Partners become that critical bridge to maintain relevance, be competitive and drive differentiation, says SUSE’s Elaine Chan

“We hope that we are able to find that handful of partners that we can up-level and really call them like strategic partners, where we go over and above with them to invest time, energy and resource to build that win-win business together.”

According to research from SUSE, while nearly all enterprises are prioritizing digital sovereignty, only 52% are actively taking steps to achieve it. The study which was based on 309 IT leaders across France, Germany, India, Japan and the US highlights a growing gap between ambition and execution.

In Southeast Asia, the scenario is no different as Elaine Chan, Head of APAC Partnerships at SUSE highlights in an interview with CRN Asia. According to Chan, when it comes to digital or data sovereignty, each country has its own framework. But what’s interesting about the Southeast Asian region is that there are increasingly more strategic collaborations taking place to drive data sovereignty in the public sector.

As SUSE focuses on enterprise open source software, the company empowers customers by transforming innovations into secure, sovereign and AI-ready solutions. Through industry-leading Linux, Kubernetes, Edge and AI infrastructure solutions, SUSE delivers the flexibility to innovate everywhere—from the data center to multi-cloud and out to the edge.

For Chan, SUSE is not just about providing point solutions. Instead, the focus is on going back to the foundation. For example, looking at companies and making them understand why they want to deploy AI and why it is important for them. This includes helping customers ensure that they have people who are skilled and able to do that at scale.

“These are important questions that our customers are thinking about before they even try to solve one particular problem. And we want to be able to go upstream and work with our partners to address those needs. And of course, at the same time, working with each of the line of business to solve their individual use case,” Chan explained.

Chan believes it's an opportunity for SUSE because they are really the underlying software infrastructure that helps fill a lot of these use cases with end customers.

“So I do see the acceleration of pace because of the need and AI again has exploded in various ways. It's not just about generative AI. We're talking about agentic AI across so many types of workloads and then now overlay that with digital sovereignty. Companies are really thinking about how do I take control of my data, right? How do I take control of my infrastructure such that I'm not subjected to all these geopolitical situations and can ensure that my business stay resilient. So I think that serves as the opportunity for us,” Chan added.

The partner ecosystem

Naturally, driving these opportunities would be SUSE’s partner ecosystem, which Chan pointed out ranges from OEMs to global hyperscalers and local cloud providers to managed service providers (MSPs), system integrators (SI) and independent software vendors (ISV).

“We cannot be in every market the same way we would like to. So, partners become that critical bridge for us to maintain relevance, be competitive, drive differentiation. And so, we hope that we are able to find that handful of partners that we can up-level and really call them like strategic partners, where we go over and above with them to invest time, energy and resource to build that win-win business together.”

Interestingly, despite being a channel first vendor, Chan pointed out that the lines in the partner ecosystem are blurring as partners are evolving in what they are offering today. For example, a lot of traditional SIs are now offering managed services.

“It's almost like managed service is becoming an integral part of the value offering. There is an increased search in trying to pursue anything as a service, as a business model. Of course, that comes along with the need to transform their skill set and that they are able to have the competency to implement and deploy for their customers. So I think the interest is really driven by a combination of people seeing the hyperscaler model exploding and that being an option for many of the end customers, but also the need right now for being sovereign in everything that the companies do,” she explained.

Looking back at digital sovereignty, the MSP model is also able to satisfy the consideration of companies to make sure that they fulfil the data sovereignty, the infrastructure sovereignty, and the operational sovereignty of their business.

This is where SUSE’s partner program becomes imperative as partners need to have the right skill set to meet customer requirements.

“There are pockets of partners who have maybe in the past been very technically strong in that area. But I always see it in two folds. There are people who are technically very strong who often tend to be like maybe small boutique partners, but they lack the skill to go reach out to the broader market. And on the flip side, the incumbents or the people who have scale engine may not necessarily have the technical competency yet,” she said.

As such, Chan believes that both types of partners are trying to find themselves building up the muscle on the other piece, which sometimes happens through collaboration.

“Partner A can work with partner B, because one offers skill, or one offers technical competency. Some may decide to just develop independently for themselves. And that's where we can also come in and work with them,” she added.

On SUSE’s partner program, Chan explained that it’s being evolved and is going to be a multi-year initiative. Core to that is how SUSE goes from just product type of training to skill sets enablement.

“How do I help someone be cloud native ready? Do they know how to deploy the Kubernetes cluster at scale and do it with AI workloads and all the other workloads? And is there a way for us to offer this in a self-serve form, but also in a way that if they want it to be more high touch, we can offer it as some form of service to them. There are just different ways, right? That depending on the appetite of the partners and the readiness, I see this as one of the big areas for us,” Chan said.

AI driving growth

With customers primarily focused on AI, Chan explained that SUSE is the underlying infrastructure that supports all these AI models.

“If you think at the heart of AI, data is the key. And in terms of generating all these AI use cases, it's important that you have choice and predictability, because cost is something that is key as well. You can't afford that swing in your deployment. And ultimately, as partners, can you do that profitably? So, I think where we come in is that we definitely offer them the choice because we support. So, if you take the Kubernetes, for example, we have our own version of Kubernetes, but we support multi-Kubernetes. Similarly, in our Linux heritage where we have our own Linux, but we support multi-Linux,” Chan explained.

Chan also pointed out that this is the same philosophy in SUSE’s entire solution architecting.

“SUSE AI is there to provide that peace of mind for customers so that they would have the flexibility to move their workloads, their stack in however and to wherever they want, and also where they store their data. And we actually provide that building block for them to make that happen. So I would say that's a unique position for us. And we are very excited about the role that we can play to help our partners be on that journey to do that,” she said.

Growth in the region

“We have done quite a bit of progress this year in Southeast Asia, where we have worked with many of these local system integrators, service providers to get into strategic agreement, basically to help them become more cloud native and sovereign in their solution stack, and helping them in the enablement journey as they offer services to the public sector, to government linked companies, including other verticals like manufacturing and FSI,” Chan said when asked about growth with partners in the region.

Looking beyond Southeast Asia, Chan said that Australia and India are also seeing strong growth with SUSE having strong strategic wins to help them differentiate themselves and showcase SUSE’s ability as a brand to provide choice to the customer.

“Open source is our heritage. And I think being a European company also gives us that differentiation to maintain a sovereign position. We also have been very forthcoming in terms of reaching out to partners to say, how do we work with you to build solutions that are open, flexible, and sovereign, such that you are able to help your customer maintain wherever they want to host their compute environment, be it on-premises, cloud, multi-cloud or hybrid.”

“We can be that infrastructure. We give them that flexibility, and they can have that peace of mind to deploy very quickly. We have presence in FSI, manufacturing, retail, across the board, telcos, and so forth. So it's quite a well-spread-out area where we have reference wins with several of the big companies across the globe. But I would say that right now, given the sovereignty focus, the public sector is gaining the most traction for us,” she concluded.