SUSE supporting MSPs with cloud-native solutions

Leveraging open-source technology could be effective in meeting productivity challenges in Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ), while also giving channel partners an opportunity to modernise their offerings and adapt to the evolving cloud-native landscape.

In an interview with ARN, SUSE A/NZ general manager Ben Henshall said organisations in the region are looking at ways to drive productivity.

“You either do that by increasing your top line, which is your revenue, and/or improving the way you do that work, getting more output per input of cost,” he said. “From an IT point of view, the digital transformation and digitisation of things continues and is a key strategic enabler for organisations to do that.

Henshall added however that this hasn’t delivered the level of productivity in region that is being seen at the macro level. As such, organisations need to leverage more out of their digital infrastructure and applications and their digitisation “to get more bang for buck”.

Managing compute demands

“Generative AI [artificial intelligence] ; … the next frontier needs a lot of infrastructure and compute and that’s expensive,” he said. “It needs to be stable, secure and highly efficient infrastructure to make those large language models on-premises work well.

SUSE partner HPE has developed a mechanism under GreenLake, its edge-to-cloud platform, to address cloud modernisation, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud solutions to address these issues.

“This mechanism lowers the barriers to cost and onboarding, offers a great commercial model and manages a lot of the complexities involved,” said Henshall. “Additionally, it ensures high security and resilience.”

HPE South Pacific vice president and managing director Chris Weber recognises that software-as-a-service (SaaS) “deployments in hyperscalers are great”, while platform-as-a-service (PaaS) “offerings are often ideal as well”.

However, many workloads perform far better on-premises, particularly latency-tolerant applications such as virtual desktop infrastructure and databases, and as such could lead to problems.

“There are also specific use cases in industries with large edge deployments, such as ports,” Weber said. “In such environments, if one of those containers crash, [it could] lead to significant problems.”

With the world moving towards more hybrid cloud models, customers are feeling the real cost pressures.

“Part of why they went down that path a few years ago was because the tools and capabilities weren’t as available for on-premises deployments,” Weber said.

Now these tools are widely available now and the ease of managing on-premises deployments has greatly improved.

“With a single pane of glass to manage multi-cloud environments, we’ve been doing this for five years and the technology has just evolved,” Weber said.

He believes today it’s possible to manage both on-premises and off-premises environments with a unified view.

“The ability to port applications across both is now available,” Weber added. “The market has caught up to the reality that applications can live in any location and the focus is now on finding the right mix.

“We’re seeing a mass rebalancing, or as we call it, right rebalancing, where customers are evaluating their existing deployments in hyperscalers.”

Modernising through apps

As this shift takes place, SUSE partner Adfinis highlights a critical challenge with the need for modernisation of applications that customers want to migrate.

The partner’s IT director, David Grolimund, told ARN this isn’t just about moving the classic Linux workloads anymore but is more about a cloud-native approach.

“Customers need to modernise in order to adapt and that’s not an easy process,” he said. “It’s quite complex, especially if you’ve been working in the more traditional spaces for a long time.

“It takes time, expertise and specialised skills to get there.”

In response to these challenges, SUSE launched its Cloud Elevate Program to equip managed service providers (MSP) with the ability to tackle productivity challenges by offering tools and infrastructure needs.

The program falls under the SUSE One Partner Program and provides MSPs with the opportunity to sell the open-source vendor’s SaaS suite of enterprise container management open-source solutions via AWS Marketplace.

Through the Marketplace, MSPs will have access to a range of SUSE Cloud and Rancher SaaS solutions, including SUSE Cloud Observability, SUSE Application Collection and, coming soon, SUSE Rancher Hosted.