After a landmark deal between Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and SUSE parent company Micro Focus International plc earlier this year, these two companies now face the unique task of integrating cloud offerings. Open source technology seems to be a common denominator enabling their efforts, as the partnership names Linux vendor SUSE as HPE’s preferred Linux partner. This effectively brings together HPE’s Helion OpenStack and Stackato solutions with SUSE’s OpenStack expertise to provide best-in-class enterprise-grade hybrid cloud offerings to customers, according to Bobby Patrick, CMO, HPE Cloud, at HPE, and Bryan Gartner, senior technology strategist at SUSE.

Patrick and Gartner joined Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), co-hosts of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during HPE Discover EU, held in London. They discussed the new partnership between HPE and SUSE, including how to handle legacy OpenStack clients, as well as their strategies around communicating and helping customers’ developers.

Mitigating OpenStack concerns

The guests discussed different aspects of the HPE/SUSE partnership and the implications for both companies. Patrick explained HPE is working to get OpenStack to a place where you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand or run it.

“It’s not for us to build code; it’s for us to bring it to market,” said Patrick. HPE’s focus is on the hardest part, getting it implemented into a customer’s existing environment.

SUSE has been around for 24 years, and, “We’ve been doing enterprise Linux during that entire time. With all of our enterprise products, we make sure they’re enterprise-grade and enterprise-ready,” said Gartner.

While HPE has a significant number of OpenStack customers already, and those customers may be a bit leery with the addition of SUSE, there’s a joint plan in place to create a roadmap for customers, the duo explained.

Developer strategy

So does HPE and SUSE have a developer strategy in place? Patrick said that HPE’s focus is helping CIOs remain relevant and engaged so that they can enable their own developers. On SUSE’s side, Gartner explained that open source is SUSE’s heritage, and everything that they ship is open source, so they definitely work with and contribute to developers interests.

Despite the different developer strategies, both HPE and SUSE want to expand the number of options for their customers; customers are expecting them to look at all the available technology, use their knowledge of the marketplace and pick the winners for them.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of HPE Discover EU. (*Disclosure: HPE and other companies sponsor some HPE Discover EU segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither HPE nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE