Enterprise solutions companies often expand by broadening their scope of capabilities.

For the German-based, open-source software company SUSE Group, that expansion was turbocharged by its acquisition of Rancher Labs in 2020, in addition to its HPE platform integration.

“Post-acquisition, one of my internal roles was to bring the two halves of the house together, where you had a cloud-native side in the form of Rancher, with innovative products like K3s for example,” said Keith Basil (pictured), general manager of the Edge Business Unit at SUSE. “Then you had really strong enterprise roots around compliance and security, secure supply chain with the enterprise-grade Linux through SUSE’s in-house SLE Micro Linux version.”

Basil spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and John Furrier at last year’s HPE Discover event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed SUSE’s K8s-focused Linux solutions and how they play into HPE’s larger partner ecosystem. (* Disclosure below.)

Synergy in motion

The way SUSE’s technology stack is set up, Kubernetes directives manage all the way down to the operating system, according to Basil. This has proved a winning strategy with the company’s customers.

The consumption models available to customers varies. While a managed services flavor is something the company would welcome subsequently from its service provider ecosystem, many of its customers prefer a more autonomous deployment.

“We have customers who are very sophisticated and want to do the whole thing themselves,” Basil explained. “They stand up Rancher at a centralized cloud location like HPE GreenLake for example — which is why this is very relevant. And then that control plane, if you will, manages thousands of downstream clusters that are running K3s at these edge locations. So that’s what the complete stack looks like.”

Through the added Linux capability, companies have immense scale on the OS, kernel and container levels and can create new value avenues from there, Basil concluded.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Discover event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for HPE Discover. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE