Our Kind of Open: SUSECON Day 1 Recap

We saddled up and kicked off the first day of SUSECON with a few bangs and heehaws!  Here’s a full recap of the first day of SUSECON.

Keynote

The keynote opened with a new SUSE parody song “My Kind of Open Source” and immediately after President of Strategy, Alliances and Marketing, Michael Miller, took the stage to really hone in on how we are doubling down on open.

“We are asking: Why should anyone have to be locked in to a one size fits all solution? On the contrary…we want to unlock the inherent power of your uniqueness and enable transformation on your terms. We call it Open-Open.”

He then provided a quick overview of the week, SUSECON key points, shouted out our sponsors (BIG THANKS!!!) and then welcomed SUSE CEO Nils Brauckmann on stage where he delivered a business review.  A few key take-a-ways:

• As of March 15th we’ve become an independent company. In fact, we are about to be the largest independent open source company in the industry.
• Now, more than ever, we can be 100% sure that there is only one agenda…understanding what our customers and partners need and making it our mission to find the right path to meet those needs.
• Now, we are really well-positioned to pursue both an organic and inorganic set of strategies. For years we’ve been investing heavily in our engineering organization and we’ll continue to do that.
• Our partner eco-system has always been deeply ingrained in our genes as a business, and we will certainly hold on to that. At the same time we are looking to broaden our eco-system and find ways to build new or intensify our work relationships.
• Our revenue growth in FY18 was around 15% so quite substantial and are about to surpass $400m revenue mark as a business. And again also last year we saw revenue growth from all 4 global geographies.
• We invested significantly into expanding the SUSE team across geos and business functions. In the last 12 months alone we added more than 300 people and the entire SUSE team is approaching 1750 heads around the globe.

Nils then exited stage right and Michael welcomed James Staten, VP Forrester to the stage.  James discussed the state of the industry and current market dynamics, the anatomy of the modern IT department, how it has evolved and what the implications of that evolution are.  He dove into why it is a great time to be in Open Source, what the future looks like and finally, shared some advice for IT leaders:

• Start your shift to Customer Obsession
• Drive Digital Transformation to raise EX & CX gains
• Enable business value achievement/improvement agility
• Use evolving customers’ needs to drive your roadmaps & investments
• Shift your culture to an Adaptive Enterprise
• Embrace agility, fail-fast and disruptive moves across all BUs
• Prioritize CX-driven, tech-enabled innovations
• Leverage open source technologies
• Empower technology agility across platforms
• Empower your own solutions across your ecosystem

Michael then shared a few housekeeping items and dismissed everyone to their sessions.

Watch the replays below.

Announcements

First we covered our independence.  As a newly independent company, we are better positioned to deliver open innovation to meet our customers’ needs on their terms.  Get the full release here.

We then introduced new, open hybrid and multi-cloud capabilities and application delivery innovations that enable businesses to support their own customers when, where and how they need. Read more here.

Then, we announced delivering the first enterprise Linux for SAP HANA large instances on Microsoft Azure!  Full release here.

And last, but not least, we announced support for 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, formerly code named “Cascade Lake,” following on the heels of becoming the first enterprise Linux optimized for Intel Optane DC persistent memory with SAP HANA workloads earlier this year.  Learn more.

Videos

Of course SUSECON would not be complete without the release of a few cool parody songs!  Here are the ones we premiered today.

Whew!  We covered a lot in one day but there’s so much more to come!  Attending the event?  Be sure to get on down to the keynote on day 2 where we will hear from Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo of SUSE, Dan Lahl from SAP and Hiro Kishimoto, Ph.D. of Fujitsu.  Not attending?  We’re keeping you up to speed via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and SUSECON.com.