SUSE Bridges New Span of Integrations Across Hybrid Cloud-Native Channels

SUSE has continued its seemingly-Sisyphean approach to bolstering its cloud-native services portfolio with a number of enhancements, integrations and extensions. Services detailed at SUSECON 2025 in Orlando this year include work focused on enhancing enterprise container management services, new connections for SUSE Rancher across SAP applications and integration between the company’s own security platform and Microsoft Sentinel, Redmond’s security information and event management (SIEM) technology.

As a company, SUSE is a mouthful. Pronounced “sioux-suh” as an acronym derived from the original German term for the company – Gesellschaft für Software und Systementwicklung – the organization, that we may have once simply labeled a Linux specialist, now styles itself as an open source enterprise infrastructure services and operating system company.

Keen to appeal to both community-based open source users and enterprise-level customers alike, SUSE’s product and toolset updates (at the level showcased during SUSECON at least) typically manifest themselves most prevalently as commercial grade products up front. With functions spanning software supply chain certification and software bill-of-materials (SBOM), SUSE has been extending its self-service platform-as-a-service (PaaS) tools for platform engineering teams for some time.

“SUSE continues to lean into its strong belief in open source and the four-pronged Linux, cloud native, edge and AI approach. We are seeing EQT’s plans realized for SUSE’s organic growth, acquisitions and product portfolio alignment after taking SUSE private,” said Mitch Ashley, VP and practice lead for DevOps and application development with The Futurum Group. “Today, SUSE has a much greater emphasis on horizontal integration across SUSE’s products while emphasizing enterprise cloud native, security, hybrid-cloud and AI workload needs. Progress continues.”

Central among the product updates tabled for SUSECON 2025 was news of the company’s efforts to extend its enterprise container management portfolio:

“[We have shown] our commitment to delivering scalable, secure and flexible solutions to address enterprises’ most demanding cloud-native requirements,” said Peter Smails, SVP and GM of cloud-native at SUSE. “With expanded workload support, enhanced developer experience, advancements in virtual machine modernization and new SaaS offerings we are further strengthening SUSE Rancher Prime’s position as the cloud-native platform of choice.”

Personalized, Regionalized & Promotionalized

SUSE Rancher Prime provides unified management for self-service platforms across a distributed cloud-native environment. New updates to the platform include certification with Temenos Core, the banking technology platform. Always referred to as a “core” banking solution, this lower level system reference is meant to illustrate capabilities within Temenos that provide pre-integrated FinTech services that financial institutions can use to create personalized, regionalized and promotionalized banking products. The integration with SUSE Rancher Prime enables financial institutions to use Kubernetes with enterprise-grade security and scalability.

In the developer experience sphere, SUSE announced new capabilities focused specifically on enhancing programmers’ personal practicalities with SUSE Rancher Prime. The company’s DevX Validated Designs bring together everything needed for development teams to go from code to production in a repeatable and secure way. Rather than creating one static “golden path” for developers, DevX Validated Designs offer composable workflows that software development teams can tailor to their requirements. The first validated design combines SUSE Base Container Images and language SDKs, Gitea or GitLab for source code control and build actions – then there is Fleet for continuous deployment to RKE2 or K3s clusters.

Accelerating VM Modernization

Few vendors are holding back on finding a more polite way to describe VMware exit procedures and SUSE is no different. The company says that it is continuing its investment in providing customers with a “cloud native off-ramp” from traditional VMware infrastructure. It is doing this with its latest version of SUSE Virtualization (version 1.5), the company’s cloud native virtualization solution, which now adds SUSE Certified Storage for Virtualization. 

Here we can find certifications for a variety of well-known storage vendors including Dell, NetApp, Oracle and Portworx. ‌The suggestion here is that an expanded ecosystem of storage certifications provides organizations with openness and choice by allowing them to use their existing storage infrastructure with SUSE Virtualization.

There are also expanded SaaS offerings on offer this year with Rancher Hosted, a pay-as-you-go offering of SUSE Rancher Prime as a fully managed service. SUSE Application Collection on AWS is also now available, offering pre-built, containerized applications and services. Finally, we can also make note of SUSE Cloud Observability on AWS, a managed observability platform for cloud-native workloads. New capabilities here include tailored dashboarding, enterprise scalability of more than 4,000 nodes‌ and health-over-time insights.

SUSE Rancher for SAP Applications 

Not a natural breeding (or hunting) ground for open source technologies, SUSE has worked to extend its capabilities in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) space with SUSE Rancher for SAP applications. Described as software for organizations to “bridge their systems” from SAP to anywhere, SUSE is offering what it likes to call “operational continuity” with key Rancher functions. These include the Kubernetes cluster management platform’s centralized authentication controls, its auditing, backup and upgrade services and – perhaps most crucially – Rancher’s ability to offer observability and alerts to monitor cluster status and help enable accurate security posturing.

