Digital Sovereignty, Hybrid Cloud and the Future of AI Infrastructure | Techstrong Gang

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Techstrong gang live from Prague. I've done so many interviews today.

I said Lisbon earlier on one of my interviews. That's the kind of day I'm having. I think we've done about 12 interviews.

But while I've been busy doing interviews, this gentleman's been sitting in the keynotes, talking to other people, doing interviews for written articles, probably writing some articles too. Mike Vizard never lets the... What is it?

The rolling stone gathers no moss. There's no moss. No moss under my feet.

Do they still say that? I don't think so. Okay.

Well, it was a thing at one time. It might be so old it's going to be new again now, so let's try it again. But it's not where The Rolling Stones came from.

No. That's a whole different story. That's a different story.

But Mike, it's been an interesting day here. Yeah. They got a lot going on here.

So I'm going to try to pull it all together in a capsule. But I guess the best place to start is the keynote with the CEO, whose name is Dirk Peter van Leeuwen. He said there's five strategic initiatives for these guys, and one of them is obviously digital sovereignty- Yes ...

because we've been talking about that. Second is hybrid cloud computing, and the third was convergence of application workloads. That's cloud native and legacy and a lot of VMware conversion stuff.

And then they're after AI workloads and edge computing are their five big strategic initiatives. And they had a couple of announcements that tied into all of that. First of all was they allied themselves with NVIDIA, so now you can get the NVIDIA AI factory embedded with the SUSE AI factory, which you kind of need.

You can't really just build a factory without some AI components on top of it. Now, SUSE is probably the last company in that pile who jumped in on that, and so everybody and his brother is reselling that NVIDIA framework, but you can't be a serious player without it, so they're stepping up on that side. They also talked about a deal with Oracle and pointed to that as their hybrid cloud computing latest example.

You can now get the entire SUSE full stack on the Oracle marketplace and deploy it on their cloud. They have similar deals with AWS and Google. So they have that mindset that this is just one more cloud platform for them.

And then they talked about a new digital sovereignty, what they're calling a cert... Well, it's really a certification, and it's aimed at their partners, but they're trying to make sure the partners know enough about digital sovereignty so that they can make sure that the systems that they deploy actually work. What's interesting about it is that SUSE has taken the lead on the support for that, so they're the face to the customer, and then they have the partners and the managed service providers behind that, and that's kind of the big digital sovereignty news of the day at the show.

There's a bunch of other stuff that'll be coming out tomorrow as well that play into those five pillars, but you got to hand it to them. For a company that, we were joking about this yesterday, has probably been kicked around by, I don't know, four different companies since 2004. They're ambitious.

They got a lot on their plate. They do. Well, let me give you a couple of observations, because it's funny you hear these things in the keynote, and I'm here sitting talking to the people at SUSE who are responsible for rolling this out.

So things I learned at SUSECon. The theme here is shaping your resiliency or something like this. Shaping your resilient future.

So resilience to me is a security thing. Yeah, I get confused by that, too. I was thinking about that.

Resilience here is code name for sovereignty. Yeah. That's what that means otherwise.

Or adaptability and freedom of choice. It's all about sovereignty. Uh-huh.

That's what sovereignty is. Yeah. Freedom of choice to have your own thing.

Second thing, let me stick on this sovereignty thing. Make no mistake about it, most of the people here are from the continent, from Europe, and they are voting with their dollars, their feet and their mouths that they want a European solution. Right.

Free of American meddling, of the ability for the US to dictate or have access or shut access off, and they're damn serious about it. Yeah. Very serious.

To me, truly, I'm watching the end of the post-World War era before my eyes. This is the reverse of no taxation without representation, right? I sat at a table, I was the only English speaker, for lunch with the folks from Germany speaking German, but they spoke a little English, so I guess they felt bad for me.

And I'm sitting here thinking, "Boy, the Germans are really kind of rearming here" every time this happens. But we have no one to blame but ourselves on that front. We told them to, so that's that.

