SUSE steps up hiring in India, bullish on platform engineering

Global provider of open and secure enterprise-grade solutions firm SUSE announced several key updates for the Indian enterprise market.

With India’s massive talent pool and the government’s increasing push for open-source technologies, SUSE is looking to enhance its technology capabilities by integrating open-generative artificial intelligence (AI) to boost partners and customers in the region. To this end, SUSE plans to add roles such as product development, technical experts, and go-to-market resources to its team of over 100 to support business growth and drive customer success, the company said in a media roundtable held on Thursday.

With over 1,000 customers across key verticals, India continues to be one of the key global markets for SUSE. One of those is the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which has significantly improved retail payment systems in India by relying on SUSE solutions for the high availability of its new IT applications and the agile deployment of container-based services.

In 2022, SUSE opened a new centre of excellence in Bengaluru for its engineering functions specifically on developing its Linux portfolio.

On the company’s current expansion plans and that of hiring, Rajarshi Bhattacharyya, Country Manager for India, SUSE, mentioned that India is one of the key hubs of talent for open source developers in the world, and SUSE is excited to leverage this marketplace. “We are 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. This will make candidates market-ready, and we can get more skilled in-house talent.”

“We are enthusiastic about the new advancements across our Linux, cloud-native, and edge portfolios. SUSE looks to drive continuous iterations of these technologies, powered by open models of community-led and collaborative development, to empower organisations to unlock the full potential of open source. Our enhanced offerings, and now with the introduction of Gen AI, are designed to accelerate time-to-value and reduce operational costs. In doing so, we can help organisations optimise their digital transformation strategies and stay ahead in a highly dynamic market.”

In terms of its key technology focus in FY2025, Vishal Ghariwala, Senior Director and CTO, Asia Pacific at SUSE, told TechCircle that the tech team is bullish on areas such as platform engineering.

In March, SUSE updated its container management and edge computing platforms by launching Rancher Prime 3.0, its container management platform. The edge computing platform optimises the Rancher platform for edge-of-network deployments. Rancher Prime had its last major update back in November 2023, while it has been over a year since SUSE Edge 2.0 was released.

“This is already making the developers work much more productive, and they have as much time as possible to write code instead of being bogged down by other complexities. Secondly, it will continue to improve the quality of the software we’re building and also drive productivity across the organisation as developers can work with all other teams cohesively,” said Ghariwala.

With a focus on simplifying Kubernetes, the Rancher Prime enterprise container management platform added new capabilities for platform engineering teams to deliver self-service platform-as-a-service (PAAS) to developers. This also gave security a boost to provide more assurance for applications and supply chain security.

Another area the company is bullish on is open generative AI. SUSE is launching a secure, open, generative AI platform for businesses transitioning from strategy to implementation. Set to debut in late 2024, the company said that this modular, vendor-agnostic solution will integrate with SUSE’s existing open-source technologies, enabling organisations to deploy private generative AI using their preferred large language models (LLMs) on-premises or in the cloud.

SUSE’s AI platform boasts a "human-first AI" approach and emphasises security and customer autonomy, implementing a responsible AI framework that allows enterprises to select models and tools while ensuring privacy, said Josep Garcia, General Manager for Asia Pacific at SUSE.

In addition, in June this year, SUSE completed the acquisition of StackState, a full-stack observability platform, to enhance its cloud-native capabilities by integrating StackState’s technology into Rancher Prime, its premium container management service. This will improve visibility and control for IT teams, enabling quicker issue detection in cloud environments.

Garcia noted that India's public cloud services market is expected to reach $24.2 billion by 2028, presenting both opportunities and challenges for enterprises adopting cloud technologies. “SUSE aims to provide a secure and flexible platform for businesses to modernise their IT infrastructure and leverage advancements in digital transformation, cloud-native development, edge computing, and AI,” he said.