Danny Rowark, Regional Director EMEA West, SUSE talked to Enterprise Times recently about the future for the rapidly expanding company. Micro Focus has invested heavily in SUSE not just in the acquisition but also in the deal with HPE. That second deal has projected SUSE into a significant position in the OpenStack and Cloud Foundry world. They are now the biggest contributors to both projects.
Luckily for SUSE, at the moment their parent company is allowing them to be run effectively as a separate business unit. Rowark made it clear that the company has its own CEO, strategy and Go To Market. One of the things that made sense for this deal was the mainframe experience of Micro Focus and SUSE’s experience as an IBM Linux partner. Rowark was keen to make it clear that one of the goals for SUSE was its open source approach and support for other vendors, not just IBM.
What was interesting was Rowark’s view on working with government departments, local and national. He has a history of working in that field and that will be to SUSE’s benefit. HPE also brings a lot of experience working with G-Cloud, however, the challenge will be changing the conversation from packaged software to open source. Rowark acknowledges that this is something that needs to be addressed. He believes that he is pushing at an open door with the support of GDS but there are a lot of things to address.
One of the big challenges now will be for SUSE to take OpenStack into government. Rowark believes that this is something that they can achieve. It will take time and it will be interesting to see just how SUSE begins to eat into the AWS and Microsoft Azure share of government cloud computing.
What was very interesting was listening to Rowark talk about where open source and OpenStack goes next.
This podcast was recorded before the final due diligence between Micro Focus and HPE over the OpenStack acquisition was complete. To hear more about where Rowark sees SUSE going, listen to the podcast online or download it to your desktop, laptop or mobile device.
