SUSE, a Luxembourg-based open-source company, has struggled to gain traction in the US market, where competitors like Red Hat and Canonical are better known. However, the company is pinning its hopes on artificial intelligence (AI) to help it break into the US market and challenge its competitors. SUSE is announcing its AI strategy and SUSE AI solutions, a new vendor- and model-agnostic generative AI platform.
In an exclusive interview, SUSE CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen and VP of AI Pilar Santamaria discussed the company’s AI strategy and its overall approach to open-source software. Van Leeuwen emphasized the importance of long-term support for enterprise customers, which is why SUSE forked CentOS and supports existing customers who are migrating to its fork. He also noted that many enterprises are looking to consolidate their platforms, which makes SUSE’s portfolio of products, including Rancher and Neuvector, attractive.
SUSE has undergone several ownership changes over the years, which has made it difficult for the company to establish a strong brand identity in the US market. However, van Leeuwen is confident that the company’s products and solutions are strong and that it can build a strong brand presence in the US.
The company’s new AI solution is designed to help customers put AI workloads into production in a secure and privacy-first way. It is not a training solution, but rather a platform that allows businesses to use their own models or open-source foundation models like Meta’s Llama. Santamaria emphasized the importance of giving customers the freedom to deploy the models of their choice and to select the vector database of their choice to build a solution that best suits their needs.
Fujitsu is one of the customers that has already signed up for SUSE’s AI solution. “Generative AI is helping to unlock innovation within our world,” said Udo Würtz, Chief Data Officer, European Platform Business at Fujitsu. “With our solution, they can do this in a secure and protected setting.” SUSE’s AI solution is now available as an early-access program.