Yes. Well, no, it's more than we told them to. We're forcing them to.

Yeah. Right. We're forcing them to, and they can get a little territorial.

So there is that. Secondly, I've done a lot of webinars around the need for modernization and transformation in your virtualization future. They are coming right after VMware by nameVMware and Broadcom here much more aggressively than I've seen anyone.

There was one announcement today that played into that, and it's kind of been the quiet little secret star of the show, in my opinion. But they did a deal with an outfit called CloudBase that has a- Yes ... migration tool that enables you to do a live migration, essentially.

Yes. You don't have to do a cutoff. You can take this in stages.

Yep. And it's kind of a data protection tool that's been refashioned for data migration, but it's kind of cool, and there's a lot of demos over there. I think it's called the Coriolis Migration Tool- Yes, it is ...

which has something to do with clouds. I interviewed the SUSE person in charge of that one. So here's the thing, that tool was selected because it does more than just a VMware and migration.

Yeah. It'll migrate you from any hypervisor to another hypervisor, as well as building in Kubernetes and cloud native and multi-thread. Yeah.

,"Hey, you can do a little migration off SAP," just one European company to another. To another. So that plays into the third thing I wanted to point out, which is, you know Branch Rickey said about luck, right?

80% preparation, 20% inspiration. Whether you believe it or not, he was good at picking ballplayers, baseball players. " Okay.

Well, that's a similar inspiration. Here's the thing about it. This is their moment.

I applaud them for being as aggressive as they are because I think the world has aligned to them- Yeah ... between the need, not the need, but the yearning for a European solution. The AI, and agentic AI, and what that's bringing.

The whole Broadcom VMware licensing, and is this the time to move off of it kind of thing. Owning Rancher and having a native cloud native. How's that?

Native cloud native, NCN, solution built in. If they don't seize this moment, 10 years from now, we'll be talking about this crazy little company that had six people, six different owners. " And his thought line was, "We can't do the level of innovation and investment required if I got to answer to shareholders every quarter- Every quarter ...

about something that's going on," this, that, and the other. Again, I don't disagree. Yeah.

And I can't help but wonder if we reach that point where, I don't know, maybe the Wall Street analysts, and I know this is heresy, but that whole model, it's too hard in tech because my windows are too far and too long, and I can't really look. No, I think... Well, it depends.

This AI stuff's going to have a huge role in it. I know. As companies become less dependent on PE or public market funds, that they actually run profitable companies.

Right. I learned this lesson in 2000 and 2001. It's hard driving your company like a ship tacking left like a clipper ship that goes left and right quarter to quarter.

The shortest point is a straight line. That said, somewhere in this picture are a bunch of venture capitalists that own this company, so the question is: What's their exit strategy, and what are they looking to do? And does somebody wind up buying SUSE, or does SUSE roll up a bunch of other companies to become something bigger?

Who knows? I see SUSE... So I spoke to the fellow who does their M&A.

And right now, they've done a great job with partnerships. They've announced a lot of partnerships. But I also see them potentially acquiring companies that tuck in.

Even maybe some of these partners they announced, some of the smaller ones. Mm-hmm. I agree.

Do you think, let's go radical here, but the more success that these folks have, would that force Broadcom to coming up with a pure open source play? No. Hell will freeze over.

No. I think, look, it's interesting. Again, I was talking to, I think the gentleman sitting right over there, who's working the SUSE virtualization with this partnership, not with CoreWeave.

Coriolis is the product. Is the product. Right.

CloudBase is the company. CloudBase. They say in talking to their customers that Broadcom makes no bones about...

And it's more than just the cost of the license, it's the, "This is what we're going to give you. " Yeah. No, they're not negotiating, that's for sure.

No. Or if they are, it's on a limited scope. They'll negotiate money sometimes, but the freedom of choice, the freedom of saying, "I want to be able to do this, this, and that," if Broadcom says, "Doesn't fit our model," they're done.

Yeah. I would think that all these companies are facing this current dilemma. The more AI evolves, the easier it's going to be to reverse engineer or migrate something to something else.

