The Key to Unlocking True Digital Sovereignty with SUSE’s Andreas Prins

Hey, everyone. Welcome back here to Techstrong tv. I'm so excited to have my next guest on, you know, we were talking for way too long in the green room before we got on, but the first time I, I interviewed my friend Andreas Prince.

It was at a, I, I'm not even sure if it was a DevOps world or a Jenkins world still, but it was in nice France way before COVID. Good times. And, uh, you know, we've been talking pretty regularly ever since then.

So let me introduce you if you don't know, to my friend, and Andreas, and Andreas is the head of Sovereign Solutions at SUSE now, but, and Andreas is, oh man, he's had a storied career. And Andreas welcome. Thank You.

Thank you for coming on. You know, I, I hope I didn't embarrass you, but give people a sense of your journey. Yeah.

So our journey, right? Started indeed in nice, I do think it was the first year they left Jenkins World and called it DevOps world, right? They were really trying to bridge, uh, but I started very much in, um, in actually in digital transformation.

So helping organizations to pivot to more agile, fast pace ways of working. Did a lot of CICD automation, release automation type of companies. Uh, and then the last startup was all about observability.

And that was acquired tech state by Susan. And then I joined the bigger family, which is really, really interesting, uh, because all of a sudden there's much more power, right? Than rather having a single product you all of a sudden, uh, can influence platform p polio.

Mm-hmm. Um, so I'm now global Head Sovereign solutions and building actually our proposition around sovereignty, taking our products to markets, finding new partnerships, and, uh, yeah, really helping out Europe, middle East, Africa to become more sovereign and more autonomous, if you like, from a IT perspective. Yep.

Thanks for that, Andreas. And, and congratulations to you on this role. I, I couldn't think of a better person for it.

You know, Andreas, the whole idea of, uh, it sovereign, uh, sovereignty, data sovereignty, cloud sovereignty is really come to the forefront over the last year or two. We are living in, you know, I wasn't alive then, but in the, in the lead up to World War I, and let's hope, uh, this isn't a lead up to another war. But in the lead up to a World War I, we saw sort of old empires dying out, new nations, emerging new alliances, new new ways of doing business, you know, because there was a bit of an industrial revolution going on there too.

You know, the Austria-Hungary empire, the Ottoman Empire, they were breaking up countries like Italy and Germany, you know, were new, new countries back then as modern countries. We, we look around today and we see a little, not exactly that, but we see similar kinds of things the EU arising as, as a, as a power in this multipolar world, right? It's not just the two superpowers that you and I grew up in the world of, um, technology is just changing our lives and, and the promise of AI and what it can bring.

At the same time, we're also seeing, we're seeing a lot more violence. We're seeing authoritarianism, we're seeing, you know, uh, different factions fighting for freedom, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of information. It really is a pivotal moment, I think, in history.

I, when we look back at 2025, yeah, in many ways, 2025 is gonna be the first year of this new century. I think for the first 24 years we were still living in a 20th century world. Yeah, It's been changing, but now clearly we're not in the 20th century anymore.

We're in the 21st century. And sovereignty is, is part of that. How do you think, how do you feel about that?

Well, I, couple, couple reflections on that. So, one of them, right, is I do think the first 25 years has helped us to accelerate when it comes down to an innovation perspective, right? So all the cloud native, uh, application landscape, et cetera, right?

Help us now to run AI workloads in a very controlled way, right? So the first few years have been needed to accelerate and innovate where we are right now. So there's definitely a connection.

But I do think we're also entering a very interesting phase, because you could argue the entire sovereignty thinking from an innovation perspective is a bad thing, right? Because Europe is a kind of closing Middle East Africa, right? So we're making the world smaller because all of us are focusing on our own geographical, jurisdictional region, and sometimes even down to a country.

And when you think about innovation, right, where you need muscles to really accelerate and experiment and whatever, I do think sovereignty as such might be a bad thing when we look back. However, I do think where it's a really good thing, and that's also what we see happening at our customers is companies, executives, leaders, they all of a sudden, well wake up, if you like, to understand their dependencies, their dependencies on hyperscalers, their dependencies on the chips. They use their dependencies on the entire software supply chain.

