SUSE CEO on India market and why open source will get bigger and richer

SUSE, a global provider of open-source solutions, is actively seeking to expand its presence in the Indian market. During SUSECON 2025 (the company's flagship event happening in Orlando this year) CEO Dirk-Peter Van Leeuwen told TechCircle that the company sees significant potential within the country's government sector, which is already leveraging open-source technologies. Additionally, the German-headquartered company is seeing a growing interest from telcos, retail, manufacturing and healthcare segments in the region. In his keynote earlier in the day, Van Leeuwen also spoke about how open source offers the 'power of choice' to customers, thereby accelerating its adoption across industry verticals.

India a key growth market for SUSE

With a customer base exceeding 1,000 across various key sectors, India is a crucial global market for SUSE. Notably, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has made substantial advancements in retail payment systems by using a robust technology stack that includes SUSE offerings such as Rancher, a Kubernetes-native platform for managing multi-cluster containers, ensuring high availability for its new IT applications and facilitating the agile deployment of container-based services. 

Data from the NPCI indicates that in January 2024, over 12 billion UPI transactions, amounting to ₹18.41 lakh crore (approx. $222.17 billion), were processed, marking a 41.72% increase in transaction value compared to January 2023.

Van Leeuwen noted that governments are particularly valuable clients, highlighting SUSE's collaborations with governmental bodies in the United States, Singapore, and Australia, besides India. He remarked that the Indian government will continue to adopt open-source technologies due to their capacity to foster innovation and reduce costs.

In 2022, SUSE opened a centre of excellence in Bengaluru for its engineering functions specifically on developing its Linux portfolio. The company also boasts of prestigious clientele in the country including Indian Oil Corporation, the Kerala Police, ONGC, to name a few.

On the company’s stepping up hiring in India, Rajarshi Bhattacharyya, Country Manager for India, SUSE, told TechCircle in August that the company is "partnering with leading technology institutions to get the best of knowledge in open-source, with one of the plans being introducing smaller centres of excellence or innovation hubs within the institutions."

Van Leeuwen said that the company has also been partnering with some of India's leading technology providers such as Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, HCL Tech, among others, to drive open source innovation, further strengthening its partnership with India and global markets, and also sees a lot of untapped potential in addressing the global capability centres (GCCs) that are growing by leaps and bounds in the country.

Key announcements at SUSECON 25

At SUSECON 2025, the company announced new initiatives including the launch of SUSE Rancher for SAP applications, which integrates SAP systems with cloud solutions. This offering, built on open source technology, ensures flexibility, security, and operational continuity for critical SAP workloads.

SUSE also expanded its Enterprise Container Management portfolio, with Senior VP Peter Smails highlighting improvements in workload support, developer experience, VM modernisation, and new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings, reinforcing SUSE Rancher Prime as a leading cloud-native platform.

Additionally, SUSE enhanced its core Linux solutions amid market consolidation, emphasising an open, ecosystem-first approach. The company now supports multiple Linux distributions, offering proactive security patches, no forced migrations, and priority support for improved reliability. 

Leveraging on its past collaboration where, Deutsche Bank successfully transitioned "hundreds of servers overnight" to SUSE Enterprise Linux without any downtime, ensuring uninterrupted operations and features like live patching and in-place upgrades, the two are now partnering to create open-source solutions that improve agility and security. According to Peter Nutt, Head of UNIX Engineering at Deutsche Bank, "SUSE Multi-Linux support will establish a secure framework for financial services."

Finally, SUSE announced an integration of SUSE Security with Microsoft Sentinel, a cloud-native SIEM solution. This collaboration, enhanced by Microsoft Security Copilot's AI features, offers customers a unified security strategy across hybrid IT environments.

While there's still some way to go for enterprises to shift complete gear from proprietary to open source, the SUSE CEO believes that "open source will only get bigger and richer," as it lowers costs, streamlines business processes, speeds up product development, and improves infrastructure management. As Thomas Di Giacomo is Chief Technology and Product Officer for SUSE also puts it, "The collaborative nature of the technology fosters rapid innovation, enabling organisations to have greater 'choice' in product development and digital transformation, leading to significant advancements across sectors."

(The author was in Orlando for SUSECON 2025 on SUSE's invitation)