Exploring Cloud Native Computing & SAP Solutions at SUSECON 2025

This is Textron tv. Hey, everyone. We're back here at Scon in Sunny Orlando.

Welcome to our coverage. We've been tell you, we've been speaking to some great people here at Scon. We've had some great conversations.

I think this next one will be a great one as well. Let me introduce you to our guest, first of all, on the far right. Uh, it's Javier.

I'm gonna mess up your last name, Javier Inti from Inti, Javier Inti. We're gonna call him Javier today. And if you couldn't tell from his shirt, Javier is with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HPE as we, we call 'em.

And, uh, Javi, welcome and thanks for joining us today to my immediate right. And how great was this? She wore her green shirt because we're playing this on St.

Patrick's Day. Uh, Natalie Herman, also of HPE. Yes.

Hi, Natalie. How are you? Good, how are you?

Good. You know what, let's start off. Let's tell people a little bit about what each of you do at HPE, what your roles are, and then we'll talk about SCON and HPE and what's going on.

Avi, why don't you go first? Good. Sure.

So, uh, first thing is I'm, I'm working in EMEA, so I travel all the way here from Cze Republic Ban. Mm-hmm. Um, what I'm doing is I'm focusing on cloud native computing solutions, and my main focus is, uh, SUSE solutions on the cloud native computing part inside of HPA Civic, an exciting time to be in that particular role.

Natalie, how about you? Yeah, So I am the Alliance Business manager, uh, for SUSE and SAP in North America. So I work closely with our MCS team for mission critical solutions around SAP, and then, um, also around rancher, some of our edge opportunities.

So really getting, being the liaison between HP and suse so we can work, get our teams working closely together with customers. You know, there's been a lot of news here around the SAP mm-hmm. Suse relationship, and, and unfortunately we didn't have anyone from SAP yet.

Yep. So, I'm gonna ask you to kind of carry that baton and, and talk about this a little bit. There's certainly been a lot of news around Cloud native though, right?

I mean, uh, the, the big thing for me was the DevX, uh, kind of framework, you know, pre-packaged stuff. Javi. What, what's been your take on, you know, the cloud native scene or the cloud native news here at SUSE Con?

So, one of my main focus on my role is, so, you know, HP and SUSE have been, uh, in a relationship for 30 years. Um, that relationship has been, you Called that a commitment. Yeah, definitely.

I mean, since the beginning, basically, uhhuh and that commitment is very, very strong. So, uh, we have, HP has the most performing computing in the world called El Capitan. And it's running, K-O-S-K-O-S is the operating system that we have co-developed with suse.

It's based on SUSE for hp. Really? I didn't know that.

Yeah. So the most performing computing in the world is actually running a co-developed product with HPE and suse. I mean, I know for a long time, you know, there was that period, and I guess it's still ongoing, but everyone was racing to have the, the, the best supercomputer and, and it was really a lot of parallel processing.

And I didn't realize it was, it was SUSE under the covers of the case of the HPE El Capitan. Yeah. Yeah.

Excellent. Uh, Capitan Frontier, and I forgot the name of the third one, because we have the first three, so very strong relationship, and now we are seeing how the market is moving towards com, uh, Cloudnative computing, right. And we continue that, uh, collaboration with them.

Um, as I said, one of my main focus, I'm a solution architect, is try to enable, uh, the, uh, the HP community, whether they are, uh, pre-sales community inside of hp, but also all the partners to articulate the message from the cloud native computing part. Because we, we also, we work with many different organizations, uh, and they're, they have all of them, they have different ways to modernize their applications. Some of them are going very, very fast, but many of them are going much slower.

So we need to help these organizations make that move and SUSE treats. Absolutely. Perfect on, on that part.

I love it. Um, what did you think of this architecture? Did you get a chance to look at this new cloud native a the DevX architecture?

I didn't have time, unfortunately. I've been focusing on, so one of the main focus we have right now is the SAP Oh, yeah, the H itself, obviously, because HP and SUSE have been collaborated a lot, uh, with the SUSE part. So I've been focusing more on that part because it brings both words together, the SAP business and the SUSE business, and we, we see that this is going to be a great opportunity because we have a big, uh, big amount customers that are using SAP, and this can be the first step of modernizing part of their, of their stack.

Absolutely. Natalie, I'm going to, uh, come to you explain to our audience, because as I said, we haven't really covered the SAP kind of announcements and what Javi here's talking about. If you can explain this to the audience.

Yeah. So there's obviously a lot going on with the SAP landscape right now. I mean, SAP's main initiative is getting their customers to move to rise.

