SUSE Launches a Sovereign Premium Support Service for EU Customers
SUSE is still best known for its Linux distributions. But with the acquisitions of container management startup Rancher in 2020, container security service NeuVector in 2021, and, more recently, StackState, as well as the launch of SUSE AI, the company has expanded its product portfolio quite a bit in recent years. Yet, offering support for its infrastructure solutions remains at the heart of its business, and today, the company is adding a new offering here with the launch of its Sovereign Premium Support service.
This new support offering will ensure that when SUSE customers ask for support, their requests will be routed to EU-based support engineers and service delivery managers, and that their support data will be stored on networks and servers stored in the EU as well.
Traditionally, as SUSE CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen told me, SUSE’s support model followed the sun to give customers 24/7 coverage. “Instead of that, now we are supporting you in the country or region where you want to be supported,” he said in an interview ahead of today’s announcement. “We make sure that all your support engineers are there and that you’re not talking to anybody outside of the region, that the data that you share with us in terms of your support case is being treated confidentially in that region and it doesn’t leave it.”
As a Luxembourg-based company, SUSE has always had its roots in Europe — and it’s the European Union’s digital sovereignty agenda that is driving the demand for solutions that allow businesses to keep their data within the EU. This has driven the large cloud providers like AWS, Google and Microsoft to launch a variety of sovereign cloud solutions that mostly target customers in the EU.
Those solutions are complementary, van Leeuwen told me. In his view, the cloud providers are part of this ecosystem. A SUSE customer can now, after all, run a workload on SUSE’s Linux distributions in AWS’s sovereign cloud in the EU, for example, and then get help from EU-based engineers when there are issues.
And while the current service focuses on Europe, van Leeuwen noted that SUSE already has a few North American customers as well.
“Due to all the geopolitical changes that we’re seeing and the pressure that we’re also seeing in Europe from a North American president who wants everybody to stand on their own feet and be more focused on their own sovereignty, in a way — I think that’s the right way to say it,” van Leeuwen said. “I think what happened in the last six months was really a daunting moment for the European businesses, by and large. We’ve obviously seen the Asian businesses having to struggle with it in their own way in the past. But now it’s Europe’s turn to really figure out: Okay, how do we become a sovereign in the most critical things.”
And while the recent NATO commitment to increase every member country’s defense spending to 5% of their gross domestic product may, at first glance, be all about defense spending, a lot of this money is also going to building up the digital infrastructure to support this — and support it with products from local vendors.
“We have seen rising interest in digital sovereignty solutions, such as sovereign cloud, for several years now,” explained Rahiel Nasir, research director, European cloud strategies, and lead analyst for worldwide digital sovereignty, IDC. “This interest is not just confined to regulated industries but across all sectors and also globally, especially as many organizations 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.”
It’s worth noting that while SUSE is among the first to offer a branded sovereign support service, competitors like Red Hat and Canonical do provide the software pieces to build similar services and likely have enterprise contracts with select customers who have the kind of support needs that SUSE’s new service addresses, too.
