Setting up a business or giving life to your innovations more often than not ends up being a herculean task; to say nothing about growing your business. But having the right technology to facilitate your business always helps. This makes carefully choosing a good technology partner even more important. SUSE is a global leader in providing innovative, reliable and enterprise-grade technology solutions focused on Enterprise Linux, Kubernetes Management and Edge Solutions. It collaborates with partners and communities to give power to its customers to enable them to innovate anywhere and everywhere. It supports cloud native journeys of customers and helps achieve their digital transformation goals. Following SUSE’s recent acquisition of Rancher Labs, a market–leading Enterprise Kubernetes Management platform, CIO Insider engages in an exclusive chat session with the country head for SUSE, Neeraj Athalye.

In conversation with Neeraj Athalye, Managing Director, SUSE (India)

The global cloud computing market is expected to expand at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 14.9 percent from 2020 to 2027. What kind of role is SUSE playing amidst the exponentially growing digital transformation demand and where are you currently positioned in the industry?
SUSE and Rancher offer a foundation for customers to succeed on the cloud. We help simplify and automate the infrastructure layers so customers can focus on innovation and build new services faster. Today, as a pioneer in Enterprise Linux, SUSE is also positioned as leading specialists in Kubernetes management and Cloud and Edge solutions. Our business continues to grow and gain momentum..

What’s the unique proposition that you offer? Do you have any SOP in place to understand clients’ pain points and offer a highly customized, integrated and problem-centric solution?
The promise of SUSE and Rancher is the ability for customers to innovation everywhere. Our teams have worked closely with AWS for the last 10 years.
We understand customer challenges and jointly develop solutions that tackle those challenges head on for extreme customer satisfaction. Our field engineering, consulting and support teams are trained with a set of best practices that have helped some of the

world’s largest companies run their most demanding workloads in the cloud. As organizations expect smarter, digitized products and new, innovative ways for customer interaction and delivery of products and services, over the years we have mastered the art of exceeding their expectations. We enable organizations and customers to deliver innovative products and boost productivity while maintaining highest security standards.

in innovative infrastructure products and solutions for customers worldwide in the energy, transportation and construction industries. On one occasion, when the company was running its SAP landscapes in a private data center while bringing in a new business on a tight timescale, they needed to migrate to the public cloud. Migration missions are always time-consuming and expensive. Incomplete applications at this stage delayed migration and resulted in unexpected tasks that consumed project resources and caused cost overruns. Faced with an extremely tight deadline and limited in-house knowledge of SAP S/4HANA and public cloud deployments, L.B Foster set out seeking solution partners that could help them migrate to SAP S/4HANA. It chose to work with Protera Technologies, an SAP global partner who helped them achieve complete migration to SAP S/4HANA within 16 weeks on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications on the AWS Cloud. They minimized risk of migration through innovative prototyping in the public cloud, reduced cost by leveraging an automated upgrade and migration platform, and provided a bulletproof high-performance environment for SAP S/4HANA.



What’s your mission and vision while going forward? What’s SUSE’s future roadmap?
Together, SUSE and Rancher will give our customers unmatched freedom and power to innovate everywhere – from the data center, to the cloud, to the Edge, and beyond. We will achieve this by helping our customers simplify, modernize and accelerate their business with solutions for hybrid cloud IT, cloud native transformation and IT operations at the Edge. Our vision is to help companies be open enterprises that always explore possibilities, and our mission is to provide and support enterprise-grade Linux and give customers the freedom to innovate everywhere.