SUSE completes its management transition

[Posted March 15, 2019 by corbet]

Here's a SUSE press release hyping its transition to being "the largest independent open-source company". "As it has for more than 25 years, SUSE remains committed to an open source development and business model and to actively participating in communities and projects to bring open source innovation to the enterprise as high-quality, reliable and usable solutions. This truly open, open source model refers to the flexibility and freedom of choice provided to customers and partners to create best-of-breed solutions that combine SUSE technologies with other products and technologies in their IT landscape through open standards and at different levels in their architecture, without forcing a locked-in stack."

SUSE completes its management transition

Posted Mar 16, 2019 5:38 UTC (Sat) by alison (subscriber, #63752) [Link] (2 responses)

I was impressed by the quality of the talks in the OpenSUSE track at Southern California Linux Expo last weekend.

https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/17x/schedule/friday

I've never used OpenSUSE beyond Open Build System, but the quality of technical contribution there obviously remains high.

SUSE completes its management transition

Posted Mar 18, 2019 7:38 UTC (Mon) by em-bee (guest, #117037) [Link] (1 responses)

suse has survived several sales of the company or parent companies. that is usually a sign of a good and stable revenue. i expect they will survive quite a while longer...

greetings, eMBee.

SUSE completes its management transition

Posted Mar 18, 2019 13:45 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I don't know about that. Nokia got sold around a couple of times. Granted, it doesn't seem like the buyers are parasitizing the profitable parts and regurgitating the remnants onto the next sucker, but I wouldn't use it as a universal indicator of success.

SUSE completes its management transition

Posted Mar 17, 2019 15:39 UTC (Sun) by darwish (guest, #102479) [Link] (6 responses)

SUSE's future is worrisome (I guess, but I hope not): how will they make money when every one is moving to the cloud? "Amazon Linux" and other cloud-provider-native distributions are much more common...

SUSE completes its management transition

Posted Mar 17, 2019 19:46 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (4 responses)

Ubuntu is quite popular on various cloud providers. And Amazon Linux might not work best if you want a cross-provider application (like AWS+Azure+GCE).

SUSE completes its management transition

Posted Mar 17, 2019 20:00 UTC (Sun) by darwish (guest, #102479) [Link] (3 responses)

Of course, I won't recommend "Amazon Linux" to anyone; I'm just talking about _facts on the ground_ here:

https://thecloudmarket.com/stats

SUSE's marketshare on the cloud is almost Nil. So my original question still holds: how will SUSE make money in a cloud-native world? This is IMHO a make-or-break question.

SUSE completes its management transition

Posted Mar 19, 2019 17:38 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (1 responses)

I guess one question is how they make their money now. Maybe there's a rich vein of consulting across both cloud and datacenter?

I mean, I really don't know, but I expect most of their income hasn't been via SuSE Linux Enterprise for some time, because it isn't a growing market. The datacenter was pretty saturated with Linux a decade ago.

I do think that in around 10 years, datacenter spending will have rebounded a bit, but I expect its management will look more like the cloud than its current reality.

SUSE completes its management transition

Posted Mar 21, 2019 9:36 UTC (Thu) by vmoutoussamy (subscriber, #86142) [Link]

The cloud is hype today, but a lot of money maker system are not there yet (IMHO they will remain in datacenter...) It's the same for any vendor (even Microsoft), you can sell a lot of tiny subscription/contract in the cloud and/or sell big subscription/contract for mission critical systems.

SUSE completes its management transition

Posted Mar 21, 2019 11:10 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

Those stats seem to talk about the number of published images... not the number of images in use. A lot of those images are going to be rolling snapshots and things like that. So SuSE could have 10x the number of Ubuntu instances based off of 1 image.

SUSE completes its management transition

Posted Mar 21, 2019 8:24 UTC (Thu) by rbranco (subscriber, #129813) [Link]

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the OS of choice for SAP applications, in bare-metal and in the cloud.