SUSE, A Company on the Move

Recently, I sat down to talk with SUSE CEO Nils Brauckmann, the man who has steered SUSE out of troubled water and toward success. My first question was: "Are you going to make your drumming debut at SUSECON?"

"We have a better drummer. In fact, the entire entertainment at this SUSECON is being provided by SUSE employees. You will see Ralf Flaxa, our President of Engineering, on keyboards," said Brauckmann.

For those who don't know the context, my little birds at SUSE have told me that Brauckmann is a very talented drummer, so every time I meet him, I ask whether he will have his drumming debut at SUSECON.

So far his answer has been no, but if there is enough public demand, we may see him perform.

Brief History of SUSE

SUSE, the oldest Linux company, celebrated their 25th anniversary in Prague, Czech Republic, at SUSECON 2017. SUSE was founded in 1992 a few months after Linus Torvalds announced the Linux kernel.

Over the past 25 years, SUSE has been through some challenging times. The company was acquired by Novell in 2003. To an outside observer, Novell struggled to maintain a balance between its own proprietary technologies and SUSE's open source technologies. As a result, SUSE didn't see the kind of success it should have enjoyed as Linux increased its footprint in the server space.

SUSE got a new lease on life and gained some independence when Novell was acquired by Attachmate Group in 2011. Nils Brauckmann and his team, which included Michael Miller, President of Strategy, Alliances, and Marketing, took the helm of the SUSE brand and product portfolio. Brauckmann kept the company on the right track, but SUSE needed financial resources to reach its full potential.

Things took an interesting turn when Micro Focus, a relatively lesser known company, decided to merge in 2015 with Attachmate. Micro Focus offered much needed financial stability to SUSE. Under Micro Focus' stability and Brauckmann's "slow and steady wins the race" approach, SUSE started to grow again. Acknowledging SUSE's value within the group, Micro Focus promoted Brauckmann to the position of SUSE CEO and also offered him a seat on the board.

25 Years of SUSE

In reflection, Brauckmann said, "For 25 years, SUSE has been a pioneer and leader in providing enterprise-grade open source innovation paired with excellent service and support. That mission still guides our business strategy, our company culture, and our relationships with customers and technology partners."

He said that while SUSE is preserving and leveraging its roots, "We are a company on the move because we are growing. We are investing in people, communities, and the product portfolio."

SUSE: The Acquirer

SUSE is one of those few companies that innovates and creates in-house projects. It was also the first company to come up with a business model around Linux.

However, Brauckmann believes that at times it's more prudent to acquire technology than to create it internally. Micro Focus has given him the resources to do this. Brauckmann has already made two technology acquisitions within the last year: OpenATTIC, a storage solution, and HPE's Cloud Foundry and OpenStack assets.

These acquisitions proved that SUSE was back in the game, as if it ever left it in the first place. Because Micro Focus is a publicly traded company, the whole world can see the numbers. "We have passed the $300 million revenue mark in 2017, which is a 21 percent increase compared to the previous mark, so we are growing," said Brauckmann.

Compared with Red Hat's $2.4 billion annual revenue, SUSE is relatively smaller, but considering the ups and downs the company has been through, it's quite impressive.

Brauckmann is showing no signs of slowing down. He is looking at more such acquisitions in the future. "It acquisition has to advance us in areas where we want to play. We don't buy IP (intellectual properties), because we are an open source company. What we do buy is engineering talent, the knowledge, or sometimes the influence in the open source community that comes with it," said Brauckmann. "I can't say when the next one will happen, because it has to be complimentary to our technologies, but I can say that we continue to look for such opportunities."

Brauckmann would not pre-announce any possible acquisitions, so to get a better picture, I inquired about the capabilities that he thinks SUSE needs to remain competitive. Brauckmann said that it has to do with the evolution of the software-defined infrastructure stack. He even gave an example: "The whole orchestration, management, and security of the software stack across the different components, with the more standardized set of tools that we bring to market is, I think, an area where we will want to invest more. For our customers, it's not just the infrastructure stack itself; they also need the orchestration, the management, and the broad set of components and tools with similar technology. We have SUSE Manager; we use Salt a lot, so connecting those dots will be an area of interest."

SUSE Is Hiring

In addition to making technology acquisitions, SUSE has increased its workforce and added more than 300 new people to the company. When Brauckmann brings new people to SUSE, he maintains a great balance between salespeople and engineers.