Designed to support operations from SAP in hybrid-cloud scenarios, this alliance seeks to provide validated infrastructure to underpin business continuity for SAP workloads.

Mechanics of Validated Infrastructure

“This launch marks an important milestone in our longstanding partnership with SAP and ultimately helps us deliver on our shared customers’ demand for a modern infrastructure solution optimized for efficiency, scalability and simplicity, combined with SUSE’s deep expertise on SAP applications,” 

According to Diego Akechi, vice president of SAP solutions at SUSE, this new SUSE Rancher for SAP applications service is a single package of priority support and SAP-validated components, including SUSE Rancher Prime, SUSE Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE2), Linux, databases and wider container-native applications services.

By deploying Edge Integration Cell (the on-premises containerized integration runtime of the SAP Integration Suite) on SUSE’s Kubernetes infrastructure, businesses can connect sensitive data and external applications with their cloud solutions from SAP. 

Ground-to-Ground Integration

SAP Edge Integration Cell enables customers to run on-premises cloud content integration scenarios within their own landscape, whether that’s a private cloud or an on-premises environment. According to SAP’s Udo Paltzer, SAP Process Integration is used for many ground-to-ground integration scenarios, but Edge Integration Cell enables these users to design and monitor integration content in the cloud, then deploy and run scenarios exclusively in private landscapes.

SUSE Rancher for SAP applications is built as a multi-cloud deployment size technology, i.e., suitable for modestly sized edge environments or for massive installations. SUSE says that Rancher’s multi-Kubernetes management capabilities enable enterprises to manage multiple containerized environments, ensuring consistent operations and efficient scaling.

“Tailored to the needs of SAP teams, SUSE Rancher for SAP applications can reduce complexity by aligning with SAP solution architecture and streamlining collaboration with IT teams. It provides everything needed to run workloads in one package, ensuring readiness for business-critical applications and simplifying processes. The technology combines automated setup processes, security hardening and configuration guidelines. There is also SUSE Security for proactive threat mitigation, and SUSE Observability for advanced monitoring and alerting. Deployments are simplified with automated installations and configurations embedded with best practices,” stated both firms, in a joint press statement.

SUSE Security & Microsoft Sentinel 

SUSE also announced an integration between SUSE Security and Microsoft Sentinel. The integration is enhanced by the generative AI capabilities of Microsoft Security Copilot to provide a unified security approach across hybrid IT environments.

“This new integration is a robust security solution for any organization running cloud native workloads on Microsoft Azure and is a great example of how AI is being used to advance enterprise cybersecurity strategies,” said Laurent Mechain, global head of cloud at SUSE. “We’re excited to deepen our existing work with Microsoft and reinforce our commitment to powering open, secure innovation.”

This new integration is promised to address security posture concerns across complex and diverse cloud environments with its centralized security dashboard, offering users visibility of security threats across environments and the ability to respond to them with automated actions. Microsoft Sentinel raises an alert based on the data and autonomously quarantines the node to prevent any spread while waiting for a human review, significantly accelerating the response time.

Streamlined Security

“In a cybersecurity landscape that is growing increasingly complex, it’s crucial that organizations have the right tools to quickly identify and mitigate security threats,” said David Houlding, director, global healthcare security & compliance strategy at Microsoft. “Collaborating with SUSE will help our mutual customers streamline their security operations and, ultimately, better protect against threats.”

With this new integration, data from SUSE Security events is funneled directly into Microsoft Sentinel. Microsoft Security Copilot then analyzes the data and shares AI-driven recommendations for threat mitigation, giving customers the ability to proactively address potential threats. Microsoft Security Copilot can also correlate SUSE Security data with other data sources within Sentinel to identify patterns and anomalies that could indicate a sophisticated attack.

This integration provides improved visibility, i.e., bringing all signals from SUSE Security together in Sentinel provides a comprehensive view of security threats across hybrid IT environments. It offers AI-driven recommendations from Security Copilot to enable proactive threat mitigation and faster incident response. Security Copilot also correlates SUSE Security data with other data sources within Sentinel to identify complex and sophisticated attacks that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Stronger Software: Stärkere Softwaredienste

Overall, SUSECON appears to be designed to convey a central message of competency that gravitates around infrastructure services that will support, monitor and manage an increasing number of key business continuity measures. If SUSE had had more room on the giveaway t-shirts for its annual conference, it might have used the tagline: Securely configured, intelligently optimized and robustly validated infrastructure services for platform engineering teams working in complex automated hybrid-cloud-native environments.