And I do think that awareness is a really good one, because hey, you need to determine your levels of business resilience. And it obviously contributes big time to that. So the positive side in my mind of the entire sovereignty movement is that we see a reassessment of risk, um, right?

No longer is a data center, below C level, um, a threat, but it's an opportunity compared to an American hyperscaler. For some companies, they were in the past, we would've made a different choice. Um, so bottom line, right?

I do think it's just the next transformation that we'll go through in our thinking, and then also followed by our IT choices and implementation in, uh, in engineering. I love it, and I don't disagree with you at all here. Um, it, some of it makes me sad because I do think, you know, as, as a, not even a child of the internet, I was already an adult when the internet, you know, went public, went commercial, but as, as someone who spent their career in the internet, let's say, um, I love the i the global nature of it Yeah.

That we're all one, one community. Yeah. And, and this sort of thing, you know, building walls, I always like tearing down walls.

Yeah. But Yeah, You know, this, this, this is the world we find ourselves in. Yeah.

Andreas suse has a, an aggressive sovereign solution product line, if you will, or vision, right? It transcends just Linux or rancher, Kubernetes or SUSE software. It, it goes to the heart of the data center and support sovereign in every sense of the word.

Yeah. Expand on that for us, if you don't mind. Well, If you, if you think about it, right?

That the world becomes or gets smaller, right? Or people start to look at their, at their, uh, continents, if you like. Um, then the question is, what is still helping you to cross, uh, to, to, to, to step aside, right?

Cloud Act or Cyber Resilience Act here in Europe. And then I do think there are only a very few elements that are still helping us to build software that can be used across the world. And that's open source, right?

So that direct effect of using open source is, it gives you the freedom, right? To build it yourself, to create it yourself, to enhance it, and to, to, to use that to your own, um, needs. And I, what we see happening here at, at SUSE is open source was obviously always our top, our top lever.

Uh, but today, fascinating enough, all of a sudden, the market is also requesting a proprietary software, right? Where they don't, or are not able to assess the risk is no longer suitable for governments, uh, for public sector, for healthcare, for mission critical, um, industries. So the fact that suse, right, as a firm believer of open source has that at the core of their DNA while is really beneficial for us.

So what we're doing is we're not only bringing our existing products to the market, but we're also rethinking is, hey, but what does it mean that we have features like, for example, reproducible builds, right? That you can build anywhere across the world in any data center. You still get the same version of the software out.

What does that mean from a sovereignty perspective? Um, and we see and start to learn and have learned in recent months that we have a lot of diamonds in our portfolio that are perfectly suitable and powerful for a, for a sovereign solution. Um, and then we start announcing that with sovereign support, eh, as an example where we say, Hey, for Europe, if you want to use open source, but you still want to get enterprise support, we have a solution for you as well, which is sovereign premium support.

So that's really what we have. And then we're adding on top new features, new services, uh, new partnerships to, um, to expand. We're gonna, we're gonna dive into that in a moment.

I, I think there's a, there's an interesting or an ironic kind of piece to this, which is at the same time, as you say, we're making smaller, we're putting up these walls, we're also relying on open source, which is the ultimate wall buster, right? The ultimate uniter. It unites us all.

We all can, everybody can use open source. We're using open source to build this sovereign, uh, offering. And, and that, you know, there's a, there's like a, I forgot, not a dichotomy, but there's a, an interesting paradox there.

We're using open to do sovereign get Closed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Make Close.

Well, and I, I would re I would not use the word closed, I would say to gain control, right? Because ultimately it's about control, right? Knowing what is the software used, what are the packages in there, uh, what are the libraries being used, the vulnerabilities, the license types, right?

And open Source helps you to assess that very quickly and very clearly. Absolutely. Andreas Souse recently announced a partnership and alliance with evoc.

