Q SUSE has recently announced its entry into the Platform as a Service (PaaS) landscape. How is it going to impact SUSEs overall business as well as its position in the Indian geography?
One of the biggest highlights of SUSECon 2015s keynote was SUSEs entry into the Platform as a Service (PaaS) landscape; the company is joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation.
SUSEs PaaS offerings were available through partners such as WSO2 and others. While we still have those offerings from our partners, we felt the need to be a part of Cloud Foundry and stay engaged because of the presence of partners such as SAP and IBM. SUSE is collaborating with SAP on the Cloud Foundry Foundation BOSH OpenStack Cloud Provider Interface (CPI) project. This will enable Cloud Foundry users to easily run applications of their choice on public or private clouds. The enterprise-grade solutions for customers will increase their opportunities for business success.
The CPI project is led by SAP and its goal is to improve the ease with which Cloud Foundry communicates with underlying OpenStack infrastructure, whether the cloud is public or private. It will help simplify application testing and deployment for a wide range of cloud users.
In this context, we see that many organisations (enterprises and government) in India use SAP, and it will help them to adopt the cloud in a faster, more reliable and secure way. This will lead to faster adoption of SUSEs management products so that these seamlessly manage SUSE, Red Hat, CentOS, and also have connectors to integrate with the Windows SCOM.
Q How does SUSE plan to expand its reach in the PaaS landscape in India?
SUSE India will follow its global strategy to work closely with SAP on this. The SAP-led Cloud Foundry OpenStack CPI project will help simplify application testing and deployment for a wide range of cloud users, while SUSE will collaborate closely with SAP to help ensure that the cloud provider interface supports OpenStack infrastructure.
As long-time partners, SAP has worked with SUSE to bring enterprise-class products to the Linux market via solutions such as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP applications. As customers increasingly move to cloud technologies, we look forward to collaborating with SAP to help tightly integrate Cloud Foundry with OpenStack.
Q How will SUSEs relationship with Microsoft be affected, now that the latter has joined hands with Red Hat?
There has been no impact on the relationship between SUSE and Microsoft after Red Hat aligned with Microsoft. Today, the relationship between Microsoft and SUSE is a mature one and has evolved over a considerable period of time.
Q What is OpenSUSE Leap and how is it different from SUSE Linux Enterprise?
Since the last release exactly one year ago, OpenSUSE transformed its development process to create an entirely new type of hybrid Linux distribution called OpenSUSE Leap Version 42.1. This is the first version of OpenSUSE Leap that uses source from SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE), providing a level of stability that will prove to be unmatched by other Linux distributions.
OpenSUSE Leap will benefit from the enterprise maintenance effort and will have some of the same packages and updates as SLE, which is different from previous OpenSUSE versions that created separate maintenance streams.
Community developers provide an equal level of contribution to Leap and upstream projects of the release, which bridges a gap between the matured packages and newer packages found in OpenSUSEs other distribution, Tumbleweed.
Since the move was a considerable shift from previous versions, a new version number and version naming strategy was adopted to reflect the change. The SLE sources come from SUSEs soon-to-be-released SLE 12 Service Pack 1 (SP1). The naming strategy is SLE 12 SP1 or 12.1 + 30 = OpenSUSE Leap 42.1. Many have asked, Why 42? SUSE and OpenSUSE have a tradition of starting big ideas with a four and two, a reference to The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. In every minor version of OpenSUSE Leap, users can expect a new KDE and GNOME, but today is all about OpenSUSE Leap 42.1; so if you are tired of a brown desktop, try a green one.
Q What is the business model that you will have around Leap, and how do you aim to promote it amongst developers in India?
There is no business model for Leap as its a medium to exchange goodies. There is a lot of downstream and upstream collaboration around Leap and SLE. We are planning to promote it through the education sector, and we look forward to substantial usage amongst the strong SUSE community.
Q What was the need for Leap, and what are the areas you are looking to target with it?
SUSE wanted to provide an operating system, which is enterprise-grade rock solid and yet has the flexibility for individual users. SUSE Leap and SLE will have upstream and downstream contribution.
Q Please throw some light on your community initiatives in India.
Apart from the many others that we have, OpenStack is one of our key focus areas. We are a very key contributor to OpenStack India, and we will continue to look into this space in the future as well.
