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SUSE CEO champions open source choice
Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen warns against suppliers diluting open source to lock in customers, and touts SUSE’s commitment to providing choice and support across multiple Linux and Kubernetes distributions
In a world increasingly reliant on open source software, SUSE CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen has issued a stark warning against suppliers that attempt to dilute its principles by adding their own intellectual property to lock in customers.
Speaking to Computer Weekly alongside Ben Henshall – SUSE’s general manager for Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) – Van Leeuwen touted SUSE’s approach, which focuses on superior service and multi-distribution support as the keys to success, rather than restrictive open-core models or paid versions.
SUSE, he said, is committed to a different path: “We make open source accessible to enterprises in terms of support, dependability, stability and other factors, and we are very comfortable doing that.”
This commitment translates into practical benefits for customers, allowing them to select the versions of Linux, Kubernetes and other open source technologies that best suit their needs. “Customers like choice,” said Van Leeuwen. “But those choices are being rapidly eroded.”
SUSE aims to counteract this by actively supporting a wide range of Linux and Kubernetes distributions, ensuring customers maintain the freedom to switch providers without significant disruption.
This flexibility is further reinforced by SUSE’s longer support cycles compared with rivals such as Red Hat, a factor that Van Leeuwen credits for the company’s strong growth in ANZ and other regions. “Customers really like it,” he said.
Henshall expanded on the challenges facing ANZ enterprises, noting that the ubiquity of Linux has shifted the focus towards optimising business productivity with open source while maintaining security.
Software bill of materials
A key concern for larger organisations is managing the software bill of materials, ensuring the integrity of every component in their applications and containers. This expands the attack surface, Henshall acknowledged, but SUSE’s unique and well-defined support strategy provides a solution, enabling enterprises to consume open source securely, even in mixed environments that include non-SUSE products. This allows businesses to focus on their core operations without the need for costly and disruptive overhauls.
Beyond security, SUSE is also focused on enabling innovation. Henshall said SUSE offers a standardised, secure infrastructure to support emerging technologies such as generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). Van Leeuwen echoed this sentiment, citing Deutsche Bank’s migration of tens of thousands of servers to SUSE as a prime example of the cost savings and long-term support benefits that SUSE offers.
Henshall highlighted several local success stories, including a utility company leveraging SUSE Rancher Prime to manage containerised application deployments, a retailer using SUSE Manager to streamline patching across a diverse Linux environment, and an insurer deploying applications across on-premise and cloud environments with SUSE Rancher, all without restrictive supplier agreements. “No other vendor does that,” he said.
Noting that “SUSE is living in the real world”, Henshall said the company recognises heterogeneity as a fact of life, but provides a standardised way of patching, updating, scaling and observing across different systems, saving money that can then be used for innovation.
For a supplier to do that, “you’ve got to know what you’re doing … it isn’t for the fainthearted”, he said.
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Pretty much everything requires Linux in a world where workloads continue to grow, more business processes are digitised, and the internet of things is increasingly put to work, but that calls for the ability to deploy systems from the datacentre to the edge, to scale them as required, and to keep them patched – whether or not they are containerised.
Henshall said SUSE customers are doing all of that even in air-gapped zero-trust environments with thousands of devices. It is non-trivial, but SUSE makes it simple and sustainable, he added.
Some of SUSE’s credibility comes from being one of the largest open source contributors, and from its practice of immediately releasing security patches, said Van Leeuwen. “We’ve been doing this for 33 years, so we’re not new to this,” he added.
Asked about work still to be done by the company, his first response was the need to establish the SUSE brand. To that end, the company has renamed several products – such as Rancher to SUSE Rancher – and that “it’s just a matter of time to get over that”.
SUSE is always thinking about the next addition to its portfolio, said Van Leeuwen, pointing to the 2024 acquisition of full-stack observability specialist StackState that resulted in SUSE Rancher Prime gaining its observability capability.
The market demands choice, and the goal is to ensure that SUSE is the supplier that customers turn to – but “we’ve got some work to do” in ANZ to achieve that, admitted Henshall.
Some customers see SUSE’s independence and European ownership as advantages, which could be a benefit to the company at a time when some organisations are putting tenders on hold while they review the geopolitical issues triggered by US president Donald Trump’s imposition of broad-ranging tariffs.
