Breaking The Vendor Lock-In: The Great Virtualization Migration and Sovereign AI

Hey everyone. Welcome back here to our day one coverage at SUSECON in Lisbon. It's been a great day.

Prague. It's Prague. Did I say Lisbon?

Yeah, you did, just because of me. He lives in Lisbon. All right.

That's why we're not live. See? Fool me again.

He wants to go there. No. Hey everyone.

Welcome back here to our day one coverage of SUSECON. We are in Prague. That's right, Prague.

It's been a heck of a day. There's a real buzz going on. You can feel it.

We're out here in the lobby if you couldn't guess, but the whole lobby, the whole hotel's been taken over by SUSE. I think what they said are like 1,500 rooms, all but six are taken up by SUSE folks- ... or people attending the show here.

Let me introduce you to our next guest, though. His name's Frank Feldman. Frank is the CSO at SUSE.

That's correct. Frank, it's great to have you on. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you very much for having me. You know what? We're going to talk about a lot of stuff, but before we talk about that stuff, let's talk about you a little bit.

We were talking off camera, you've had an interesting career path. You've spent a lot of your time in Southeast Asia. Yep.

Various places in Europe as well. Yep. Give people a sense of your journey.

Sure. So my history's actually in the Java landscape, believe it or not. I was an enterprise developer for a long time, and that really got me into open source and those sorts of things.

" No kids and all that sort of thing, what do you do? Listen to that story. So I went to New Zealand and Australia, Singapore.

That was close to 18 years, 19 years. Wow. And then recently we got back to Europe, now in Lisbon.

Uh-huh. And yeah, joined SUSE a couple of years ago, together with a few other of my ex-colleagues. So yeah, that's a bit about me.

So how did you make the transition from Java engineer- Yep ... to CSO, right? Going to the business side.

I got really lucky, to be honest with you. In my career, I've always had a curiosity, number one, in what's going on in the role and in roles around me. And I've been lucky to have really good people around me that gave me an opportunity to try different jobs.

So from developer, I went to product manager. From product manager, I went to technical sales, technical sales leadership. I ran product marketing and actual field marketing.

So if you think about what makes a software vendor tick, I've almost done most of those roles, and not for short stints. It's two years, three years. So you really learn the ropes of it.

And all those things together, I think have really built up to this point where I can assess from a broader picture what this company really needs to be thinking about. How's the industry moving? I've seen a lot of trends in my career, too, so I don't get easily too persuaded to jump into something without having a good look at it.

It's been a bit of luck, but at the same time, as my wife says, luck comes to people who seize it. You know what? You know.

There was a baseball executive, Branch Rickey. I don't know if you ever heard of Branch Rickey. I played baseball, but that guy I don't know.

Okay. I played for 15 years. So Branch Rickey was the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Okay. He was the guy who brought Jackie Robinson- Yep ... into baseball.

Yep. Then I think he ran the Cardinals after the Dodgers, but he was really a hall of fame kind of guy. Yeah.

Not a baseball player, an exec. But he coined a phrase that I've used my whole career, which is, "You know what they say about luck. It's 80% perspiration- Yeah ...

and 20%-" Exactly ... " Exactly. Right?

And so luck does come to those who work for it. Right. And so- I agree ...

the fact that you're sitting here is probably testament to that. Yeah. I agree.

Totally agree. That's a good one. Remember that one.

Yeah. Anyway, Frank, I was a CS-- Before I came on this side of the camera, I was a startup guy. Yep.

Did four or five startups, venture backed. I was a corp dev, biz dev, CSO type, same kind of thing. I did marketing, I did sales, I did product.

I did everything. Yeah. Because that's what you do.

You're chief cook and bottle washers. But here at SUSE, and I've been following SUSE for years. It just feels like this is your moment.

Yeah. You know what I mean? Sometimes, again, you want to call it luck, call it luck.

No, I'm amazed. But things start, like the time. I see it as amplification.

Our message has been companies want, and not just companies, but in general, enterprises want to have choice- Yep ... in whether it's infrastructure or middleware or any tier of even large language models and those things, you need choice. That theme was something that just took off now like crazy because of partially the geopolitical situation- Yep ...

as well as some of, I would argue, the consolidation that we've seen- Yes ... in the IT industry. Some large companies have acquired large pieces of technologies and have started to bundle these things, maybe not necessarily in ways that customers ever asked for.

And so it's built up this pressure point for people to say, "I want to have options. " And so SUSE has been leaning in on that for the last three years, really hard. But I don't think it's luck in that sense.

It's a coincidence of an accelerating circumstance. And yeah, we will benefit from that, no doubt. Yeah.

" And we're like- Yeah ... " Yeah. It feels like that.

