Insights & Highlights from Partner Summit 2024

When over 150 partners arrived in Berlin for our partner summit, you could sense the excitement building as the team and I shared our future vision with our partners and highlighted the crucial role they play in achieving it.

Our  commitment to partners

The afternoon kicked off with our CEO, DP van Leeuwen , announcing that we will do 100% of our deals with our partners. This commitment underscores our belief in the unmatched expertise and insights that our partners bring, which are crucial to our joint success. 

From listening to what our partners have told us, this is important in today’s unstable environment where the importance of trust is amplified. Our goal is to foster a symbiotic relationship built on mutual respect and support. We embrace open source values and trust is front and center.

With SUSE, and other partners within our partner ecosystem, you can deliver unique and impactful solutions. We provide unparalleled flexibility across deployment scenarios—from data centers to multi-cloud environments to the edge—backed by world-class support.

Partner Meritocracy

Also aligned with SUSE’s value system, we often use the word meritocracy (“the best ideas can come from anywhere” aligning success with ability and effort”). During the keynote, I asked Werner Knoblich, our Chief Revenue Officer, to share his views on a new concept of “partner meritocracy”.  Werner echoed this with ‘the best idea wins’ and can come from across the ecosystem. 

SUSE’s goal is to provide the building blocks for our partner’s success – from enabling each of you to create solutions that solve our mutual customers’ real-world challenges. Within this framework, you can see us as an ‘ingredient’ for you to deliver outcome-based customer solutions. Our most successful partnerships are with those that sell and build solutions solving business and technical challenges with ease.

Evolving Partner Marketing

Evolving partner marketing is another key focus at SUSE, with an emphasis on education and thought leadership. Ivo Totev, our Chief Marketing Officer, explained that 68% of buying decisions are made before talking to a sales rep.  SUSE is making strategic investments to accelerate pipeline generation for partners and we are targeting our messages and assets to those researching solutions, offering campaigns-in-a-box, and rolling out new functionality for partners to customize SUSE-prepared assets with their own branding.

Recognizing that a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work, we highly value feedback from partners to collaborate effectively on demand generation. Recent investments based on partner feedback have enhanced communications, including newsletters and webinars. We focus on why partners should care, how they can learn more, and sharing our knowledge consistently.

Latest Products and Innovations

No partner summit would be complete without discussing the latest products and updates with our Chief Technology and Product Officer, Thomas Di Giacomo. Not only did ‘Dr. T’ share insights on our latest offerings but also shared with our trusted partners ahead of release as part of our extended community serving our mutual customer’s together. This discussion complemented the partner webinar we hosted prior to SUSECON. Additionally, we launched the highly anticipated  SUSE AI, offering enterprise-grade AI solutions with flexible large language models and deployment options, including edge computing. By ensuring private AI with certified trust and security, we enable companies to benefit from AI within regulatory frameworks, ensuring both compliance and innovation.

New Cloud Offerings

We then heard from  Christine Puccio, Global Vice President, Cloud at SUSE, and Manu Parbhakar, Director of Business Application Partnerships at AWS, who discussed the new marketplace offerings available and introduced SUSE Cloud Elevate as a crucial element of the CLOUD specialization (one of six specializations within the SUSE One Partner Program). This initiative means you can offer SUSE solutions alongside your consulting services or other products on the hyperscaler marketplaces. We are pleased to launch SUSE Cloud Elevate with AWS as the official launch partner. If you’re interested in signing up, you can do so via this form. 

Rewarding Relationships with our System Integrator Partners

Amidst uncertainty, geopolitical tensions, and economic concerns, customers are seeking solutions that mitigate financial risks and deliver on outcomes. In response, Mike Pallot, Global Vice President of Global System Integrators, talked about how the enterprise-grade, open source technologies from SUSE, which offer the widest possible range of deployment options, naturally lends itself to those solutions being built by Global and Regional System Integrators. The SERVICE specialization within the SUSE One Partner Program, is being expanded to empower our GSIs and RSIs with new offerings and incentives. SUSE will be introducing a new initiative that allows partners who influence customers’ technology stack choices with enhanced incentives. Mike also talked about the expansion of support offered by SUSE, including dedicated offshore teams for enablement and solution development, that will further evolve the offerings we have for partners in the SERVICE specialization.

Partner Awards

Ton Musters, SVP for EMEA, joined me on stage to acknowledge seven partners who have really moved the needle for our joint customers in the past year. You can read more about all the partners who were honored during this year’s Partner Summit.

Towards a Partner-First Future

If there’s one thing you can take away from this year’s Partner Summit, it’s about how we have a huge amount of positive momentum driving our commitment to fostering strong, trust-based partnerships, delivering cutting-edge innovations, and empowering you with the tools and support you need to succeed. Together, we embody the strength of our tagline: “Power of Many. Together as One.”  I hope to welcome you to our Partner Summit and SUSECON 2025 – which we have announced will take place in Orlando, Florida from March 10-14, 2025. We look forward to continuing this journey of shared success and innovation with all of you.