Rajarshi Bhattacharyya: Suse is a necessity for enterprise DevOps Journey

Rajarshi Bhattacharyya, Country Head at SUSE elaborates on the growing impact of open source on the digital transformation of enterprises.

How has Suse grown in India and where is the growth happening now?

Suse has come a long way in the Linux market. We are constantly involved with the open source community and have many ‘firsts’ to our credit. We were the first enterprise OpenStack Cloud distribution, the first Linux on the mainframe, and also the first Linux to make KVM and Xen available. Besides, we are the primary sponsor of the community-supported openSUSE Project, which develops the openSUSE Linux distribution.

In India, we are growing by double digits, and with open source being at the heart of the Indian government’s IT Policy, we are expanding at a significant rate. Suse powers the ‘Make in India’ initiative established by the government, by enabling cloud services and value-added service providers with cutting-edge, enterprise-class open source technologies. Moreover, adoption of open solutions from Suse allows these organisations to build products and solutions that are comparable to their foreign counterparts.

What are the major challenges for Suse to operate profitably in the Indian market? How do you overcome those challenges?

Today, the major challenge that an open source organization faces in India is the unavailability of skilled resources. Suse has been making huge efforts to popularize the adoption of open source right from the elementary school to a higher level of educations. There are a lot of universities, school boards and technical education centres nowadays that are adopting open source education as a part of their ICT curriculum.

SUSE invests heavily in developing course content on cutting-edge new technologies. There are online academies as well as on-demand training available to master these newer technologies. On top of these, YouTube releases by experts help individuals to master the available technologies. There is a unique programme wherein SUSE enables academic institutions to subscribe to all its course materials at zero cost. These materials are regularly updated. Also, students and individuals can get themselves certified in technologies like OpenStack and software-defined storage.

What will be the role played by OpenStack as most enterprises embark on their cloud journeys?

OpenStack has already made its presence felt as an enterprise-class framework for the cloud. An independent study, commissioned by SUSE, reveals that 81% of senior IT professionals are planning to move or are already moving to OpenStack Private Cloud. What is more, the most innovative businesses and many Fortune 100 businesses have already adopted OpenStack for their production environment.

As cloud becomes the foundation on which future businesses will be run, OpenStack gains the upper hand with its flexibility, agility, performance and efficiency. Significant cost reduction is another major consideration for large enterprises. Because a proprietary cloud platform is excessively expensive to build and maintain. At the same time, an OpenStack-based architecture supports the kind of innovations that enterprises are striving to achieve, as it offers self-service developer access. OpenStack will support a much larger transformation toward agility and developmental efficiency and is not tied to virtualisation or consolidation efforts.

How can open source impact the digital transformation journey of Indian enterprises?

Digital transformation is a headache for CIOs because of its sheer heterogeneous and all-pervading nature. With the data at the centre of digital transformation, it is often impossible for CIOs to ensure that the information that percolates down is insightful and secure at the same time. They need a platform which is scalable, flexible, allows innovations and is quick enough to turn around. This is exactly what Open Source promises.

Technologies like IoT and SMAC will make data more valuable and voluminous. The diversity of devices and standards that will emerge will make open source a great fit for enterprises to truly leverage these trends. In fact, we will be surprised to know that almost all ‘digital enterprises’ in the world are already using open source platforms and tools to a great extent.

How does Suse look at open source-defined data centres?

Most enterprises now consider open source to be the preferred solution for migrating to software-defined infrastructure (SDI). Interestingly Linux adoption in the data centres is growing steadily at a pace of 15-20% YoY. The key drivers of SDI - efficiency, scalability and reliability at minimal investment - can be achieved only with the adoption of open source platforms. Open source helps the enterprises to be agiler in building, deploying and maintaining applications.

Open source adoption is essential for achieving true ‘zero-downtime’ in Software-Defined-Infrastructure. Suse believes that open source will have the specifically large role to play in the software-defined-storage (SDS) space. It will help organizations in overcoming the current challenges associated with SDS. Open SDS solutions can scale infinitely without a need to refresh the entire platform or disrupt the existing functioning environment. For example, Pi data centre in Hyderabad is running completely on Suse. Cloud service providers like Sify, Tata Communications are also running on Suse.

How can open source platforms like Suse play the role of a catalyst in the enterprise DevOps journey?

In the customer-driven economy, it is imperative for organizations to have DevOps and containerisation technologies to increase release cycles and quality of applications. Often, enterprises struggle to get the most out of DevOps model. The investment associated with replicating the production environments for testing the apps is not negligible.

They also fail to ensure that the existing systems are not disturbed while running a testing environment within containers. Suse believes that microservices running in Docker-like containers, on an open and scalable cloud infrastructure are the future of applications. OpenStack-based cloud infrastructures are going to be an absolute necessity for enterprises for a successful DevOp journey. The flexibility and interoperability apart, the open cloud allows the DevOps team to reuse the same infrastructure as and when containers are created