The CEO of SUSE today identified five specific areas that the company plans to focus on at a time when organizations need a more resilient approach to managing IT environments.
Speaking at the SUSECON 2026 conference, SUSE CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen told attendees that IT organizations are increasingly in a bind between determining not just what is technically feasible, but just as importantly, what is economically feasible.
With that issue in mind, SUSE is now squarely focused on providing support for digital sovereignty initiatives, enabling hybrid cloud computing, convergence of application workloads running on the same full stack of IT infrastructure and the building and deployment of both artificial intelligence (AI) workloads and edge computing solutions, said van Leeuwen.
As part of that effort, SUSE is committed to enabling IT teams to deploy the full SUSE stack of infrastructure anywhere, he added. For example, SUSE today revealed that its entire portfolio can now be licensed via the Oracle Marketplace for deployments on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) service. SUSE has previously made similar alliances with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google.
Additionally, van Leeuwen noted that an ability to manage multiple distributions of Linux and Kubernetes makes it easier for IT teams to adapt to changing requirements.
A recent SUSE survey of nearly 600 IT leaders in the enterprise in the U.S., UK, Japan, India and Germany suggests IT teams need that ability now more than ever, with 59% investing in hybrid IT environments compared to 16% that are investing in private clouds. Over half (51%) plan to spend more on scaling across multiple cloud environments. Nearly half (46%) are increasing their investment in enterprise support for open source software. Half (50%) also cite vendor lock-in as a critical or major issue, with a slightly larger percentage (55%) identifying IT resilience as the most important technological priority.
Additionally, 80% of respondents cited implementing AI as their top budget priority line item. However, implementing AI ranked as either a critical (24%) or major (37%) challenge. When it comes to AI model training, digital sovereignty is becoming a defining requirement that is either extremely (42%) or very (40%) important.
On average, the top three priorities globally are as follows: skills gaps and talent shortages. enhanced security and implementing AI, the survey finds.
Privately held, SUSE has been making significant investments to expand the scope of its reach since being spun out of Micro Focus following that company’s separation from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE). Micro Focus gained control of SUSE following its acquisition of Attachmate, which acquired the remnants of Novell in 2010 following that company’s acquisition of SUSE in 2004.
It’s not clear to what degree those efforts are expanding the company’s base of customers, which already includes PepsiCo, CVS Health, Carnival Corp, Omnicell, Grupo Elektra, Mizuho Bank, the Swiss National Computing Center, Nexi and Airbus Defense and Space. That challenge, of course, is convincing enough additional customers to absorb the cost of switching to a SUSE open source platform to achieve one or more of their strategic goals.