The buzz here is- It's also AI ... reflecting. Yeah.

Right? The AI which is enabling so much disruption. Because look, on a day where Tim Cook announces- I know, right?

I saw that, yeah ... he's stepping down in September. Or he's going to a chair position, right?

I think they said. I think that's where they send them. Park you?

Yeah. It's not a bad space to be put. That's good to me, yeah.

But, in many ways, Apple is the poster child for the walled garden. Yes. Right?

That closed system. And I don't know, look, there's always going to be some people who like that because they don't have to worry about- Yeah ... what choices to make.

They don't have to worry about the things the walled garden handles. Yeah. But I think, again, because of geopolitical, because of AI, because of the disruption that we're seeing, it's rippled through.

Yeah. People want choice. They want freedom.

Well, and I think people are learning also, right? Yeah. It's not like we make the same mistake three times.

Most of the time, after two- Usually not ... we would figure it out. Yeah.

So I think people are learning that, hey, technology, with all the layers that we now have, has created abstractions, and I should be able to leverage those abstractions- Absolutely ... to make shifts in these things, right? When this commercial consolidation takes place, even though those layers exist, if the number of players on the field that offer that disappear, you're still out of luck.

Yeah. Right? And so I think this is where SUSE is really in a strong position.

We are one of the players. We're independent. We're big enough to serve global.

" We're really good in that position for people, for Kubernetes to Linux to management. I joked about it in the morning, we want to give you a single pane of glass, not a single glass of pane. Right.

And it landed with people. There's some sense to that, yeah. But that is the reality, right?

That is. It is. Of what we're trying to do.

But the nice thing about SUSE is that open legacy says, "We're going to give you a single pane of glass- Single pane of glass. Got me going. A single pane of glass, but behind that glass, we're going to let you choose- Correct ...

what pieces. And they don't even have to be SUSE pieces. No.

They could be other pieces. No. If you don't mind, I want to pivot in and focus in, really, on the whole virtualization thing.

Right. Because I know that's something you spoke about today. Look, from the day Broadcom bought VMware, it's- Everyone was on alert.

Right. Yeah. In fact, we knew this was coming, and it's been coming.

" But I think what's happened is, people have gone beyond just the cost of the license- Mm-hmm ... and said, "Wait a second. " Yep.

Do I want to get out of that walled garden? Do I want to get out of a lock-in? Do I want to have more choices?

Is sovereignty important to me? Yep. All of these things are percolating.

Yep. So from where you sit, you talk to customers, you speak to partners, you speak to potential M&A partners. What do you see with that?

So, you're right. Pricing was the initial trigger for people to look around. I still think it's a major, major aspect as part of the assessment that people go through.

I think the Broadcom thing was a very significant moment, but it wasn't the only moment, right, that made people look at that. Moving away from a vSphere environment has operational challenges. As we know, people have spent decades stitching this deep into their day two operations and things like that.

Yeah. So you have to take that into account. But a big question is: Do I want to be treated by someone I trust to run my infrastructure in the way this is being communicated and deployed on me?

Those contract changes, the bundling aspects, license adjustments, seems like a very one-way street that's happening there. Yeah. " They don't even say the price point.

They want out of the relationship. Right. It's not just the money.

Yeah. And some of that gets negotiated back to the table. There's a deal to be made and that sort of thing.

But people, don't forget, you add to that the geopolitical scenario and we joked about it earlier. Yeah, an American vendor with some of the geopoliticals that are going on. One plus one is three right now in that sense, unfortunately.

I'm no fan of it either, because trust me- No ... the world is smaller and harder for me. It's not the world I grew up in.

No, exactly. Neither of us, right? Yeah.

But each market therefore becomes more isolated and makes it harder for us as a company to take a good product and sell in multiple places. Yeah. But that's the reality, right?

No, that is the world we live in. So, and I don't think it's unique- There's no doubt about that ... in that sense to VMware.

But, we did look at it and say, "Okay, we've had too many customers say you have a virtualization product. We like it. It allows us to do Kubernetes and containers.

" But the move itself is the hard part. Migration, right? That's where I was going next.

The number one thing. It's painful. That's what we focused on here, right?

Can AI help us with that migration? We asked. Yeah.

Sure. And it will. I do think eventually migrations will be made easier because agentic and AI will help.

Some of that stuff for sure. Absolutely. The conversion and all those sorts of things.

But a lot of people have their careers washed up on the rocks of a bad migration. Yep. What advice do you have as SUSE now?

Why is SUSE going to make a migration easier for me? So we did quite a bit of research on it before deciding on the Coriolis product from CloudBase. CloudBase has really got a long history in picking up workloads from a variety of platforms.

It's not just vSphere, just to be clear. They do this from Hyper-V to vSphere. They do it from vSphere to OpenStack.

