Kathy Gibson is at SUSECon Digital ’20 – It’s been a year since SUSE bought itself out of Micro Focus International and became an independent entity. During that time, the company has focused on helping customers to simplify, modernise and accelerate their businesses.
“We are facing unprecedented times,” says Melissa di Donato, CEO of SUSE. “Many people have had to adapt to new circumstances that are impacting every business across the world.
“I believe challenging times like these not only bring out the best in humanity, but also trigger innovation where communities come together to innovate for the greater good.
“We want to make sure this innovation continues every day,” she says.
“I have been in the CEO role for almost 10 months, and am continually inspired by this amazing open source company; you are impacting the world through our technology and innovation.”
SUSE recently commissioned a global survey with Insight Avenue to explore the must-have technologies and approaches taken by IT leaders, and how hybrid cloud and software-defined infrastructure are underpinning IT transformation efforts.
Even before the extreme pressures of the pandemic made it critical to pivot to digitised business models, the survey found that IT leaders do not have the luxury of time in accelerating digital transformation.
Nearly 90% see tech investments in the next two years as essential to making a tangible difference in their organization.
A heavy legacy of complex applications, infrastructure, and processes are now being deprioritised. Nearly two-thirds of respondents identified infrastructure simplification as their top investment priority for the next 24 months.
More than half also confirmed that modernising, accelerating change, and scaling the business are extremely important, as well.
The top technology pillars being used to support and drive this ambition are high performance computing (HPC) at 83%; Internet of Things (IoT) at 82%; edge computing 80%; and open source software at 70%.
Other highlights from the study include:
* Increasing agility is the number one driver of IT transformation efforts.
* Businesses want the agility to support tech transformation and faster results, focusing on security, speed, efficiency and overall cost reduction.
* Nearly eight of 10 IT leaders would like to reduce application delivery cycle times, while nine out of 10 see that delivering new applications and updates more rapidly would improve agility. Containers will play a pivotal role in the speed of application delivery.
* HPC, IoT, and edge computing will be key to this transformation, as 91% of IT leaders see increasing business agility as important to improving their competitiveness, while 89% see delivering new applications and updates as integral to expediting business agility improvements.
Di Donato points out that hybrid cloud is the future, but customers say migration must be simplified, with 62% saying that migrating workloads from the public to the private cloud is difficult.
“While leaders know they need to bring in a modern approach, the need for careful evaluation and planning to mitigate these challenges is evident.”
Meanwhile, skills in artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, IoT, and hybrid cloud are inhibiting the speed of transformation. “In order to fully accelerate their teams into the modern era, IT leaders know that they need these skills, but nearly half of organisations are saying they are hamstrung by it.
“As a result, businesses are rethinking resources and tech team structures,” Di Donato says.
IT leaders are tasked with driving innovation in digital transformation for their companies, Di Donato adds. SUSE is launching new solutions that will help companies to simplify, modernise and accelerate technology development and deployment to achieve this goal.
Since IT leader are concerned with delivery more applications, more frequently, SUSE has launched a new developer community that includes the SUSE cloud developer platform sandbox
Modern app platform lets developers focus on application logic while the platform handles the rest.
Access to the sandbox is free.
In addition, the company will next week launch an artificial intelligence solution for data scientists and I T operating teams develop, test and deploy the next generation of intelligent solutions.
“Two months ago, SUSE celebrated its first year of independence,” Di Donata says. “It means we are in control own destine, backed by a strong investor who believes in company and open source.”
The company aims to remain nimble to focus on helping customers address the business problems need to solve.
“We continue to offer the flexibility our customers have enjoyed from SUSE for the last 30 years,” she says.
The SUSE solutions are built in a strong community, Di Donata adds. “We help you run your IT infrastrucutre from edge to core to cloud, without vendor lock in.”
Being independent means SUSE can work with any IT stack. “This means solutions are easier to sell, implement and integrate – and will always continue to get better.”
SUSE remains partner-agnostic, and this independence helps customers achieve a solution-based outcome that matches their business requirements, Di Donato adds.
The company’s strategy is based on the mantra of simplify, modernise and accelerate.
“IT environment are complex and expensive,” Di Donato points out. “SUSE will help you simplify and optimise applications and data in existing IT departments.”
The company is also able to help customers to modernise applications, and run in the environment of your their choice
Once a business has simplified and modernised its applications, SUSE can help to scale the business to bring value to customers faster.