Why Digital Sovereignty Is Becoming a Strategic Imperative for Enterprises

Hey, everyone. Welcome back here now to Techron tv. I'm thrilled to have my next guest on.

He's a friend of mine. I, truth be told, we probably spent more time talking off camera, then we're gonna spend on camera here. But, uh, I'll be seeing him in person at, uh, Shan in, uh, Shan in, uh, Prague.

I believe it's April 20, the 23rd, something like, like that. That's correct. Absolutely.

Um, his name is Andreas Prince. Andreas has, as he told me when we first got on, he only has one job now. Right.

He is global head of Sovereign Solutions for suse. And, uh, Andreas says that, of course, tongue in cheek. He, Andreas is a former CEO the company acquired by Seus Suer, uh, Stax State.

Right? Correct. Absolutely.

And, Uh, and then he, he's worn several hats at suse, but now as he says, he has just one hat and he's laser focused on it. Andreas, welcome to Text Drunk tv. It's great to have you back.

Thank you so much, and glad to be here again. Absolutely. So, Andreas, let's go right to this new role.

I, I think I interviewed you when you first were appointed, uh, global Head sovereign, you know, took up the mental of moving this forward for suse. But, you know, for people out here who maybe are not familiar with digital sovereignty yet, how important it's become, talk about that and, and why Souse in particular, you know Yeah. Saw fit to take a senior person like you to, to head this up.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Happy to, uh, happy to do that. And I must admit, I don't think it's about six or seven weeks ago that we spoke, or probably a little longer, but I learned so much over the last few months.

So let's, let's talk about that in a little as well. Um, but I'm, I'm driving the global initiative around, uh, sovereignty, right? Because we see the world becoming more and more isolated, which is a kind of sad, uh, because it's killing innovation as such.

But what is the good part of that is companies and governments and, um, even continents are becoming aware of their dependencies on other parties, right? And that is posing the question is how sovereign or how resilient is actually my business. And I do think that that is a very valid question to ask by, by any company, what are my dependencies to, uh, to other countries?

And in my initiative, what I try to do is really connect all the, the gold, how I'd like to put it in our portfolio as suse is running a full open source portfolio and use that to help public sector mission critical infrastructure, highly regulated banking to let them use open source to ultimately increase their autonomy, because the more autonomous they are, the better, and they can run the business themself. So I'm bringing product marketing, sales positioning, but also a little bit of influencing Brussels, if you like, from a policymaking perspective to, um, yeah. To, to come to a better answer to all the foreign influences that the different regions in the world are facing today.

Yep. You, I wanna address that for a second. Different regions in the world, a lot of people think of the digital sovereignty movement as, oh, this is a European thing.

They wanna be, you know, sovereign and independent, but no digital sovereignty. I, as I said on my shimmy, says a couple weeks ago, it's a, it's a national sovereignty issue, but it even, it goes below even the nation state. It, it's a municipality issue, it's a province issue, it's a state issue.

It goes all the way down to a personal issue. Yeah, yeah. Right.

The issue, the idea of sovereignty over one's data sovereignty over one's technology infrastructure. Yeah. Yeah.

It, it, I think it has to become sort of like a basic human right. A basic right. Yeah.

And we have to think of it as such, and it, and it goes beyond just Europe. Yeah. So it goes beyond Europe, as in, we see it equally happening in Africa, middle East, apec.

Right? So many, many regions are asking, and if I would ask my American colleagues, they would not call it sovereignty, but they very often speak about data security in the context of ai. Right.

Which connects it back to your, to your statement, right? Because it's all about the data. Um, so we see different wording, but all, all regions I would argue across the world are becoming more and more aware to take action.

Um, and then on the other side of the spectrum, and SUSE is not that much involved there, but if you think about many countries putting strict regulations on what teenagers can do on social media platforms, right? And, and increasing the, the bar, right? The age before you can enter a platform ultimately, right?

For addiction, but also for a protecting data sovereignty, these type of elements. So it's definitely a human. And last week I was at the open source, um, week in Brussels, and, uh, one of the, the German ministers from one of the, the areas in the north of Germany, he spoke about that they've moved already to 60 to 70% of all their software towards open source.

So it's not that Germany as a country, but these portions of Germany are, are moving big time. So it's hard, but there's a lot of 50, 60% that's relatively simple to do. Right.

And then the rest Yeah. Ultimately will follow if you free a budget and efforts to, uh, to get there. Absolutely.

You know, there's another element to this too that we have in hit on and driving. You mentioned here in the states, in America, um, you know, I, we've seen this in the US for some time where some states tax, right? Charge for business you do within the state, online and so forth.