They do it from a public cloud to vSphere or to SUSE Virt and so forth. So that was one of the things that really stood out to me. It gels with the choice theme that we have.

It gels with resilience. Now, obviously, as a vendor, I want, just like VMware, people to end up on my platform. SUSE Virtualization is the best one.

In case there's any doubt, it is the best one. Okay. However, if you still want something else, a product like Coriolis provides you with those flexibilities and- Choice ...

it's just a good marriage from that perspective, right? Absolutely. The second thing why Coriolis will help better than most tools, it's battle tested and it really does a good job at these continuous migrations.

So it takes small snapshots continuously of your source VM. Your users won't notice a difference. And while it's doing that, it's morphing the machine into the target platform.

I think that's one of the unique parts. You don't have to take it offline, then convert, bring it back on. IT guys can do it while they're running.

Now you may not want to do that for a super large SAP HANA system. That might not be the best choice. No.

But the majority of enterprise workloads, I think, can be picked up like that. Can move like that. I don't disagree with you at all.

That reduces that the migration is a big hurdle. It's not entirely a non-event, but very close to a non-event if you do this sort of stuff. I think another thing, we spoke about timing and luck and what's going on.

If you're going to go through a migration, it's also maybe the right time to look at a transformation. Absolutely. What I mean by that is, in today's world with what's available to me, I just don't want to move from one hypervisor to another.

Yeah. Maybe I want to go to a microservices architecture. Maybe I want to go to a- Yep ...

Kubernetes cloud native, a container-based model. Yep. And again, right place, right time, right?

SUSE has a great- Yep ... solution for that. Yeah.

SUSE Virtualization is built on KubeVirt, and so yeah, you get a Kubernetes control plane that will respect whether you have VMs or cloud native design that you want to deploy. If you want to chip away before you migrate, you could do that. You could also migrate and then start chipping away at converting these things while using the same platform.

I think it's a perfect marriage. We're not unique in that sense, right? KubeVirt is a very, I would argue, an industry standard- Yeah, but you do have Rancher.

You do. That's right. You have a- We bring them really simply together, right?

Absolutely. So. Last question.

If I'm an enterprise customer, and this all sounds great, what can you show me before I... You know what I mean? Let's date before we get married.

What kind of proof points, what can you give me to give me a good feeling about doing this? Well, we thought about that, and obviously seeing is believing- Right ... for most people in that sense.

So we worked this out with the guys from CloudBase and made sure that every customer of SUSE today can actually get their tool and try it out and see in anger. Pick the workload you want. It could be an easy one, it could be a difficult one, and just test it.

See if it does what we think it does. We've obviously tested it quite a bit. And then we're bundling the product inside of SUSE Virtualization.

So if you buy the product from us, the hypervisor platform, the management, you'll have Coriolis's product nicely tucked, integrated into that, making, again, it very easy for you to deploy it and start activating it. Services is another thing. Some customers just need more help, either strategizing, planning, and those sorts of things.

So we'll deliver those to customers if they want. Excellent. Depending on fast or slow, we got your back, basically.

All right. Last question. If we're at SUSE 2027, I don't know where that's going to be, but SUSEcon 2027.

Probably in the US, I think. Back to the US. I think they have to try to- They have to go back ...

on off set, I think. I kind of like coming to Europe for these, I'll be honest with you. But- Yeah ...

wherever, we'll be there. What do you think the big story is there next year around this? I think there'll be a lot more AI, and there'll be a lot more sovereign AI, not specific to Europe, because sovereign today is sort of this European thing, but it's all about- It is and it isn't.

Yeah. Because here in the US, that's not the sovereign we're looking at. Our sovereign is how do we keep our friends in Asia, or so-called friends.

Well, but to be fair, we're a European company, and we've had a US business for a very long time. Absolutely. And the US has had strict rules on how a foreign company can be a supplier to the United States.

I think that's the first definition or implementation of a sovereign policy. Yeah. We just didn't call it that.

Right. So there's nothing new really about it. It's just really front and center now because of the world situation that we're in.

So I think next phase in that will be, okay, if AI is going to help everyone to create digital twins in some shape or form, that might even be better than the physical twins. Right. Am I still in charge of the digital twin or not?

And that sovereignty in AI, that will be a big theme I suspect. I think it is. Coders already experienced this, right?

" Right. That topic I think is going to really come up. Can't live with it, can't live without it.

Yeah, exactly. I get it. Completely aligned.

Hey, Frank Feldman, CSO here at SUSEcon, well, for SUSE, but we're at SUSEcon. We're going to take a break. We're just getting started, though.

We still have so much more to do today, just day one. Day two's packed. Stay tuned.

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