SUSE eyes up to 40 percent of India’s open-source enterprise market through five partner routes, says Sachin Vig

He says the company is expanding across resellers, hyperscalers, MSPs, hardware vendors and ISVs as customers rethink how they consume infrastructure and applications.

SUSE is expanding its India partner strategy across managed service providers, hyperscalers, hardware vendors and independent software vendors as customers move towards open-source technology and rethink how they consume infrastructure and applications.

Speaking to CRN India, Sachin Vig, director – strategic channels & alliances (Indian Subcontinent), SUSE, said the shift away from proprietary technology is creating opportunities across multiple routes to market, from traditional resellers and cloud marketplaces to managed services and industry-specific software platforms.

Vig said SUSE is bullish on the opportunity and is looking to capture around 30 to 40 percent market share in India’s open-source enterprise consumption.

The market, he said, is being reshaped by customers moving away from closed ecosystems and looking for greater flexibility in how and where they run their workloads.

“The era of closed ecosystems is moving towards open,” Vig said.

According to him, enterprises do not want to lock themselves into proprietary software and solutions. At the same time, customers are looking at cloud-native technologies not only to modernise legacy applications but also to reconsider where those workloads should run.

Vig said migrations are now happening in both directions — from legacy applications to modernised cloud-native environments and, in some cases, from public cloud back to on-premises infrastructure.

“That repatriation has started happening today in the country,” he said.

For SUSE, the opportunity is to make its technology available through multiple partner routes as customers make those choices.

SUSE's partner ecosystem is structured around five primary routes to market, according to Vig, which include distribution and Tier-2 resellers, hyperscaler marketplaces, managed service providers, independent hardware vendors and independent software vendors.

The traditional channel remains an important part of that structure.

SUSE has close to 300-plus active resellers in India, according to Vig, including regional and national system integrators. Regional SIs, he said, provide coverage across Tier-1 and Tier-2 cities.

But the company's partner strategy is extending beyond conventional software resale as customers move towards different consumption models.

MSPs become a major growth route

Managed service providers have become an important route for SUSE in India as customers evaluate alternatives to public cloud and look for greater control over infrastructure costs and deployment models.

Vig said SUSE has seen its platform building strongly with MSPs over the last two and a half years.

The shift is being driven partly by customers that initially moved workloads to public cloud but are now evaluating private cloud options and looking at how to optimise their overall infrastructure landscape.

“Later, customers will probably decide that they want to move out of the public cloud. They will be looking at more private cloud options that suit their pockets,” Vig said.

SUSE works with MSPs including Yotta, NTT, Tata Communications, CtrlS and Cloud4C, according to Vig. These partners operate private cloud, colocation and managed services models.

“If a customer is looking at spinning up their workloads and does not want to expose themselves to the public cloud, that's the third prime route,” he said.

The opportunity is also shifting towards consumption-based models, where customers can increase or reduce workloads according to their requirements.

Vig compared this with electricity consumption, where the amount paid changes according to usage.

“This is the flexibility that is there with managed service providers, and hence customers also look at such options,” he said.

Customers want the ability to spin up a specific workload for a period and reduce or stop consumption when it is no longer required.

Hyperscalers keep SUSE connected to public cloud demand

SUSE is also using the hyperscaler ecosystem to capture customers that continue to prefer public cloud.

The company is available on the marketplaces of AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, giving customers a route to consume SUSE as they deploy workloads in public cloud environments.

Vig said SUSE works with hyperscalers at both global and local levels, with the company driving alliances and go-to-market activity with them.

“If the market is moving more towards cloud consumption, which is driving public cloud consumption, then obviously the hyperscalers come into the picture,” he said.

The strategy is intended to ensure that customers are not restricted to a particular deployment model.

“If you're looking at cloud, we are there,” Vig said.

That flexibility also extends to customers that eventually decide to deploy their own infrastructure.

Hardware partnerships create an on-premises route

SUSE's fourth route to market is through independent hardware vendors, with relationships including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Dell, Lenovo and Cisco.

The model helps customers that want to deploy applications on-premises and procure the underlying compute infrastructure through hardware partners.

Vig said customers working with major hardware vendors can have SUSE technology integrated into the broader infrastructure stack rather than procuring components as separate siloed solutions.

“If they are working with HPE or Dell, these large hardware partners, the entire solution comes in a single box,” he said.

This provides another option for customers reconsidering public cloud consumption and evaluating their own infrastructure environments.

Vig said SUSE's objective is to give customers flexibility and choice rather than force them into a particular deployment model.

“SUSE may be the centrepiece of it, but there are other surrounding ecosystem software players which are more open in nature,” he said.

ISVs create another partner-led consumption layer

The fifth route is independent software vendors, particularly companies building specialised applications for specific industries.

SUSE is looking to work with ISVs that have niche solutions across sectors, including manufacturing, retail and BFSI and can use SUSE as the underlying platform.

Under the model, ISVs can bring their applications onto the SUSE platform, conduct testing and benchmarking, and get their products and applications certified.

“We give the flexibility to these independent software vendors to bring their applications onto my platform,” Vig said.

That allows the ISV and SUSE technology to become part of a broader solution delivered to the customer rather than operating as separate components.

Vig said this is an area SUSE is focusing on as part of its FY27 strategy and growth plan.

Consumption models are changing the partner opportunity

The common thread across these routes is the move away from siloed technology purchases towards broader infrastructure, platform and application services.

“Either we consume the entire infrastructure as a service, platform as a service or application as a service nowadays,” Vig said.

Under this model, SUSE technology becomes part of a partner's broader cloud or service stack, with partners building services around it and taking those services to their customers.

“We weave our solution into their stack, into their cloud environment, and we integrate there, and then they build those unique services to take these services to their customers,” Vig said.

That is why SUSE's growth strategy is not limited to one category of partner.

The company is looking at how its technology can be consumed through public cloud, private cloud, managed services, hardware-led deployments and industry-specific applications.

For partners, that creates multiple routes into the same underlying open-source opportunity.

Vig said the market is maturing alongside customers, with cost optimisation and changing infrastructure preferences influencing where workloads are deployed.

“With AI being there, everybody is looking at cutting down the cost, manpower cost, and bringing AI into the picture,” he said.