So there are a lot of businesses who will say, I don't want my infrastructure, even though I'm using AWS or Google or Microsoft, I don't want my infrastructure stored in this state because then I'm subject to their taxes Yeah. And their laws. And so again, it breaks down, but, but there is the financial, as there always is, is in there the financial aspect of, of having, again, sovereignty control over your footprint, over your data.

Well, and, and interesting, I don't know the the details, but what is the EU doing is, is the opposite. Um, so, um, uh, funder Lion, she announced an initiative, right? And let's see if we can realize it, which is called EU Inc.

So rather than having a, a company that resides in a country with its own tax rules and labor rules and whatever, and they have the ambition to establish something, and I do think ideal for IT companies across Europe, because by doing so, it's much more interesting for a startup to remain in Europe, right? Because then if you sell in one country, you're able and allowed to sell in all countries across Europe. So all of a sudden you're targeting a, a much bigger market, um, than moving first to the us.

Um, right. To, because that's what a lot of European companies do if they go to series B, that they have to go to the US have to, to have much faster growth. So it's interesting that the EU is also having these considerations to, to make it easier to grow a company here in, uh, in the eu.

Yeah, sure. Standardization makes it easier because it becomes reliability, predictability, et cetera. You know, speaking of the EU though, the, the, uh, the 2025 EU cloud sovereignty framework, is that what you're referring to here?

Or is that something else? No, that's, that's something else. So the, the EU Inc is really a company type, right?

That is applicable for the whole of Europe. The framework is another very fascinating instrument that the EU has launched. Um, I'm very positive about it because it's simple.

It's only six pages. Uh, but it helps executives, I would argue, to really understand what sovereignty is, because it have defined eight objectives to do that. And it then gives a very interesting five grade scoring mechanism to help them understand, to rate on these eight objectives, uh, scoring five.

And that's interesting because then all of a sudden they can start to assess, um, their products, their IT stack and understands what their risk is or their exposure, if you like, from a sovereignty perspective. So what I do think where EU really succeeded is to make a, a framework that is comprehensive, um, but still very easy to consume and to, to understand that we see a rapid rise. It's mentioned, people are writing about it, it's popping up in RFPs, right?

So people are really using it to understand what it is they need and where they are today. Excellent. Excellent.

Now, is this, this framework, has it been pa like is it official EU legislation that they voted on, or is it, because I know in the eu sometimes they'll have like a, a working model session, right? Where they, let's see, you know, we're waiting to hear back from industry and other people before we actually make it law. Yeah.

It's much more like this. So it's early days, and so if you take a look at the regulation, it's the Cyber Resilience Act needs to, and Dora, right? Mm-hmm.

Which are really, really laws and regulations applied to the countries. And then this framework, I do think that's why the word framework is in, is still a recommendation, right? So if you need to think about sovereignty, this is how you can assess your own situation, how it might turn into law.

I don't know if that's gonna happen, is that they're requesting particular scoring levels. So imagine the, the government of the Netherlands or Germany would acquire software and they might say it needs to score, right? At least a three or at least a two, right?

On the, on the framework. Um, right? That's, that's how it's potentially be used.

So not in a law, but more as if you do procurement, you might see this framework popping up by articulating, Hey, you need to at least score a two or a three or a four, um, in this, in this perspective. Excellent. Yeah.

Andreas, I wanted to ask you, I I, I remember reading this news, I saw you were featured, you spoke out, and I think SUSE put out some pr and there I saw some LinkedIn activity, you know, AWS so one of the big three hyperscalers Yeah. Announced a, uh, sovereign environment, a sovereign offering spec specifically for eu. And SUSE is one of the strategic partners.

Yeah. Yeah. In that, yeah.

I wanted to ask you, how does that work though, with AWS still being sort of a US based Yeah. Uh, corporation. Yeah, That's, that's very interesting one.

And if you take a look, uh, if you go back to the framework, uh, the framework articulates sovereignty in many aspects, right? It is where your data resides. It is the personnel who's working there.

It's about the supply chain. It's about the software being used, it's about jurisdiction, it's about strategic. Um, and if you think about our customers as some customers, let's say a public, um, or a government, right?

They want to go very strict, right? And they might say, Hey, even AWS right is not good enough for my, my online identity management. I want to go to a more local regional data provider, right?

That, that might be a move. And then the AWS European Cloud isn't a so solution for them. We have a lot of other customers who say, Hey, I want to get guarantees that it runs in Europe, right?

Because that's important that I have European personnel working on it, because that's important, but I'm still a global company, right? So the fact that I'm under the cloud act, right? And because that's where a lot of people refer to, it's still okay because I also have an American entity as a, as a company, right?