So the cost of switching keeps dropping, and I think a lot of these companies made decisions to buy other companies pre-AI without realizing that the customer's going to have a lot more flexibility than they thought. So again-Luck by design, the way they've designed this is that's okay with them. You don't have to use all SUSE, and they can still give you that single pane of glass.

Yeah. So again, I think in a lot of ways, this is their moment. Either they seize it or they got to rip it up and hope for some high draft choices.

The draft's coming. Yeah. I think it was you were talking to the chief strategy officer, Frank?

Yes. I think during his keynote today, he said something to the effect of, "And we give you a single pane of glass- Pane of glass ... " A single glass of pane.

Yes. He did it in our interview too. He quoted it.

I guess that's his new catchphrase. That is his new catchphrase. So, as I said, we've got Mitchell, he was out podcasting somewhere.

Was it a video or an audio? I can't. It was with another podcast.

I can't discuss it. I don't want to- All right ... cause any ripples or issues, but.

It's okay, Mitch. You did violate your exclusivity clause. I have an exclusivity clause?

Yeah, you did. You did. Okay.

No, he's good with the new rule. He did us first yesterday, so he's okay. That is the new rule, you know.

Do you first. Okay. All right.

Something like that. That's what he said. Yeah.

I cannot confirm or deny that one. I don't know where that was going, but. Yeah, I don't know.

You know what? He had a troubled childhood. Anyway, Mitch- We were talking.

You guys are lifelong friends. Yeah. What do I know?

What the hell? Oh my God. Mitch, Mike and I were just talking.

There were five key pillars that SUSE CEO put out this morning, and we were just going through them. You know what they are. You were up on stage, you spoke around stuff with Andreas around resiliency, which is code word for sovereignty here.

Yes, exactly. What was your impression? It's interesting because this podcast I did, I got to interview DP, talking with him about this and sort of what's behind, do you really believe this momentum?

A year ago, we were wondering, is this a thing or not? And I think the moment has happened for SUSE. They've been around for a while, so they've probably had other moments, but we talked about being a huge believer in open source and building a company around that model and openness.

Being European-based, those two things alone sets them up to be sort of at least part of the gravity well of digital sovereignty within the European environment. Mm-hmm. Then you take other issues of we're at the beginning, we're at the early stages of this, right?

It's going to continue to take shape and morph and- Yeah ... different forms across different nation states and organizations. It's going to get more complex than simple, I think, what digital sovereignty means, and how does a company like SUSE or any other company deal with that?

Yeah. I'm interested to see what their financials look like because both SUSE- What makes you think you're going to see their financials? Well, you never know, but it's interesting to me that both SUSE and VMware have been bought and sold multiple times over each, and it's almost like in SUSE's case, it's like, "I don't want to.

You can have it. " And then VMware, which was much bigger, still couldn't make it as an independent company. So what goes on with these two platforms here that they have been kicked around so often, and yet here is SUSE now making it as an independent platform.

So, you know what? I look at this from an analyst point of view, if I'm looking at it that way. Mitch, you cited two things.

They're based here. They have that open source heritage. But from a company performance point of view, they've assembled a great lineup.

Yes, you could use other people's stuff- Yeah ... but they've assembled all the parts you need to do this, from the Rancher to the Linux to a bunch of other things. And what they don't have, they've partnered for.

They've done a great job of partnering. Yes, the NVIDIA is a me too. No doubt about that.

That's a me too deal. But when you look at some of the other partnerships they've announced here, and they've announced recently before this, they are in a catbird seat to become the European provider of choice. Mm-hmm.

From the OS to the infrastructure to the support to the cloud native to the AI, they could be a powerhouse. Well, there's a vested interest, right? European nation states, organizations, it's their only of this caliber based in Europe.

Yeah. They want it to succeed. Right.

