ORLANDO — You probably know SUSE best as a Linux powerhouse. You may well also know that, thanks in no small part to its Rancher acquisition, it’s a major cloud player as well. Recently, however, SUSE has also been pushing its way towards being a capable AI partner for its customers as well. This trend was on full display at SUSECON 25,
As Abhinav Puri, SUSE’s general manager of portfolio solutions and services, said in his presentation, “Through close collaboration with our customers and partners since the launch of SUSE AI last year, we’ve gained additional and invaluable insights into the challenges of deploying production-ready AI workloads. This collaborative journey has allowed us to bolster our offerings and continue to provide customers with strong transparency, trust, and openness in AI implementation.
SUSE has done this by rolling out several key enhancements and partnerships in its AI offerings. These included
- AI-Specific Observability: The new SUSE AI release includes enhanced observability features, providing real-time insights into AI workloads, LLM token usage, and GPU performance. This allows enterprises to predict costs better, improve scalability, and enhance performance by quickly identifying and resolving system issues.
- Support for Agentic Workflows: The platform supports the development of agentic AI workflows, enabling proactive decision-making and automation of repetitive tasks. This accelerates innovation by allowing enterprises to focus on high-value activities.
- Expanded AI Library: The SUSE AI Library has been expanded to include validated open-source AI components such as Open WebUI Pipelines, custom Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and PyTorch for image classification and natural language processing. Put it all together and SUSE customers should be able to achieve faster time-to-value by leveraging these curated components.
SUSE isn’t doing all this on its own. As Puri told me in an interview, “Through close collaboration with our customers and partners, we’ve gained invaluable insights into deploying production-ready AI workloads,” Puri noted. “These enhancements reflect our commitment to delivering greater value and strengthening SUSE AI.”
The European open-source company is also working to secure AI workloads by using confidential computing. This technology encrypts data in memory so that your AI data and analysis is safe from snoopers even within public cloud containers or on unsecured edge servers.
Retain Control of Your Data
As Manuel Sammeth, Managing Director at FIS-ASP GmbH, a German SAS integrator said at the conference, “With SUSE AI, we help customers innovate while retaining control over sensitive data and meeting strict regulatory requirements.”
Additionally, SUSE also announced a collaboration with Infosys to facilitate AI adoption securely across businesses. This partnership builds on their existing relationship to enhance private cloud adoption and optimize Linux environments for SAP applications.
Finally, SUSE has integrated its security platform, SUSE Security with Microsoft Sentinel to provide a unified security approach across hybrid IT environments, leveraging AI-driven threat mitigation.
None of this may be as flashy as many recent AI announcements, which promise a revolutionary world out of science fiction. Instead, SUSE is focused on delivering practical results to help businesses securely make the most from the state of AI today and not what it may be — possibly, hopefully — tomorrow.
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