So I don't know if everyone in our audience is familiar with EVOC and certainly with this recent announcement, why, if you don't mind, give us a little evoc background. Yeah, definitely. So EVOC is a brand new, um, M-S-P-C-S-P really focused on helping governments, public sector, mission critical companies in Europe to increase the level of sovereignty by providing an infrastructure, a modern AI platform that is entirely European.

And when we speak about entirely European, the data centers, uh, the personnel, the type of support that is delivered, um, and that's then bundled with lots of open source software that they can support or are supported by companies like suse to build a stack on top where, um, companies can actually make use of, so imagine, right. Governments, um, that say, Hey, I wanna decrease my dependencies for my crown jewels, my mission critical applications on an hyperscaler, not for all workloads, but for a few, are there alternatives in Europe, right? Where I can put skill, um, and, and, and put my workloads on.

And that's actually what EVOC is doing. So they have data centers across Europe. Uh, they're continuously expanding, um, but they're really, really sovereign.

So they're founded pretty recently, only a few years ago. So they start building it with sovereignty in mind and with a modern approach in mind. And, um, yeah, that's what goes really well together with, uh, with suse, if you like.

I love it. Um, talk more about the strategic alliance. Yeah.

So imagine, right, a customer who would pick a company like SUSE to say, Hey, I would like to have a, a full stack from a software perspective, Linux virtualization, uh, cloud native rancher management on top, um, without sovereign infrastructure, right? You are as sovereign as the infrastructure. You run it on, on the EVOC side, right?

They could argue saying, Hey, we have a very sovereign infrastructure, but if, uh, the sovereign on top is in sovereign, you're still a sovereign as the sovereign that runs there. And that's really what we would like to achieve and have achieved by merging the two, using the infrastructure from frock, and then the software from SUSE on top, the Linux layer, the cloud native layer is really enabling customers to pick an entire sovereign stack and start migrating workloads, uh, head containers or virtual machines towards that stack. And that's then combined, and that's also the strategic element here with sovereign support from both parties.

And because that truly makes the solution, uh, sovereign. So it's infra software and service from both parties combined, which is our sovereign offering that we've brought to the market to get with avo. We love it.

Now, look, I get that a lot of this is aimed primarily at Europe, but you mentioned the Middle East and Africa. Yeah. Um, are there plans for data centers in the Middle East and Africa, people based there, or will they use Europe sovereignty, if you will?

Well, so, um, so a couple, couple very interesting moves going on. So Europe is definitely a trusted body place, country, right? So when software comes from there, it's very often what we see happening, accepted, for example, in Africa as well, right?

So software created here, um, is very useful when it's open source in the other two regions, middle East, Africa, but also countries like Japan, right? So that's, that's why it's really, really global. Now, from a data send perspective, right?

There's another challenge you need to solve, and that is what is your vision or where your data from a jurisdictional, um, perspective needs to be? And what we see happening is that data centers in Europe, right, are not sufficient to host, for example, a South African bank or, uh, whatever bank or insurance company that is out there. So they still pick, um, local data providers and the same to Middle East, right?

Middle East is not a single region, right? There are multiple countries with all their own rules and their own philosophy when it comes down to where the data needs to reside. So although, right, our ever partnership is absolutely the first one, right?

That, that tick all the boxes from a sovereignty perspective, obviously, right? We have partnerships across the world when it comes down to, uh, to data centers. But what we want to do is really help them to increase the levels of sovereignty, um, as such, right?

By, by software and by support that we could, uh, that we could deliver. Yeah. Absolutely.

And also an important element. A lot of people think, right, that it's that sovereignty is, is black and white. So they say, yeah, we now need to leave, all of us need to leave the hyperscaler and move to a party like Evro or whatever data center here in Europe.

And I do think that's a wrong philosophy. You first need to assess what are the most important crown jewels or the mission critical applications. These are the ones you need to consider and probably still conclude, right?

That you can run them on an, on an American hyperscaler because your business simply runs and in the US and runs in Europe, right? So you de-risk Europe, but there's, there's no reason for doing that. Um, so governments, for example, they can take a bit more an aggressive approach, um, and they're moving, right?

