Latest news with #DirkPeterVanLeeuwen
Yahoo
08-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
SUSE Launches European Digital Sovereignty Offering
New SUSE Sovereign Premium Support provides strengthened control and resilience for European Union sovereign environments LUXEMBOURG, July 08, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SUSEⓇ, a global leader in enterprise open source solutions, today announced SUSE Sovereign Premium Support, its most comprehensive sovereign support service for customers and partners looking for a support offering that is sovereign in the European Union. It is a cross-portfolio offering designed for enterprises that require a sovereign, personalized and proactive approach to supporting their SUSE environments. According to IDC, more than 80% of organizations in Europe are either currently using sovereign cloud solutions or plan to use them in 20251. SUSE Sovereign Premium Support represents a new, important pillar of SUSE's offerings following growing demand from customers and partners who need to navigate new regulations, mitigate geopolitical risks and build truly resilient IT infrastructure. "Our expertise in the field, coupled with our deep European roots and global capabilities, uniquely positions us to deliver the level of control and resilience our customers need over their data, operations and technology. Our new SUSE Sovereign Premium Support reinforces our commitment to empower customers and partners who choose true digital independence and operational resilience with a future-proof IT infrastructure,' says Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, CEO of SUSE. 'While this is a net new offering for us, it is a natural extension of our open by design, sovereign by choice philosophy developed over three decades and more. ' SUSE Sovereign Premium Support: Helps SUSE's customers address their regulatory requirements and digital sovereignty needs. Provides named EU-based Premium Support Engineers (PSE) and Service Delivery Managers (SDM) and customer support data is stored on EU-located networks and servers. Gives enhanced data privacy and controlled access via EU-based PSEs and SDMs and contains SUSE's commitment to encryption of data required for troubleshooting. SUSE has a wide range of customers needing to meet strict regulatory and compliance requirements including defense, governmental and law enforcement organizations across multiple continents. SUSE's commitment and tailored support has long helped customers to achieve this goal. "SUSE has been an invaluable partner on digital sovereignty solutions for our customers for years,' said Udo Wuertz, CDO and Fellow Fsas Technologies Europe. 'Their open by design, sovereign by choice philosophy, combined with their deep understanding of regional needs and now with enhanced EU-based support, allows us to offer our joint customers solutions that fit their growing needs." 'We have seen rising interest in digital sovereignty solutions, such as sovereign cloud, for several years now. This interest is not just confined to regulated industries but across all sectors and also globally, especially as many organisations are still at the start of their cloud journeys and considering what they will need from the outset. 2025 looks set to be a watershed year as the growing geopolitical and economic uncertainties so far seen are shining a brighter spotlight on the need for digital sovereignty.' – Rahiel Nasir, Research Director, European Cloud Strategies, and Lead Analyst for Worldwide Digital Sovereignty, IDC. Register your interest today and we look forward to speaking with you about SUSE Sovereign Premium Support. For more information on SUSE's digital sovereignty initiatives, please read this blog or visit here. About SUSESUSE is a global leader in innovative, reliable and secure enterprise open source solutions, including SUSEⓇ Linux Suite, SUSEⓇ Rancher Suite, SUSEⓇ Edge Suite and SUSEⓇ AI Suite. More than 60% of the Fortune 500 rely on SUSE to power their mission-critical workloads, enabling them to innovate everywhere – from the data center to the cloud, to the edge and beyond. SUSE puts the 'open' back in open source, collaborating with partners and communities to give customers the agility to tackle innovation challenges today and the freedom to evolve their strategy and solutions tomorrow. For more information, visit 1(Source: IDC's EMEA Cloud Survey, September 2024.) Media Contact Sara Matheson +44 7960 191229
Forbes
23-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Forging A Responsible, Secure Way Forward For Open-Source AI
Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen is the CEO of SUSE, a global leader in innovative, reliable and secure enterprise open source solutions. As AI adoption continues to accelerate, the focus is shifting from experimentation to execution. How do businesses harness AI's potential in ways that are practical, principled and at scale? The answer lies in an open approach. Organizations can achieve responsible, transparent and secure AI through open-source tools and open platforms that foster innovation without locking it behind proprietary walls. With large language models and other AI technologies evolving at lightning speed, agility and adaptability are essential—and an open, collaborative ecosystem can keep up. My conviction comes from observing previous technical revolutions that have moved from experimentation to scale. Large-scale adoption