SUSE promises flexibility, critical sovereign AI support to ASEAN enterprises

“Sovereignty means different things to different people. Here in Asia, it’s probably more about being able to control your own destiny. You need to be able to have total control [and] the ability to exit when you want.”

Open source infrastructure vendors like SUSE are responding to growing demand for sovereign AI across the Asia Pacific with aggressive expansion plans in ASEAN.

SUSE is harnessing their channel-first strategy and offering partners and customers flexibility in terms of budget and critical infrastructure support to ensure the region achieves its sovereign AI goals.

About three years ago, the vendor ramped up efforts in the region “a little bit more intensively”, shared Gayathri Peria, SUSE’s general manager, ASEAN at its inaugural SUSE Summit Singapore.

Starting with the three tier-1 markets — Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia — the vendor will aim to replicate their strategy across the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam from 2027 onwards.

“We have a very lean team and we are heavily focused on ecosystems and very strategic partnerships,” Peria told CRN Asia. “In recent years, we have struck very massive MOUs with strategic partners for global system integrators like Accenture, followed by localized, pretty large national system integrators.”

SUSE works closely with partners like PTC System in Singapore, Mesiniaga in Malaysia, and PT Innovation Cloud Services in Indonesia to support public sector customers primarily. However, they see increasing demand for sovereignty from enterprises across industries like financial services, defence, and manufacturing.

24/7 support, flexible tech budgets

Peria shared that enterprises have started to reach out to SUSE about options as they build out their environments on on-prem workloads.

“[With] open source, the biggest concern is how is your enterprise supportability being catered to?” she said. “In Asia Pacific, from sunrise to sunset, we have supportability within local and regional time zones.”

The round-the-clock support is backed by a flexible approach towards customer budgets as the vendor understands that managing costs has “diversely changed” in the AI era.

“Many years ago […] everything had fixated budgets,” she said. “Then you talk to customers and life has changed dramatically overnight.”

Today customers typically share that they have a committed spend with hyperscalers and want to know if they can bank on that transform their system. “[They ask] Are we able to use that avenue to modernize and kick start this portability engine? The answer is yes,” said Peria.

The vendor aims to prioritize leading with choice and resiliency to offer customers a realistic path towards transformation.

“So for budgets, we are highly flexible to see what areas of spend that they want to construct upfront or delay, whether it’s using their cloud budgets or whether they have on-prem budgets that are led by partners and service providers,” said Peria.

‘Choices should be within your reach’

Additionally, Frank Feldmann, SUSE’s Chief AI and Strategy Officer explained that flexibility and optionality are especially vital when implementing a sovereign system.

“Sovereignty means different things to different people. In Europe it is very much about jurisdictional control and then later also operational control,” said Feldmann.

“I think here in Asia, it's probably more about being able to control your own destiny, but it’s the same outcome that you seek. You need to be able to have total control [and] the ability to exit when you want from the choices you’ve made.

“Our infrastructure for AI path is very focused on highly regulated industries that need to be able to observe and have the insights to react when something goes wrong and shut it down or divert it, pivot in the same way.

“In some cases, that means a hyperscaler is fine, or a neocloud is fine, or a government cloud. Those choices should be within your reach.”

Expectations of channel partners

While vendors like SUSE pivot the business and adjust as customers shift away from vendor loyalty and reprioritize business needs as well as realizing ROI, Peria believes the most successful channel partners are those who transform accordingly.

“In the past, we expect channel partners relationships as more about the resellability, knowledge transfer ability, and maintaining stability,” she said. “Now it has grown in multiple forms with channel partners.

“We will have to look at creating synergies with a suite of communities at any one point in time — that means you are no longer the single partner of choice. You will have multiple partners and we have to work hand in hand to come together in AI and bring an ecosystem alive.”

Across Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, she has seen cloud providers work closely with both national system integrators as well as tier-1 integrators to support enterprises.

“Channel partners who are not transforming at that speed to be part of a community will be challenged,” she said. “That’s the beauty of SUSE being an open source company, because we actually bring them together, helping them to shape their strength and abilities, and not just looking at them as a transacting facility.”