The CTO for SUSE is telling IT leaders they need to focus more on making resilient platform decisions at a time when the pace of change, changes to software licensing terms and geopolitical uncertainty are all conspiring to make it more difficult than ever for them to succeed.

Speaking at the SUSECON 2026 conference, Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo told attendees that because of those issues IT leaders need to create new pathways that enable their organizations to better handle the inherent trauma that rapid changes inevitably bring about.

Whether it’s a sudden change to VMware licenses, a new executive order from a president or the rise of new IT platforms for deploying artificial intelligence (AI), IT leaders need to define platform architectures that enable them to pivot more easily as needed, said Di Giacomo. Resilience, for all intents and purposes, is now a prerequisite for future IT success, he added.

The overall goal is to rely more on open source software to reduce the number of dependencies that can result in IT teams finding themselves locked into a specific platform, said Di Giacomo. Otherwise, IT organizations are, from a digital sovereignty perspective, one executive order away from becoming a hostage, he noted.

Unfortunately, too many IT organizations are locked into rigid platforms that can’t easily evolve as technology and business requirements change, he added. In some cases, the decisions that IT leaders made many years ago are now clearly biting back, said Di Giacomo.

There are, however, plenty of IT leaders who are committed to existing IT platforms that their organization has relied on for years. Many of those IT organizations may be suffering from a form of “Stockholm Syndrome” that occurs when hostages start to identify with their captors, noted Di Giacomo.

It’s not clear to what degree IT leaders might be willing to reconsider which IT platforms to bet on, but it’s already apparent that a fundamentally different IT architecture will be needed to deploy AI applications and their associated agents. Existing IT platforms were designed primarily for end users versus thousands of AI agents that dynamically invoke various services in ways that are going to be nearly impossible to predict. As such, the level of scale required to run AI applications will be considerably higher.

The challenge is that building and deploying the IT platforms needed to successfully meet the requirements of AI agents will cost millions of dollars. Many IT leaders are, understandably, unsure of which platforms to invest in today for fear they might be rendered obsolete in a few short months. Nevertheless, pressure to make that decision continues to mount as the pace at which organizations are deploying AI agents only continues to accelerate.

Of course, as the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once observed: things that do not kill us make us stronger. The mindset IT leaders need to instill is being able to absorb the impact of an unexpected event in a way that might provide a different perspective on the role IT will play in a world where change is now a constant.