As an open-source software company, SUSE has a community spirit rooted in its culture — and this involves developers, partners and customers. To further strengthen this ecosystem, SUSE has begun a soft rollout of its SUSEOne Partner Program, which will officially launch later this year.

This initiative is part of SUSE’s overall strategy to work with partners around the world to offer more complete solutions to customers. The company also wants to help its partners effectively guide their customers through the digital transformation in an open-source ecosystem.

“We’re releasing or unfolding slowly our SUSEOne Partner Program,” said Rachel Cassidy (pictured), senior vice president global channel and cloud at SUSE. “I think, historically, we had some different programs that address certain go-to-market routes … and we’re pulling that all together so we have this larger, all-encompassing offering.”

Cassidy spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the SUSECON Digital event. They discussed details of the new Partner Program, how to enable customers’ digital transformation, the celebration of SUSE being fully independent for a year, and responsibilities of the new SUSE channel and cloud team. (* Disclosure below.)

New portal and learning system make work easier

As part of its new Partner Program, SUSE presented a brand new partner portal to make its system easier to use. Soon, the company will make available an updated learning management system.

“So you’ll have easier and more access to different types of training to support the different roles as you build out your channel and cloud strategy within your organization — and all of the supporting services and solutions that support that as well,” Cassidy said.

Another change in the partner program, which will occur later this year, is an update in partner categorization. The new focus will be on partner specialization.

“Are you a seller of a solution? Are you a builder? So, you’re building integrated solutions that other partners in the downstream channel can sell? Are you a managed service provider or services provider or CSP?” Cassidy asked. “We’ll have those different areas of specialization. But then our partners can opt into one or more and make their business more impactful to their customers. And we’ll support them along that journey.”

SUSE’s idea is to have more impact on customers’ businesses, make offers more strategic, and effectively leverage relationships across the full partner ecosystem, Cassidy explained.

“It’s not just a SUSE-specific solution … we’re looking at: What are the use cases that our customers are trying to solve? And how do we put the different parts and pieces of the ecosystem together to help them get to that next state of success?” she stated. “Then we can package, bundle, support and enable our partner ecosystem to support customers on as well.”

SUSE is also evolving in the current enterprise ecosystem by collaborating and integrating with its developer community to offer application-oriented solutions that include edge technology and artificial intelligence.

“On top of that, I think the other compelling factor that we have to offer is through source initiative,” Cassidy said. “Now with COVID-19, it is a catalyst for innovation. And we are all about true open-source opportunities and offerings. And that’s what we’re also enabling for our partner ecosystem and our end customers … so that they can also be successful.”

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