Um, with both HPE and suse, uh, we can definitely support that, but there's a lot of customers that, um, need to do some modernization before getting there. So with HPE GreenLake, um, we're able to help customers move to that RISE model. Um, of course, with the assistance of suse, um, we've got the LES for SAP that's really going to support those HANA applications.

Um, there's, like Javier mentioned that long-term relationship, I mean, SUSE and SAP and HPE have been in toge in bed together for 30 plus years. Um, it's somewhat running itself at this point, but, um, constantly making sure that we're keeping our customers, um, up with what they need for, uh, for SAP, having live patching, having SUSE manager to be able to manage the different oss, um, with the Edge integration cell, that's super interesting to see how we can help customers take their data from, um, offline, putting it back online without too much disruption. So I think it's constantly improving.

Um, those SAP applications are not easy to manage, um, especially when it's a mission critical. Um, so to kind of taking the guesswork out of it, the downtime, the scalability of it, um, all things that we can offer through HPE GreenLake, um, and suse being under the hood is the main OS for SAP applications. So I, I'll tell you, people out here say H-P-E-S-A-P SUSE been together for 30 years, and it, you know, it is almost on autopilot.

Mm-hmm. But I think at, at the surface, one could say that, but when you peel that onion back a layer or two, there's so much new stuff going on too. Right.

So, for instance, I, I know we covered on TECHRON again a couple weeks ago, you know, SAP coming out with agents, ai, AI agents Yep. Right. To, to start really accelerating some of this stuff.

Susa continues to push the bounds on making cloud native easier to manage. Right. That whole stack, HPE doesn't sit still either.

Right. They're also pushing the boundaries every day of whether it's using, you know, a, uh, AI processing, GPUs and so forth, or just more, better scalability and maybe taking some of that bump that, that lift out of, you know, spinning up an SAPI mean, it's, it's not a trivial thing. No, it's not.

It's, you, you guys will ever make it not No, but, but still it could be made easier, it could be made better. And, and so there is, it's, it's not static. Mm-hmm.

Right. It is a, a dynamic landscape. I'm wondering, what are you hearing in talking to maybe some of the customers here, the other partners, what, what has been the feedback, if anything, you are hearing maybe some of the other alliance partners or, or some of the end users?

I think a lot of customers, um, are not fully aware of their choices for deployment for their SAP applications. I agree. Um, I mean, whether it's hybrid cloud on-prem, public private, um, it really just depends on which SAP application they're focused in on.

Specifically for HPE, with our mission critical workloads, we have our super domes that are best in class. No other, um, competitors quite have what we have in terms of the superdomes, especially when it comes to the sizing of it. Um, so I think it's really educating customers on what we coin it within HPE is the power of choice.

Mm-hmm. Um, you have rise and then you have non rise. Right.

So, from there, that's kind of the first question to answer and which, which direction you going and how can HPE help you? And I think, like I said, the main thing is public and private cloud deciding which workloads you need to keep OnPrem versus which you can, and not after that edge integration cell comes in. Yeah.

It's not mutually exclusive. Right. Right.

Exactly. They're Slip Flopping. I think that is, I think that was a problem with adoption in cloud in general, is people made an either or bet it had to be one or the other.

Yeah. And it really shouldn't be. Mm-hmm.

You know, as I've gotten older, I've learned always use the best tool for the job. And there are some jobs that lend themselves to a public cloud, some that lend themselves to a private cloud, some, you know, and it's a relatively newer thing where let's run some of this out on the edge. Right.

And not everything has to find its way all the way back to the hyperscale center. Uh, but things that do, you know, and, and there's a, it's kind of a rhythm to that, if you will. Right.

But it, it is hard. I was talking earlier with some people, you know, look, the cloud native computing foundation has 200 projects that they're managing 200. You look at that landscape and you say, okay, I, I wanna run SAP on a cloud native stack, you know, your eyeballs, like a slot machine start going.

Right. And that's really what I think they look to HPE for, to come in and say, Hey, we got, we could do this for you. We got this.

It's, it's not, don't be fooled by the 200 projects out there. This is, I don't wanna say prepackaged, but Yeah. You know, we, we build solutions, Right?

We build it for you. We build a solution and, and as Natalie was mentioning, we build it to the need of the customer. So with GreenLake, what we do is we have a completely hybrid cloud platform in which customers can decide whether they want to have only infrastructure.

So, uh, for customers like that, uh, today we were presenting, uh, there was a, there is a collaboration with SUSE and Infosys for SUSE ai, but we also have solutions that cover the full, uh, stock. So you want to have a an RTVI intelligence platform. We have a private cloud for business enterprise for ai.

Mm-hmm. Uh, that we are able to fully manage fully. We will deploy it, we will manage it, and then the customer only needs to care about the application that they will run on top of that artificial intelligence platform that we have already created.

