SUSE Announces Finalists for Inaugural SUSE Choice Awards at SUSECON 2024

We’re thrilled to share some exciting news from SUSECON 2024 in Berlin. Today, we announced the finalists for our inaugural SUSE Choice Awards. This global program celebrates organizations that have leveraged SUSE solutions to drive innovation, achieve outstanding business results, and make a positive impact on society. We’re proud to recognize these incredible achievements and the transformative power of our customers’ initiatives.

Honoring excellence with SUSE Solutions

At SUSE, we’re passionate about working alongside our customers to tackle some of the most challenging issues in tech today—from enhancing security and navigating Gen AI to modernizing applications and infrastructure in a rapidly evolving landscape. Our Chief Executive Officer, Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, summed it up perfectly, “We are honored that our customers continue to choose SUSE for this journey and proud of these many accomplishments. Huge congratulations to all finalists.”

Meet the gold finalists

Our gold and silver finalists were announced today at the main stage in the Estrel Congress Center, and we couldn’t be more excited to celebrate their achievements. Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, SUSE’s CEO, recognized 12 outstanding customers who have harnessed the power of SUSE solutions to redefine industries, drive business success, and contribute to positive societal change.

Here are the gold finalists:

Digital Trendsetter – Hyundai Motor Company

Hyundai’s all-connected car platform, powered by Rancher Prime, hosts connected car apps like remote engine start/stop and remote climate control. With Rancher Prime and Kubernetes, Hyundai has scaled to support 5 million connected cars. 

“SUSE solutions are helping us to unlock the full potential of our cloud platform to support the connected car service,” says Dr. Youngjoo Han, Vice President, Car Cloud Development Group, Hyundai Motor Company.

Excellence in Business Transformation – Viasat

Viasat has fortified its container orchestration and security protocols with SUSE solutions such as Rancher Prime, SUSE Edge and K3s. Viasat is a global leader in satellite communications that provides connectivity across a variety of markets, including mobility and government services.

Sustainability Hero – Danelec

Danelec developed a solution with SUSE Edge that helps vessels at sea optimize operations and routes to maximize fuel efficiency and report against ESG targets. This innovation is helping the maritime shipping industry reduce emissions and meet emission targets set by the IMO by 2050.

Industry Leader – Kratos

Kratos recently launched the space and satellite industry’s first edge native terminal, OpenEdge, an integral part of their OpenSpace family of solutions. OpenEdge delivers game-changing capabilities for commercial and government applications that redefine the decades-old paradigm of proprietary, static, hardware-based satellite terminals with an open, flexible, software-defined approach. OpenEdge is built and managed with Rancher Government Solutions, a subsidiary of SUSE that focuses on the U.S. government, to provide a secure, lightweight, virtualization platform for hosting Kratos CNFs and other value-added applications using SLE Micro and K3s. 

Open Source Champion – Orange

Orange collaborates with industry peers, partners and competitors on Project Sylva, driving standards and reference implementations for telecom infrastructure. RKE2, Metal-Kube, Cluster API and Longhorn provide solutions to support Orange’s cloud native architecture, ensuring scalability, reliability and performance for its telecommunications infrastructure.

Advocate of the Year – BMW Group

BMW Group has collaborated with SUSE since 2007 and shares SUSE’s open source ethos. An early adopter and advocate of SUSE solutions, BMW Group is using Harvester and Rancher to host modern edge solutions for the plants that run K8s workloads on-prem as an essential part of a cloud-centric ecosystem.

Choice Happens – WEG

WEG chose SUSE Liberty Linux as part of its multi-Linux distribution strategy, providing a single point of support for its heterogeneous environment. This move has been pivotal in their journey.

Celebrating the silver finalists

We also recognized our silver finalists, who have showcased extraordinary initiatives in their fields:

Digital Trendsetter: NMDP, a nonprofit leader in cell therapy, helps find cures and save lives for patients with blood cancers and disorders.

Excellence in Business Transformation: Nova Credit, a credit reference agency that works with the personal credit data of 5.6 million Hong Kong consumers daily. 

Sustainability Hero: MTU Aero Engines, a leading airline engine manufacturer with the ambitious goal to offer climate-neutral flight by 2050.

Industry Leader: Saque e Pague, whose self-service financial network transforms the circulation of cash in both physical and digital realms.

Advocate of the Year: University of Luxembourg, which provides online testing operations for 25,000+ concurrent users of the country’s preferred education assessment system.

A special thank you!

Special thanks to our judges, including our external judges Priyanka Sharma, general manager at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and Steven Dickens, VP and Practice Leader for Hybrid Cloud, Infrastructure, and Operations at The Futurum Group.

We’re excited about the future and the potential for continued collaboration and innovation. Thank you to all our customers who participated, and congratulations to the winners! Stay tuned for our next SUSE Choice Awards.