The only thing I'm a little unclear about, so can you really have a sovereign cloud? Because it almost seems like it's impossible to build an entire stack that either doesn't have some components from China or some components from the US, and so I feel like some of this stuff is aspirational. Well, it's like you can't suddenly de-globalize an entire globalized supply chain.

You can't suddenly say it's all going to become sourced via here. So I think it's a matter of compromise of what things you know are going to be internationallyOr from other regions versus what parts do you want to control? Yeah.

I think the main thing is, overall, do you have control over your destiny, right? Yes, it may be a combination of supply chains from other companies, other countries. But do you have enough control over it?

If you have to take over parts of it, you can. You're not going to be held hostage to something. No.

Right. No. You can clean the servers, and you can turn off the network, so short of them sending an army to come get your servers, what are they going to do?

Yeah. The guards will be at the gate so good luck with that. An argue-- I like the way you put it, Mitch.

We can't just de-globalize a global supply chain. But unfortunately, I think being here just two days already, I've realized that the world order that we grew up in is over. Mm-hmm.

These people, even if the administration in the US changed, they're not running back to what was, because there's no guarantee it won't change yet again. And they have their own- Oh, yeah ... regime change- Yeah ...

issues and so forth. And I think what the world is realizing is that we can no longer rely on the stability. It was almost as frightening in some ways that it was the Cold War, where you had us and them, right?

Soviet Union- Very clear who the enemy was ... US. There were rules.

You had rules you could live by- Mm-hmm ... that were there, that were solid, and now we don't. And so this is...

I think it's hit me in the face like a wet towel. I think they also realize that the EU itself is not a guaranteed permanent thing, witness Great Britain leaving. So they're probably also thinking through what are the implications of somebody leaving if I'm a country and I'm in the EU, so maybe I do want all my stuff inside of a particular border, not just the EU.

Well, it's a lot easier to do something about it now versus when it is a bad situation and you have lost- Talk to the EU about that ... significant control. How do you like me now?

Said George Bush. Well, and Nigel Farage- ... or whatever his name is.

Yeah. But it's absolutely true. But again, though, I want to be positive.

You got to give these guys credit. Mm-hmm. Their- I totally do ...

their team is executing. They're making the right moves. And I think the potential is there for them to be a powerhouse.

" A huge difference between this year and last year. Not just the conference. We don't have four silos of products anymore.

We are an infrastructure company, right? They've reorganized. Their engineering's all pulled together.

Their business unit's focused around markets and products. Mixed totals. So let me ask you a question.

As part of this sovereignty, how long is it before SUSE spins up their own ARM-based inference chip? They're already building data centers or partnering on building data centers. I think that their culture is really wrapped around partners, so I don't think they'll do that.

I don't either. I think that they'll stay within their... If it can be software defined, they're interested.

But if it's build a cloud or build a chip or a server or hardware or whatever, networking, they're going to partner. I agree with that. Could they go down a chip route?

Yeah. That doesn't seem to be in their DNA. They're so much a software company.

Could be wrong, but... Mm-hmm. Someone in Europe is going to do that.

You know it's going to happen. Yeah. Yeah.

And they'll be the first one to partner with them, right? Well, ARM itself is- European based. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. So.

And they're building their own chip. Yeah. Somebody's going to build ARM servers, if they're not already, in Europe.

It takes some engineering, but it's not rocket science to build a server, right? Mm-hmm. At least, don't tell Dell and HPE that.

But at the end of the day, it's a server. But yet they have a- They break news. they have a deep relationship with Dell, too.

They very much do. Absolutely. Strong partner there.

Interesting. It's been an eye-opening conference. Yeah, it is.

Yeah. It has. Anyway, hey, we got to wrap up because I'm actually going to interview Andreas Prince, our friend Andreas, who is...

He, I think, runs the sovereignty program here now. He's the head of digital sovereignty. And then that'll be the end of a very long day of interviews here for day one at SUSECON.

But we hope you've enjoyed this live techstreong gang. We'll be back tomorrow with another gang. But until then, on behalf of Mitchell and Mike and myself, have a great day, everyone.

We'll see you soon.