Or they're at least decoupling their hard dependencies to the, to the hyperscalers. But I do think people really shouldn't see it as a black and white. Uh, but really as a nuanced approach, some ordinary workloads, well let them easily scale up and down at an hyperscaler, right?

Versus some mission critical ones that you would like to protect with data and whatever you could run on a European data center. And I do think we're quickly losing that balance. Um, but it's a very important one to, uh, to add to the, to the conversation.

I, I agree. A lot of it is about data, right? Yeah.

And, and because that's really, now, yeah, the, the question may become, if that data ran on this application and this application's not in a sovereign, uh, uh, stack, do I have stickiness to go get that data? 'cause it was in that, you know, it ran on this application, and that's where bifurcating data from, from the app really, I think will, will come in. You know, there's something else I want to state on here.

For those of you watching this, this isn't about EU versus us or US versus China, or, or, you know, just nation states like that. Even here in the US and Andreas, you know, we have, we have some states where certain medical procedures are illegal, and in other states they're legal and doctors can prescribe medications and so forth that they may not be able to prescribe in a different state. Yeah.

And so some states in the US are looking to have sovereign data that Yeah. Is not subject to the, the, the prying or discovery by a different state. Yeah.

And those are states within the US even. Yeah. So, you know, this is kind of a worldwide trend that we're seeing where people are saying, Hey, I want to keep my data private.

Yeah. Well, I, I, I do think for the US it's certainly the data conversation. Um, right?

So when we have conversations on ai, the data security, um, right, is a very, very old topic. So we barely in the US speak about digital sovereignty, but we speak a lot about data security. So the data perspective is an important one.

If you go to, uh, Africa, they speak much more about autonomy. If you come to a few European countries, they would speak about business resilience, right? So all different angles, autonomy, resilience, sovereignty, data security, that articulate ownership and control of that.

What is most precious to you as a company, right? Because ultimately, why do you wanna protect the data? Well, because right.

You run your, your company on it. Uh, one fun fact, I do think not a lot of people know, uh, but the US was the first and foremost country that introduced sovereignty. Um, yes.

Right? If you think about FedRAMP for the military, for the cloud, Cloud, cloud FedRAMP, yep. Um, SUSE started, or Rancher started rancher government services, which is an entirely separate legal entity disconnected from Suzu, or owned, owned by suse, but Right.

We don't know what's happening there. Um, that is, that is sovereignty to the next extreme level. Um, so to us as a company, it's, it's very known.

How will you bring that to the most extreme? And funny enough, that started in, in the us. So, um, yeah.

Yeah. It's ironic, isn't it? It is Funny stuff.

Hey, and Andrea, it's for people out here, maybe they're in Europe watching this or wherever they are, how can they get more information? How could they get started? Well, when it comes down to, um, understanding, uh, digital sovereignty, um, right, there's, there's a lot to do when you're in Europe and you want to inform yourself on where do I need to look at when it comes down to sovereignty?

The EU published only a six page document. It's the Cloud sovereignty framework. It's amazing to, to read and to, it gives a really broad perspective.

So that's definitely recommended to familiarize yourself with that concept, obviously. Right? com/digital sovereignty, uh, is a lot of information to find on products, on services, how suse can help you out getting more sovereign, uh, and understanding what needs to happen in this transition.

I love it. Um, and Andreas, best of luck in this new, uh, role. I hope to see you.

Well, we're gonna hopefully be at Scon in Prague Oh. Meet in Prague in March. Uh, or excuse me, that's in April, in March.

CubeCon is in Amsterdam. I unfortunately won't be at Q Con. I'm gonna be at the RSA conference in San Francisco that week.

But Mike Ard on our, and our team hopefully will be there. Nice. So, we'll, we'll, we'll talk more about that then.

Um, but look, don't be a stranger. Come on here and keep us posted on this. I, I think this whole it sovereignty thing is, is a subject that we're gonna really see come into its own next year.

Yep. Yep. And there's a lot in the pipeline here at suse.

So, uh, stay tuned. We'll definitely come back. I love it.

Andreas Prince Head Sovereign Solutions at SUSE here on text on tv. We're gonna take a break. We'll be right back.