partners of SUSE in the European ecosystem. 

Buying European is about shifting control and reducing dependency. The goal is to improve resilience. I speak with European business leaders every day. They all care about this, and I want to help meet their needs. 

This is an important, exciting moment in time. Sovereign solutions are capturing mainstream attention: business leaders, developers, politicians and industry veterans are highly invested in what is possible and practical. 

This will definitely be the case at this week’s Summit between the French and German governments, where digital sovereignty takes center stage. Now is the moment to collectively answer the question – how can Europe become sovereign? It will take time, but we are seeing some of the most powerful voices on the continent get involved now on this issue. There will be many views expressed this week on what should happen next. Here is SUSE’s answer to that question:

First, European providers of enterprise software like SUSE need to continue to develop products and services that are both sovereign and market-leading. They have to be able to be delivered and adopted at scale. We have to link customers and partners across this continent. Our ambition has to be to create the sort of “easy button” that the hyperscalers have. We have already created a Sovereign Premium Support service that our customers can easily upgrade to from the regular version. Our aim is to do more. You’ll hear more soon from us on this.

Second, companies like SUSE also have to collaborate with other partners in the European ecosystem who are used to operating at scale. Perhaps partners we’ve never collaborated with before. We have to join forces and build something that is bigger than the sum of our parts. Yes, we all have our own investments, our own stacks, our own individual solutions, but we need to create things that a wide range of customers can use on a wide range of technologies. That will only come by collaboration. 

Third, we need to give European solutions the best possible chance to succeed. This happens two ways: 1) customers should be more aware about the options open to them, and 2), they should be able to easily grade and assess those options against their sovereignty needs.

On the first point, it is a fact that Europe has a thriving open source ecosystem with many actors offering solutions to solve customer problems at scale. However, we have found that potential customers and partners are often not aware of the great European options available to them. That’s one of the reasons why we support Eurostack and its Buy European campaign. There are different views on what that might look like. At SUSE, we’re not calling for European-only mandates or tenders – going “cold-turkey” isn’t a good business strategy. However, we think that it is reasonable to make sure there’s a European vendor in a tender if a suitable one is out there. The European political system should facilitate and encourage this.

On the second, customers need assistance in determining the sovereignty level of a provider. We are fully supportive of the recently published EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework. It is a helpful and easy to understand guide. Given the European Cloud Sovereignty Framework prioritises jurisdictional and supply chain elements highly, we think there’s no reason that a European provider should not be given high scoring within a tender.

We look forward to participating in the summit in Berlin, and to connecting with the growing band of people who are confident that Europe can have greater control of its digital future. If you are there, say hi to the SUSE folks at the events during the week. If you aren’t going, get in touch to find out how we can help with your digital sovereignty or business resilience needs.