SUSE believes dual recognitions highlight SUSE’s strategic vision to unify virtual machines and containers under one open control plane across data center, multi-cloud, and edge infrastructure.
LUXEMBOURG
SUSE®, the leading sovereign open infrastructure company, today announced that it has been recognized by Gartner®, Inc. as a Visionary in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Server Virtualization Platforms. In addition, SUSE has been named a Visionary in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure.
Together, SUSE believes these recognitions reflect the enterprise market’s shift toward unifying virtual machines (VMs) and containerized workloads side by side through a single open control plane while eliminating operational silos while maintaining strict digital sovereignty.
"IT organizations need a clear, lock-in-free path to modernize their core infrastructure—one that allows them to run existing virtual machines and build cloud-native applications on the exact same foundation," said Thomas Di Giacomo, chief technology and product officer, SUSE. "Infrastructure is no longer defined by where it runs, whether in sensitive, sovereign applications on-prem, low-latency processing at the edge, elastic public cloud capacity, or GPU-heavy tasks on neoclouds. Our open, distributed infrastructure platform abstracts all of this complexity away, giving customers full operational control, enterprise security, and true freedom from vendor lock-in."
Modernizing Server Virtualization Without Vendor Lock-In
As the market for server virtualization undergoes significant transformation, enterprises are actively re-evaluating their long-term infrastructure strategies. SUSE Virtualization delivers a unified, open-source path that enables organizations to manage virtual machines and containers using the exact same cloud-native technology, tools, and ecosystem.
Customer Validation
Lumen is a multinational tech and telecom provider operating three public clouds plus on-premises infrastructure from a single console.
"SUSE Rancher Prime gives us the ability to very easily move workloads between cloud providers. It gives us flexibility and prepares us for rapid change,” said Andy Reese, Director of Infrastructure Engineering, Lumen.
FIS-ASP GmbH is a leading full-service IT provider hosting complex SAP environments:
"We chose SUSE Virtualization because it allows us to add an agile layer to our core SAP infrastructure. This enables us to deploy new applications more quickly and scale resources with greater flexibility,” said Manuel Sammeth, Managing Director, FIS-ASP.
Extending Unified Control Across Distributed Hybrid Environments
Distributed infrastructure sits central to SUSE's foundation, driving SUSE Rancher Prime’s success as an early platform that unified every major cloud provider. Extending this virtualization strategy, SUSE Rancher Prime provides one open infrastructure platform and intelligent control plane to centrally manage workloads wherever they reside. The solution spans any Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)-certified Kubernetes environment, including managed services on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. This allows organizations to manage VMs and containers through the same interface.
The platform scales seamlessly from core infrastructure to small-footprint edge deployments to extend unified policies across distributed sites. SUSE also supports sovereign operations in air-gapped environments and EU-based cloud providers, giving organizations total authority over their data and infrastructure.
Additional Resources
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Learn more about SUSE Virtualization and SUSE Rancher Prime on our official announcement blogs.
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Access the full 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Server Virtualization Platforms report.
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Access the full 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure report.
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SUSE was also recently named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Container Management.
Gartner Disclaimer
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Server Virtualization Platforms, Tony Harvey, Daniel Bowers, Paul Delory, Tony Iams, Owen Marino, 14 September 2026
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure, Julia Palmer, Elaine Zhang, Adrian Wong, Daniel Bowers, 7 September 2026
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Container Management, Dennis Smith, Tony Iams, Wataru Katsurashima, Lucas Albuquerque, Carolin Zhou, Bhuvie Chhabra, 2 September 2026
Gartner and Magic Quadrant are trademarks of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates.
Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
About SUSE
SUSE is the leading sovereign open infrastructure company where hybrid AI runs. Backed by 30 years of community collaboration, we transform open source innovation into secure, enterprise-grade solutions for mission-critical environments. Built on choice and neutrality, SUSE is the only platform that manages any Linux and Kubernetes distribution. Through our open infrastructure platform and partner ecosystem, IT leaders gain control over their data, budgets, and sovereign AI strategies. Our solutions deploy across hybrid environments, from developer workstations and on-premises data centers to multi-cloud and the farthest edge, and are optimized and certified for SAP. With SUSE, choice happens. Learn more at suse.com.