So that it's, it's, it brings a lot of, uh, it's problem free. So we, we give flexibility as, as you were mentioning, there are going to be best options sometimes in the cloud, sometimes on premise, and sometimes you are need to have something that is in the middle. And yeah.

At hp, what we will look is what will be the best for, for these things. A clear example now is, uh, you, you, you probably heard that there are some people trying to move their VMs somewhere else, right? I don't know what's making them want to do that, but yes, I've heard something about it.

Me neither. Me neither. And, and this is clearly, this is clearly a, a place where we collaborate a lot with, uh, uh, with suse.

Why? So we, at hp, we have created our own platform for orchestration of our VMs. Mm-hmm.

So customers are looking at transactional change. So they want to move their current VMs to another environment and have their under control reduce maybe the cost. Um, they, they, we have H-P-V-M-E that allows to, to do that.

But what happens to those customers that they want to modernize their applications, that they are already thinking about, okay, so this is a great opportunity for me to change the way I do things. That's, so I'm going True architect. Yeah.

So I'm, I'm going to re-architect of course. Obviously you can go to a customer and I say, Hey, modernize your application is a big task because they will need to change the processes the way they do things. But if they're willing to do that move, we'll be able to go with them.

And in that case, user virtualization will be a pet, uh, fit. So H-P-V-M-E can help many customers, but we also collaborate with many partners, including suse, to be able to bring to the market products like suse virtualization that fit where we at HP are not able to get there. And another important thing, and with that, with other people talk, is that we don't only have, uh, SUSE products.

We provide the support for suse. So they are our products. We have a lot of, we have people trained, so you have native supply for these, we have native support, level one, level two.

So customers rely on a single point of contact. They call us, Hey, we have a problem here. Is it the hardware?

Is it the software? Don't worry. We'll figure it out.

And if we need, then we'll contact suse. So they do the changes in their code. Well, Then that's the essence of a great partnership.

But, but I, I wanna come back to the main point you made there, which is we're at an interesting juncture in time. A lot of people are looking at choices around stacks, around infrastructure. You know, uh, we, we've used hypervisors now 25 years, well, more 26, 27 years.

But at the, at the time when you're gonna maybe start changing hypervisors is the perfect opportunity to say, is the architecture of my application forward thinking? Or is it also 25 years old? And while I'm doing this, this is the time to maybe, uh, uh, not multi, to go to a microservices architecture to go to a cloud native architecture.

Whether you run it on a hypervisor or you wanna run it on bare metal or, or you know, something else. Mm-hmm. You've got choices.

We have more choices today than I think we've ever had. Yep. And that's the key.

Now, the flip side is sometimes choices can be overwhelming. Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

Right? And people say, I just want you, what's the best one for me? Mm-hmm.

And that's when they look to an HPE, you know, in a deep partnership with an SAP and a suso to say, okay, I want the least painful path. I want the most scalable, I want the most secure. I want best practices.

Right. I want, and, and that, I think that's the essence of a good partnership, right? Yeah.

As an alliance manager, you, that's exactly what you have to do. Um, so Scon wraps up tomorrow. What's next for you guys?

Oh, we've learned a lot here. Um, I think my focus, like I said, is between being Alliance Manager is definitely to get these teams a bit closer together. Um, I think that there's work should be done around the Edge Integration cell, um, and broadcasting that message to customers.

'cause it's a new feature that we can offer, um, around SAP, but also virtualization being such a hot topic right now. Um, HPE just launched VM Essentials, um, Suso rebranded, uh, their virtualization. We have this AI Infosys messaging.

Um, if we can just tie that all together. I think, like said, there's two buckets. The SAP and then the virtualization world.

Um, I'm looking forward to working closer with the HPE teams from an edge deployment perspective, um, since that's the new and fun thing, so Well, yeah, it is. Mm-hmm. There's always something new and fun in tech.

Yep. Javi, how about you? So on my to-do list, uh, the most important part right now is going to be on the Edge integration itself for SAP.

Um, one of my first goals is going to enable the SAP community inside of HP to understand why Rancher isec create Kubernetes platform. Um, and, and that, that's gonna be a long trip because, uh, we, we have to, our SAP team is focusing on a more analytic application, and I'll explain them about microservices and how, uh, rancher can help, uh, with, uh, the Edge integration platform in. Yeah.

Excellent. Well, guys, thanks for coming on here on Techstrong tv. We appreciate it.

Right. Um, enjoy the rest of kin, enjoy the Orlando weather and we'll stay in touch. We'd like, we'll get updates on this.

Okay. Sounds good. Thank you, Avi.

Natalie, thank you. Hey, we're here at Scon. We got more coming out.

You stay tuned. We'll be back in a moment.