So people think about this very black and white, and I do think it's much more nuanced. There are customers who wanna benefit from a hyperscaler type of capability because they don't want to have an own data center or whatever. They wanna benefit from the rich marketplace capabilities that I'm assuming will grow there as well, um, but still get more strict, right?

Than the regular AWS type of contract. So it's a very nuanced approach, and we have a lot of customers that are across continents, right? And that are simply anyhow tied to a hyperscaler solution to make it beneficial or to make it, um, to make it work.

Um, so we really follow the customer, and that's why you will see us doing announcements on very sovereign solutions, right? Owned by European in Europe, European personnel, but also we have a lot of customers who want to go to the AWS European, um, clouds. So yeah, that's, that's the kind of meeting the customers where they are.

Excellent. Excellent. Andreas, it occurs to me that the man, you only got one job, but there's so much going on right now with it for our reader readers, excuse me, our listeners are watchers out there.

They're not really reading this. Um, where can they go to stay up on all of this? Yeah, no, that's, uh, very hard.

There's a lot going on. If you only follow your own LinkedIn feed, hey, if there's a conference going on, then it's populated with lots of articles. Um, the question really is what is it that you're after?

And what I notice in sales conversations is that people are, I mean, we're, you and I are speaking about right, the world moving and, and, and, and things that we need to build and isolation and innovation, but a lot of people are, are just trying to become aware of what is actually happening, right? How do I need to assess my own stack, right? So a lot of the market is, is much earlier days.

And what we launched last week is a self-assessment based on the EU framework that helps you to measure how you score your own stack. And by doing so, you get a very extensive gap analysis, right? And I do think that gap analysis, the text helps you to better understand and articulate where you need to go with your roadmap, with your product improvements, um, and whatever.

And the reason why we developed it is predominantly because the world, right? Or Europe, if you like, doesn't know how to express and make a roadmap, right? A lot of these CIOs or CTOs and how to make a roadmap that is reducing my overall sovereignty risk as such.

So yeah, definitely every looked it up, right? And, uh, I do think that's very helpful to, um, for many people. Excellent.

Excellent. com and find it from there? Suse sovereignty dash test?

Yeah. Got it there. I was hoping you'd have something Andy like that.

Absolutely. Andreas, do you have any spare time to do anything else, or is this consuming you at this point? Well, I'm a little bit of a fennel fight coating, so I like to run some, uh, some tiny, sometimes personal experiments.

Uh, and my duty is at home raising a big family. So, uh, lots of hobby projects there, if you like. Absolutely.

You know, I want to, one other thing I, I noticed this morning here, I think the Netherlands specifically just came out with some sovereignty, not guidelines, but a plan of three, three areas. Yeah. You want to talk about that a minute?

Yeah, definitely. And I do think that that's pretty interesting for the rest of Europe to see how that shapes up. So we, uh, we had elections, uh, and then in less than 90 days, right, they formed a coalition, which is pretty fast for the Dutch standards.

Um, and they articulated a coalition agreement. I had three parties seeing if they can, can govern the country for four years. Um, what was really strong is that it contained a two or three paragraph, or sorry, a three paragraph, two pager, uh, in that agreement with regards to sovereignty.

So it was about sovereignty itself, cybersecurity, and really the scale, uh, and scale and skill of people and the scale, how to apply that gap. Uh, and what I like there is they did in my mind, the first attempt to make it very tangible, um, and at least address the risk. Now, I, I understand it's up to the government and the ministries had to make it tangible and to put it into motion.

Um, but what is good is that at the government level, we think about, well, to your point at the, the, the sovereignty of the nation and how we could drive that forward. And I'm expecting added other countries, a if election would pop up, and if they need to come up with an agreement, they will do more or less the same and really address sovereignty and open source and, uh, procurement processes in a very structured way. So let's, let's see, right, if, um, if this moves stuff forward, um, still the government.

So I'm very hopeful and we're having lots of good conversations, but, uh, the work still needs to happen. Absolutely. Alright, Andreas, we're about outta time.

I wanted to thank you for coming on. Look, I think what you've, it's not like you haven't worked on important things before, but this is one of the most important things you're gonna work on you. Right?

And, uh, I think when you look back at some point over your career, this will be a, a, a really linchpin, you know? Yeah. A real big, big part.

Um, and I could think of a better person at SUSE to run this. So thank you. Keep doing what you're doing.

Do keep us informed. I'll looking forward to seeing you in, uh, April in Prague. Absolutely.

Looking forward to that. And let's Continue and, uh, we'll continue. But if something comes before then you'll come back on.

We'll talk more. Well, no worries. We'll do that.

All Right. Excellent. Andreas Prince, global head of Sovereign Solutions for Susa here on Textron tv.

We're gonna take a break. We'll be back.