Achieving Innovation With Flexible IT Strategies: The SUSE Approach

Speed and adaptability are key to staying competitive in today’s world. In fact, Inc. magazine named adaptability the best trait to ensure your organization’s success, especially when it comes to digital transformation. If your organization’s IT environment isn’t flexible, you won’t be able to innovate fast enough to be competitive or adapt quickly to trends. 

Flexibility has always been key to SUSE’s open source values. Here’s why a flexible IT strategy fuels innovation — and how SUSE’s solutions support this approach.

Hurdles slowing IT innovation

Many organizations have barriers to innovation that stifle innovation and speed to market. If not recognized and addressed, these barriers not only hurt your product pipeline, they also damage culture and morale. 

Here are some of the common IT hurdles businesses face when they try to innovate:

• Rigid vendor constraints. Vendor lock-in ties your technology roadmap to the plans of your vendor, limiting your team’s ability to respond to market needs. . The vendor may not be adapting to industry trends or may not be flexible with other software or with your existing architecture. 
• High operational costs. Operational costs divert resources away from transformative projects. Your company may be spending too much money on overhead costs, like non-optimized workload processing, expensive unused licenses or redundant cloud services, leaving little left to invest in groundbreaking products or original ideas. 
• Fragmented management. While mixed and heterogeneous environments have a lot of potential, they can also be a barrier if they’re not managed properly. Fragmented management leads to duplicate work, poor communication, siloed systems and data, limited scalability and heavy technical debt. 
• Risky reliance. If you rely on only one platform and that platform fails, your entire business is at risk. Too many businesses have a single point of failure that puts them in a vulnerable position. If the vendor ever sunsets that platform, you’re forced to do a time-consuming and expensive migration to another platform, which further dampens creativity and innovation. 
• Skills gaps. If you’re stuck with rigid vendors, your teams may not have the freedom to work with the tools they’re most experienced and productive with. Any forced migrations also create a skills gap that takes time to fill as employees learn a new platform. 

How SUSE fosters innovation for competitive advantage

For a competitive advantage, you need to be able to adjust quickly to changing landscapes, increasing regulations, fierce competition and more. To stay agile, you can rely on SUSE solutions. 

SUSE supports your flexible IT strategies so you can innovate freely, quickly and securely. We offer advantages such as:  

• Flexibility without limits. As the competitive landscape evolves, you can adapt and innovate. SUSE supports your agile IT strategies with centralized, multi-Linux management so you can shift tactics, add or get rid of tools and stay ahead of the curve.
• Cost efficiency as a catalyst. Stop wasting resources on expensive operational overhead. The more you cut down on unnecessary costs, the more you can put toward fueling initiatives that give you a competitive advantage.  
• Enterprise-wide security. You can’t play offense if all your players are on defense. When you keep your enterprise systems secure with SUSE solutions, you can put resources towards your goals rather than constantly dealing with data breaches. 
• Independence and choice. Vendor lock-in leaves you reliant on third parties. If they make decisions that don’t align with your business goals or they sunset the platform you’re using, your projects get derailed. With SUSE Multi-Linux Support, you have the freedom to choose the Linux versions that work best for your workloads, knowing that your critical systems are safe. You won’t be forced to abandon legacy systems prematurely or migrate to platforms when you aren’t ready. 
• Streamlined operations. Enable your teams to focus on growth by simplifying your operations. SUSE Multi-Linux Manager helps you embrace diverse environments with seamless operations management. Instead of spending resources on operational overhead, you have more resources to put toward your forward-thinking projects and can adapt to market changes quickly. 

Flexibility and innovation to fuel your long-term business goals

Achieving flexibility accelerates innovation so your company can realize your long-term goals. SUSE’s here to help you through that process. 

SUSE empowers IT leaders to foster innovation by providing flexible, centralized Linux management. Our solutions reduce operational burdens and free up resources for strategic initiatives. For more than 30 years, our open source approach has supported freedom, choice and flexibility. This enables our customers to innovate at their own pace. 

To dig deeper into how SUSE solutions can provide flexibility to your IT environment, learn more about SUSE Linux solutions.