20 years of glory, forensic growth of SUSE and Linux

The Linux operating system has been around for 20 years without knowing it. Just 20 years ago, just celebrated the 20th anniversary of Linux, in the blink of an eye, it was the 20th anniversary of SUSE. There is too much talk about SUSE, which was born in Germany in 1992 and grew up with Linux. On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of SUSE, Mr. Nils Brauckmann, President of SUSE, visited China. We are honored to interview Nils Brauckmann, President and General Manager of SUSE, and Dr. Zhang Xianmin, General Manager of Attachmate Greater China and South Korea, to help us sort out the development of SUSE over the past 20 years. growing up.

Nils Brauckmann, President and General Manager of SUSE

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Attachment Greater China Region and South Korea General Manager Dr. Zhang Xianmin

Reviewing the development of SUSE

For SUSE in the past 20 years Development, Nils president said that looking back on these 20 years is really not easy. From the initial prototype, to continuous maturity, continuous development, continuous improvement, continuous optimization, and so on, including the continuous maturity and development of the entire open source software community, the entire team has devoted a lot of effort, especially development. With the enterprise-class SUSE platform and applications, it is also a lot of painstaking efforts, so that SUSELinux can be applied to enterprise-level key business, but also can be applied to the use of various large data centers.

Today, 20 years later, SUSE has achieved annual revenues of more than $200 million and more than 750 employees worldwide. At the same time, according to IDC data, in the Chinese market, SUSE's current market share exceeds 35%, and the annual load growth rate exceeds 25%.

As for the important reasons for success, Nils president believes that success is inseparable in this market, and with other partners, SUSE has always been treating its supplier partners. Very honest and open minded. >>

Strong and strong SUSE hand in hand partner

First, work with IBM. SUSE is the first company to work with IBM on SUSE Linux. Nils said they have combined SUSE Linux with IBM's mainframe system to provide customers with better solutions. At present, this SUESE has already occupied more than 80% of the market share.

Second, work with SAP. Nils mentioned that another typical example is the cooperation with SAP. The two companies have very successful cooperation in enterprise users. Among SUSE enterprise users, 70% of enterprise customers have their operating systems running on SUSE Linux. .

Third, work with Microsoft. SUSE's cooperation with Microsoft has been going on for a while. The cooperation is mainly on two levels of cooperation, one is the technical level, and the second is the business level. Nils said that in the process of communicating with enterprises, many enterprises found that their current IT environment is not a single, but a hybrid IT environment, so they often choose Linux in some server operating environments, but In some simple IT operating systems, it runs on the Microsoft operating system platform, so it is a hybrid.

And SUSE's goal with Microsoft is to be able to provide customers with very flexible solutions that enable them to grow their business very well in a mixed IT environment, including the Microsoft operating system. With the SUSE Linux operating system, the combination and interoperability between the two systems becomes even more important.

So, SUSE places great emphasis on compatibility and interoperability, which is why it is rated by the industry as “the most interoperable platform”. At the same time, SUSE can support virtualization better. Supporting virtualization is inseparable from VMware, KVM, and Xen. Nils said that SUSE can help enterprises in an isomerized and mixed IT environment. Implement its IT deployment.

SUSE's development in the Chinese market

Nils believes that China is a very important and strategic market for SUSE. The reason is because the Chinese market has a very important share from a commercial perspective, and the growth of the Chinese market is very strong. At the same time, SUSE has a large number of very good customers in China. These high-quality customers continue to recommend more new customers to SUSE, and many Chinese customers have gradually become global customers, and can be used in many other places around the world. See these well-known brands of Chinese customers.

Secondly, SUSE does not simply sell products in China, but develops and designs according to the characteristics of the Chinese market. Therefore, SUSE also works with outstanding Chinese engineers to match products according to the characteristics of the Chinese market. Make improvements for further design and development.

Once again, some of the core developments of SUSE Linux were created by Chinese engineers. So SUSE and the outstanding Chinese engineering team are working together to develop excellent products for the Chinese market, not only based on current technology, but also based on future technologies, such as cloud-based architecture, such as open source cloud computing based architecture, OpenStack They are also developing products based on this architecture.

Finally, Nils said that although SUSE Linux was created by some of the best German engineers in 1992, SUSE's entire business is now global, with about 80% of its business coming from outside Central Europe, 60 The business around % is completely from outside Europe.

How SUSE adapts to the Chinese cloud computing environment

About SUSE How to adapt to the situation in China's cloud computing environment, Nils gave us a more detailed explanation.

First of all, in the public cloud, SUSE is the identity of a visitor, and it is how much it can pay, or it is very flexible according to the amount of customers used.

As a customer to find public cloud providers, such as the world-class large-scale Amazon, Dell, for SUSE, it is necessary to provide customers with much-needed pricing and certification, so that customers can With the use, random payment, very flexible. At the same time, SUSE also cooperates with the local public cloud service providers. The first is to sign a cooperation agreement with Amazon, and Dell is also the first and only one to cooperate with Dell in this regard.

In addition, SUSE has developed very good value-added management tools. For example, SUSEStudio is a very good management tool. It allows customers to optimize the configuration of the entire operating system and support virtual. Virtualization creates a virtual image that virtually distributes the tasks of these tasks, which allows SUSE to provide very good value-added management tools on management tools.

Secondly, in the private cloud, some companies may not want to use the service provider of the public cloud, they intend to build and build their own private cloud, so that he can have his own IT environment. SUSE is also a good way to help him achieve this. At the same time, if he needs more space and service expansion, he can also transition to the public cloud, so SUSE also has a very good solution in the private cloud.

So SUSE has been working hard to provide customers with cloud-based solutions, including the OpenStack community, which is an open source community, similar to the Linux open source community, so we are also very good at participating in OpenStack. Various development activities. It also has its own operating system, as well as SUSEStudio and so on, which are very good management tools.

OpenStack Globalization

Regarding the development of OpenStack, Dr. Zhang Xianmin said that OpenStack is led by the United States Aviation Administration (NASA) and there are many companies participating. SUSE is the main player. For example, SUSE plans to have its first product at the end of this year. It is still in a development period and is a global project. China, for example, Huawei, CITIC and other relatively large solution providers are also interested in this.

Dr. Zhang Xianmin believes that general IT technology has a time difference with China, and the time difference is about five years. As for what will suit China, these big system integrators like Huawei and ZTE will play a very important role. Dr. Zhang Xianmin believes that SUSE can play a bridge role and introduce foreign ideas to cooperate with them.

SUSE is hard to have a company that can be as good as IBM in terms of cloud computing. SUSE hopes to have its own technology and cooperate with some domestic system integrators. The color of OpenStack in China will become more and more obvious. . These large system integrators need to understand China's needs. SUSE's role is to introduce some advanced foreign architectures and technologies, combined with domestic needs, so that the technology of this architecture can be adapted to Chinese usage.

Dr. Zhang said that OpenStack is likely to be a cloud operating system, that is, SUSE believes that this may be the future direction, including that we have some products (including SUSE Studio; SUSE Manager; SLES) that can play in OpenStack in the future. Very important role.

SUSE SP2 itself and OpenStack are two projects. SUSESP2 is a product that has been released for everyone, including SLES, SUSE Studio, and SUSE Magager. There are many functional enhancements in this area, but In terms of the operating system level.

We believe that for SUSE, cloud is also a future direction. SUSE's future growth engine will be in OpenStack. How to combine OpenStack and SUSE, and there is no great future for SUSE. We will focus on it. Here is.