while keeping the pace of innovation only really happened when open source (and its community) was at its heart. Linux stands as a powerful testament to the value of open-source development. By making its code freely available, Linux invited a global community of developers to collaborate, test and innovate—resulting in one of the most secure and scalable operating systems in the world. Today, it runs everything from smartphones to supercomputers, proving that openness doesn't hinder progress—it accelerates it. Kubernetes is the backbone of modern cloud infrastructure. It enables scalable, vendor-neutral application deployments as well as open internet protocols, which enable the interoperable, decentralized growth of the internet. This proves that open standards can scale globally and empower billions without centralized control. As we chart the future of AI, embracing similar openness can ensure the technology benefits from collective expertise and serves the broader good. Understanding Open-Source AI Before diving into what an open approach to AI looks like in practice, we must first understand what 'open-source AI' really means. Defining it is a complex and evolving effort involving plenty of debate, but creating a standard is helpful for providing clear guidelines, promoting transparency and trust, and accelerating innovation and collaboration. One formal definition that has emerged comes from the Open Source Initiative (OSI): the Open Source AI Definition (OSAID), which is a work in progress that we endorse. At a high level, the OSAID defines open-source AI as an AI system that allows users to: • 'Use the system for any purpose and without having to ask for permission.' • 'Study how the system works and inspect its components.' • 'Modify the system for any purpose, including to change its output.' • 'Share the system for others to use with or without modifications, for any purpose.' I will be referencing the OSAID when discussing an open approach to AI. Ultimately, whichever definition you endorse, openness remains essential to building trust and driving AI progress. Building Blocks For Trustworthy And Open AI There are three cornerstones for a future where AI innovation is both fast-moving and fundamentally trustworthy: open datasets, open infrastructure and regulatory guardrails/legal frameworks. How to treat datasets used for training is a subject of debate because, unlike source code, data influences models through patterns and can include proprietary or sensitive information. Finding the right balance between openness and legal protections and practical restrictions is key. This is why the OSAID emphasizes making training data accessible to the public and ensuring transparency about all datasets and the process for cleaning and labeling them. Robust, open infrastructure is another critical factor for quick and secure GenAI deployments when security and observability are built into the platform. The benefits of this approach include flexibility and interoperability; applications can seamlessly integrate with a variety of technologies and platforms. Open infrastructure also allows for customization and avoids vendor lock-in. Organizations are under stricter scrutiny for their risk and security management, and that also applies to how they use AI. Regulatory guardrails and legal frameworks are essential to ensuring secure and responsible AI use against threats like data leakage, prompt injection attacks and modern manipulation—all of which can result in costly repercussions. How Businesses Can Adopt An Open Approach To AI In reality, most businesses can't achieve complete open source for AI use given legal and practical constraints like data privacy laws, intellectual property protection and the risk of misuse or security threats. Additionally, the complexity of scaling AI infrastructure and potential legal liability make companies cautious about releasing powerful models without safeguards. So what does an open approach to AI look like in practice? Leveraging the building blocks I mentioned earlier, let's look at some of the key implementation strategies: This first step is key to IP protection, as depending on the sensitivity of the information, different levels of openness may be applied. Your organization's guidelines for AI access and usage should prioritize data governance and security and proportion restrictions by risk level. Consider zero-trust security frameworks and conduct regular auditing and monitoring of AI systems using observability tools to detect and nip problems in the bud. Open weights refer to the final parameters of a trained AI model made publicly available. They differ from open-source AI in that they usually don't allow access to the model's architecture, training data and code. Since training AI models is a time-consuming, resource-intensive and expensive process, it's more realistic for most organizations to use, distribute and modify open weights instead of training a model from scratch. Open Source: The Future Of AI AI innovation and execution are moving at breakneck speed, but it requires an open approach to truly succeed through fostering transparency and trust and focusing on flexibility and security. Embracing open-source principles for AI models, data and infrastructure is key to unlocking AI's full potential while also ensuring it remains agile, trustworthy and, ultimately, beneficial for all. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
