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SUSE is alive & well
Blog courtesy of Mike Nelson, HP Americas SUSE Business Development Manager
I've recently completed a 17-city whirlwind tour of the US and Canada (OK, the US and Toronto). The HP "Pathways to Cloud" roadshow was generally well-attended and always well-executed by a bevy of speakers and the event organizers.
SUSE has begun to re-emerge as an interesting element of our server-focused sales engagements. In general, it seems to me that Linux is going through its teen years, maybe its late teens now - still feeling its way, still looking up to the elder statesmen of UNIX and mainframe. But it's getting there. It's no longer content to be confined to the arguably less important duties it's been resigned to in the past - intranet web servers, mail gateways, that sort of thing. Linux wants to be among the big boys and girls now.
As an example, SUSE's Linux offering for SAP (available from HP) environments is being positioned, not only by SUSE but by SAP as well, as mission-critical ready. Ready to be used in settings that demand 3 or 4 or 5 "nines" of reliability. Ready to be used for applications and databases, where, if they fail, companies don't take orders properly, or process the orders properly, or ship the orders on time. (Linux servers are ready to handle workloads that generate the profits for a business - or the losses, if they're not running well).
The Pathways to Cloud tour introduced us to hundreds of HP employees, HP partners and customers. We had conversations with an average of 75 attendees per event, on topics ranging from "What's a SUSE?" to "Please help me get certified on the Linux 3.0 kernel." We discussed the benefits of the "one back to pat" approach to server support, showing how HP's TS unit can handle everything from traditional hardware support (diagnoses and repairs & spares) to expert support for software elements such as systems management software, hypervisors and operating systems. We listened, provided information, took notes, took a bunch of homework assignments, and had some fun in the process.
My colleagues over at SUSE and I, along with others at HP who focus on SUSE Linux on HP infrastructures, will be working over the next couple of quarters to accelerate the pace of adoption for Linux (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, in particular). Stay tuned for more news, education and yes, blog posts.