"As a rule of thumb, at least half of these jobs go to engineers as we are an engineering-heavy company. This time it was more than half, because we acquired engineering talent from HPE," said Brauckmann. "We need a balance because as we grow our engineering teams to create more products, we also gain more customers. More customers mean more sales and service calls, so we have to invest into sales, services, and support, as well. We have to invest in all those pillars that SUSE stands on."

Product, Project, and Community

On the product side, by being a company on the move, it means that SUSE continues to expand its product portfolio to keep up with the changing market dynamics. SUSE is growing beyond being a Linux vendor, even though enterprise Linux remains the company's core competency.

"We are leveraging our Linux and open source experience and Linux technology platform to move into the software-defined infrastructure space," he said.

"All these new innovations are happening on top of open source technologies, including Linux, because the technology is freely available, and we can build on top of it. That's the beauty of open source," said Brauckmann. "So, we are moving with it, from Linux to software-defined infrastructure to application delivery platforms."

"While we do all of that, we grow as a team, we grow our product portfolio, and we end up supporting new community projects. We are deeply engaged with major open source projects. Our CTO, Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo, sits on the Cloud Foundry Foundation board; we are a platinum sponsor of Cloud Foundry. Alan Clark, one of the SUSE directors, is the elected Chairman of the OpenStack Foundation; we sit on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation; we are at Open NFV and many other projects," said Brauckmann.

SUSE has the traditional SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) product line, Just Enough Operating System (JeOS) for embedded devices, a software-defined storage platform, the OpenStack distribution, a Cloud Foundry-based Cloud Application Platform, and a Kubernetes and Linux-based Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) Platform. With the upcoming release of SLE 15, customers will be able to switch easily between free-of-charge openSUSE LEAP and SLE 15. In a nutshell, SUSE has its stakes in the entire stack.

Evolution of the Stack

As the IT landscape changes, more and more modern workloads are becoming containerized. SUSE already has the SUSE CaaS Platform, so they are well equipped to handle legacy and modern workloads.

When asked whether SUSE sees legacy applications as past and containers as future, Brauckmann said that it's not black and white: "Traditional workload and containerized workload is not past and future; there is a lot in the middle. You also need a bridge between legacy and containerized workloads. While companies move their workloads to a containerized environment, they continue to run legacy applications. Realistically both worlds will continue to coexist."

SUSE is maintaining a fine balance between these three worlds: legacy workloads, modernized workloads, and whatever there is in between.

"SLE is the fully featured, mission-critical enterprise solution. That business is growing by itself. There is a lot of workload, including legacy workload, that is not containerized. There is a lot of workload that is not cloud native; it continues to run on an operating system in a virtualized environment. We do see that, in the future, more workloads will run on containers, so we do see growth in that area. There are ISVs independent software vendors that are refactoring their legacy applications to containerize them, so they can run and manage these legacy applications as containers. We are talking to these ISVs, so these containerized applications will run on platforms like the SUSE CaaS Platform," said Brauckmann. "The way we see it is that you innovate and renovate your IT infrastructure and application layer."

He gave the example of SUSE Cloud Application Platform, which is based on Cloud Foundry and uses Kubernetes. SUSE has containerized the Cloud Foundry platform to make it easier for customers to deploy and manage.

Building the Bridge

Companies like Docker Inc. are already working on solutions like Modernize Traditional Applications (MTA), which as the name implies, helps companies in containerizing their legacy applications without refactoring any code.

When asked whether SUSE is doing something similar to help its customers, Brauckmann said that certain conversations are happening where SUSE is consulting customers. However, they are not productizing anything that will convert a traditional application into a containerized application the way Docker's MTA does.

Because more and more customers might look into containerized solutions, Brauckmann sees that as an area of interest. Docker Inc. now offers Kubernetes, along with Swarm, as an orchestrator for Docker. SUSE uses Kubernetes in its own CaaS platform, so there is an increased possibility of a dialogue between the two companies around MTA.

Respect for Competitors

Red Hat recently revised their patent promise, and Brauckmann said that, although they compete with such players in the market, he is full of praise for Red Hat. "The company is doing a service to the innovative open source companies, because they are acquiring a pool of patents to defend against the improper use of patents. Being an open source company, we support all those public license agreements, and we have a lot of respect for that," he said.

SUSE is actively engaged in the defense mechanism. "We are part of the Open Invention Network OIN. Together with Red Hat, we strengthen that network through SUSE and Novell patents that are part of that portfolio. This pool of patents is used to defend open source against possible threats."

Commending Red Hat for their revised patent promise, he said, "I think what Red Hat is doing is an extension of the OIN idea, and I respect and applaud that."

That's exactly the kind of healthy open source culture we need.