While cutting-edge technologies may be the most appropriate for solving increasingly sophisticated business problems, companies need easy-to-use solutions. Simplifying modernization to facilitate its consumption by companies is one of the goals of the open-source software company SUSE.

“We have to curate and prepare and filter all the open-source innovation that [enterprises] can benefit from, because that takes time to understand how that can match your needs and fix your problems,” said Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo (pictured, left), president of engineering and innovation at SUSE. “It is SUSE … working in the open-source projects, innovating them, but with customers in mind.”

Di Giacomo and Daniel Nelson (pictured, right), vice president of products and solutions at SUSE, spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the SUSECON Digital event. They discussed SUSE’s work to transform open-source innovations into consumable solutions for its customers; how containers, Kubernetes, and cutting-edge computing fit the SUSE approach; and AI use cases in open-source projects. (* Disclosure below.)

Modernization to accelerate business

Companies need to simplify their technology infrastructure because they have been accumulating investments in different software, solutions and platforms from different bundles, according to Di Giacomo. “They need to simplify that and modernize, and they need to accelerate their business to stay relevant and competitive in their own industries. And that’s what we’re focusing on,” he said.

The dynamics of open-source communities show that developers want cutting-edge technology and the latest news to work on, while corporate operations groups are looking for technology that is simply consumable, according to Nelson.

“And that’s kind of what the SUSE portfolio was built upon,” he said. “It’s like, how do we take the thousands and thousands of developers that are working on these really critical projects — whether it’s Linux …or Kubernetes or for Cloud Foundry — and how do we make that then more consumable to the thousands of companies that are trying to do it who may even be new to open source or may not contribute directly but have all the benefits that are coming to it?”

In addition to being simple, the adoption of the new technology must be fast, since faster is considered cheaper and safer, according to Nelson. Also, companies do not want to be exposed to risk when changing something, so the primary goal is mitigating risk.

“So it’s kind of that modality of moving from a simplified model or … manufacturing model of software to a much more organic, much more permissive, much more being able to learn with an ecosystems model,” Nelson explained.

The flexibility of SUSE solutions is essential to accommodate different technologies that are already in use or that businesses want to try, according to Di Giacomo. That is why SUSE supports, for example, different types of hypervisors, OS and Kubernetes.

“For us, it’s very important when we bring SUSE to our customers that it can be combined with what they have, what they want, even if it’s from the so-called competition,” Di Giacomo concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the SUSECON Digital event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for SUSECON Digital. Neither SUSE, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE