Beyond Data Residency: SUSE’s Andreas Prins on the True Meaning of Digital Sovereignty

Hey everyone, we're back here continuing. Well, it's day one, though it's really day two of SUSECON coverage. My next guest, well, I've been interviewing him four years now, maybe five.

Before SUSE. Eight years. Eight years.

Nice. Jenkins Worlds. You're making me feel old.

You were at Nice? I was at Nice. That was- Jenkins Worlds.

Absolutely. That was a good... What a good- It was a good time.

That was a nice conference. Yes. He needs no introduction if you've been following SUSE or a lot of the digital sovereignty activity that we've been covering on Techstrong, but he's my friend, Andreas Printz.

So Andreas, you're now what? GM of something? Global head.

Global head. Yeah. All right, so GH.

Yeah, exactly. You're getting there towards that. Well, and I would argue the difference is I'm not managing a big unit or a big department or a product family.

I'm much more focused on the go-to market strategy role. Absolutely. So.

And I will tell you on a personal note, I've seen the career move up, and it's a great thing, and congratulations. So look, I've spent the last two days here talking with people. Just before you came on, we had Mike and Mitchell here, and we spent a lot of time talking about luck is...

" And, there's another saying that kind of luck is a result of preparation. SUSE finds itself at a very interesting- Absolutely ... time right now.

A lot of the preparation, a lot of the plans, a lot of the hard work- Yeah ... that you guys have put in over the last couple years, has set you at this moment in time where we see the convergence of AI, of geopolitical- Yeah ... reasons to maybe think about sovereignty.

Of the move to open architecture, open infrastructure, open source. These things are all coming together. At the same time, a company comes along and buys VMware and decides to blow the pricing model and what you get for your money out of the water.

So now all of a sudden, an industry that for 20 years built their hypervisor, their virtualization- Yep ... on a particular platform, has reason to reassess. " All of these things come together at this moment in time, and SUSE is sitting here- Absolutely ...

with the package to do it. Give me your thoughts on that to start. Yeah.

Well, I do think right there is lots of years of hard work when it comes down to the open source foundation. Now you could argue there's always been a humongous market for open source. Yes.

The world runs on open source, right? Every stack is open source, but there's never been, for a majority of the people, the acknowledgement that open source is not only a foundation, but it's also your ticket into a more resilient and sovereign destination in your future. And what we've seen happening in the last one and a half years, people all of a sudden realize that a nice side effect, right, of open source is the fact that you can take it over yourself- Right ...

inspect it yourself, audit it yourself, when needed and where needed. So that's one. That's, right, a big foundation.

Then you mentioned the hard work in recent years, right? In recent years, we've really let the portfolio of distinct functionality come together, right? So really harmonize, but not only, right, do the same label, same language, but we've also start to launch edge capabilities, AI capabilities, that are a mixture of the technology that we have in the box.

So that's the second transformation that's happening. And then I would argue the third one is we start to realize, I would argue, well, already for a long time, that the ecosystem is important, but when it comes down to sovereignty, I do think the ecosystem is even more important. Because you can have nice technology, right?

And push a little bit from Red Hat to SUSE Linux or from VMware to SUSE Virtualization, but that's not the challenge. The challenge is not to migrate. There's much more going on, right?

That companies need to do, and our ecosystem is absolutely crucial from that perspective to make the change happen. But again, that's another place where you guys have really done the legwork, the partnerships- Yeah ... the ecosystem- Yeah ...

as you called it. There were a bunch of announcements today, NVIDIA. Of course, I interviewed the guy from Dell.

Two people from Dell, actually. It's a strong relationship, and that transcends the sovereignty issue and everything else. You really, this is the moment- Yeah ...

right? Yeah. That you got to seize the moment.

Yeah. Carpe diem. Yeah.

Andreas, yesterday, day zero as we call it- Yeah ... you hosted the Sovereignty Summit. Yeah.

And you kicked off the keynote there, and it's amazing how much... Not amazing, but I found it very interesting, how much of the sovereignty discussion revolved around migration transformation. Yep.

Because again, it goes back to what I said before. Look, as long as my pricing's going up by 30%, I might as well look- For alternatives ... for alternatives.

Yeah. Yep. And if I want alternatives- Yeah ...

maybe I want something that- Yeah ... someone can't pull the rug out from under me. Yeah.

Whether it's another government, or a political entity- Yeah ... or a software provider, or an infrastructure provider, I want toI want to have more control. Yeah.

I want to have more freedom of choice. Yeah. However, what starts as a migration usually turns into a transformation.

Yeah. And you have thoughts on that- Yeah ... I'd love to hear.

Absolutely. So a portion of my keynote yesterday was about the four changes that are happening, right? And when it comes down to sovereignty, many people start, some stop, with data residency, right?

Can I move the data to the location that I need, right? And it's an important aspect, right? Absolutely.

Who owns, where does it live, who has access to the data, whatever. Super important. But if it stops there, you get into trouble.

So the next element that we see happening is what about your architecture, right? Who owns the portions of the stack, right? From the hardware to the data center, your hosting provider, et cetera.

But also, right, how portable are your workloads from an architecture perspective? Imagine a monolith versus a microservice, right? How easy is it to swap components, et cetera?

So if you want to become more portable, which is important from a resilience perspective, how does your architecture look like? I would still say that's still a fairly technical element of the transformation, right? You swap technology, one for the other.

Then there are two very interesting aspects that a lot of people don't oversee. That's contracts and the human. So the contracts, right, I do think we are reaching a state where, for example, a public sector or a mission critical infrastructure provider could negotiate about the terms, right, and take more ownership.

Because sometimes there's no open source alternative, right? Or it doesn't fit. But then, do you have control over your contract?

Do you know exactly, right, when you can leave or whatever? So that's the contract aspect. A lot of procurement, risk type of related work.

And then the final piece I do think is really interesting, and that's why you can speak from migration to transformation, is the human side of the house. If you've infrastructure engineers that are trained and educated for years in VMware or in managing Linux because it's Red Hat in a particular way, right, you need to have the human that is able to move to a new technology. And secondly, the human aspect with the rise of AI coming into your workforce, into the human side as well.

What do you want to educate, and how are people allowed to use it? So the point I was making in my keynote, if you have these transformations, data, architecture, contracts, and the human, how do you actually lead that as a transformation? And I personally do believe, I've been a lean black belt coach helping organizations to change, and I did DevOps, you know that.

I've seen these two major waves going on in our field, and I sense that sovereignty and the thinking of what is the software and the architecture we pick and how we drive that is yet another transformation that we're looking at and might require transformational coaches, change agents, and whatever to make it happen. So I think modern IT is complex enough that if you want to truly do a transformation, and I don't think you could do just a migration anymore. No, I agree.

Every migration's a transformation. I agree. But transformations, you don't want the patient to die on the table because it can mean the death of your company.

Yeah. You must have your coaches. You must have best practices.

Absolutely. You must have your guardrails in it. Yeah.

There's not a doubt in my mind that that's the way it goes. Yeah. And that's a great business to get into.

Yeah. Someone will probably be writing AI models around it and everything else to help people. Yeah.

So to elaborate further on that, right, so what is our vision now? Because you can argue, hey, it's a transformation. " Because there's technology, right?

But how do you drive the digital transformation of the customer? And we actually pretty quickly realized there are two major components. One is where do you host, right?

So the MSPs, right, the hosting. And the other one is who drives the transformation? From a knowledge perspective, who takes operational control?

And we realized we also need global system integrators to push that change forward. So we've announced this morning a new initiative, which we call the Sovereignty Partner Specialization, under our regular partner program, to really go to market together, and to your point, come with a reference implementation, come with migration paths, right? Come with examples of how would you approach it.

How do you slice the elephant, right? Yeah. To get to the finish line.

One spoon at a time. Yeah. But I want to bring up something else.

So I did a webinar with Margaret a couple weeks ago now. Forgive me, I'm jet lagged, but it was probably two weeks ago. And then I did a TV interview with her last week.

And we talked about this shaping your resilient future. Yeah. Now I'm a security person by trade.

Resiliency to me is very much a security thing, right? It's not if I get breached, it's when I get breached. How do I...

Response. Yeah. Right.

You can knock me down- Come back ... but how do I stand back up? Yeah.

But I've come to realize since I'm here and in talking to Margaret recently, that resiliency is yet another form of sovereignty here. Yeah. Go into that a little bit.

Yeah. Warm heartedly agree there. So we did a large research across the globe, Japan, India, United States, Germany, and France.

And one of the interesting elements is the language differs a lot, right? So we've articulated as a kind of the umbrella, we call it business resilience. Yep.

Right? Because we very often look at the IT, but ultimately it's about- It's about the business ... can the business bounce back- Right ...

right to a normal new state, right? There's a supply chain attack. How long does it take?

There's a vulnerability discovered. How quickly do you understand, right, which systems are vulnerable or which data has been leaking? Resilience.

AI, right? I've heard a statement last few days, shadow AI is the new shadow IT. It is.

I see it happening, right? People are using ChatGPT because the company doesn't provide anything. So what we see as aUmbrella is business resilience.

Underneath we see digital sovereignty, data security. Japan very much speaks about autonomy, right? So there are different words, but ultimately it all goes back to how much resiliency do you have in your business, right?

And then obviously we're in IT, right? So how does the IT stack live up to that? I love it.

Andreas, we're going to wrap up. I'm probably not going to have a chance to interview you again before Thursday. One thing you want people to leave here with, what would it be?

Well, that's interesting. Good question on the spot. So I do think what is interesting is to realize that you can do a lot of transformation without too much effort, right?

So we've launched what we call migration strategies. So on the website articulated 15 ways of changing. And I do think as executives, we should realize, okay, but what are easy changes?

An example, imagine you have a development team pulling container images from Docker Hub, Artifactory, GitHub, whatever, right? Random repositories. How do you control that?

Or is there a better way to pull them from a curated list, right? So you only need to point your CI/CD pipelines to another source, and there you go. And there are many more of these low-hanging transformations that we at SUSE believe in, we can easily change.

Red Hat Linux, stay on Red Hat Linux, but get support from a European support engineer, right? Without changing a single line of code, only a contract, you become more sovereign. And then there are more complex transformations as well.

But start low hanging. The second tip I would say is identify where the real risk is. Because not every application needs to leave the hyperscaler, right?

So make a conscious decision and find a very balanced approach there. Agreed. Hey, man.

Thanks so much. It's a pleasure seeing you. I don't know, maybe KubeCon, Salt Lake City?

Who knows? It'd be nice. Andreas Prins, not general manager.

Global head of sovereign solutions. Global head of sovereign solutions. I'm going to talk to them about that here at SUSECON.

Actually, that's going to wrap up our day one coverage. We'll be back tomorrow early with day two. We've got a packed lineup.

I think we've got about 12 interviews tomorrow, so stay tuned for that. But until then, thanks for joining us. Hey, if you haven't signed up, we have our daily SUSECON newsletter in your mailbox early in the morning with our coverage, sessions to watch, keynote messaging, videos, everything else.

So check that out. com/susecon-signup. Until tomorrow, I'm Alan Schimmel.

We're out.