Modern Infrastructure and AI Readiness with Colin Rutherford – SUSECON 2025

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone. We're here in, uh, Orlando, beautiful Orlando at Sussan 2025, continuing our coverage here, talking to some of the, the movers and shakers at, at Sussan Sussan Han.

Let me introduce you to my next guest. His name is Colin Rutherford. And I, we literally just pulled him off of the keystone of Keystone, Keystone keynote stage here at Han, where, uh, Colin was talking.

For those who don't know, well, first of all, I should mention Colin's with Dell. Yeah. And Dell has been a key partner with suse for 20 years, maybe more.

Yeah. Yeah. As long as I can remember anyway.

And so it's no, you know, coincidence that, that, uh, Colin was up on the stage. But first of all, Colin, welcome. Thanks for being on Techstrong TV with us.

Thank you. Thank you. Um, we're going to get into what you spoke about at the keynote, but before we do that, why don't you introduce yourself to our audience, give them a sense of who you are, what you do at Dell.

Yeah. A little bit of your journey. Yeah, Absolutely.

Well, first off, it's great to be here with you. Uh, so yeah, as mentioned, my name is Colin Rutherford. Uh, I am a global presales lead for developer technology and, uh, multi-cloud at Dell Technologies.

And, uh, you know, that's a, a big focus for Dell Technologies of late, uh, as you mentioned, uh, you know, just got off stage from the keynote, uh, uh, with Peter Smells. And we were chatting about a couple of interesting things that happening in the industry. Uh, one being obviously the very interesting inflection point that we've all seen in the industry in the last 12 months, uh, which is in the virtualization space.

You know, I, I think what, what we've seen is customers taking a pause now with this, uh, disruption and focusing on really, I guess, two key areas that is choice and flexibility. And that's where I think the value of the partnership between Dell and suse is, is really helping out, uh, because as they look towards choice and flexibility, suse virtualization is a great option. And, uh, we've worked to bring the infrastructure modernization piece of that puzzle, uh, to, to, to fruition to make sure there's a tightly integrated, You know, it, it, it's interesting because it's rare that the stars just line up the way they have here around pricing available technology options, whether you go multi public cloud, private cloud Yeah.

Combinations there of combinations of public cloud's edge. Yeah. I mean, the, you know, choice happens as it says back here.

Exactly. Right. It, it's, it's rare that all of these things happen.

And, and, and so it has created an inflection point Yeah. Where a lot of organizations, you know, usually they're locked in Yeah. Or your cycles don't match up.

But we're at a point now where a lot of organizations are saying, Hey, wait, this is my chance to pick what I want to do for the next, I don't know, five years, three years, whatever it is. And, and it is great to have options. I I was talking to someone this morning on a, on our Textron gang show about this.

And, and what's interesting is, you know, people always say, I want open, I want open source, so I'll pick an open source platform. Sure. Yeah.

And I, I'm not dinging anyone. I know, right. But just because you picked an open source platform doesn't mean you're not locked in.

Exactly. Yeah. And, and I think that's happened to a lot of people too with certain companies where yes, maybe the Linux they were using is open source, but that Linux comes with a lot of packages that perhaps aren't.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and that's where, that is the same thing with the virtualization piece.

Yeah. The same thing with a lot of it. So it, it, it's, it's interesting times.

I didn't even mention ai. Yeah. Well, yeah, that's another big topic in the industry, right?

Yeah. But it also plays into this, right? Is what I'm picking now gonna help me when I have a lot more, whether it's agent generator, whatever, I have a lot more AI built into my stack.

Yeah. And I, I think that's a good point, right? I think as customers take that pause that I talked about looking at choice and flexibility, you know, they're looking at a platform that is gonna not only provide a good alternative for the here and now, but into the future, right?

You know, you talk about that, that next three to five year journey and, you know, we're still seeing customers on that journey of application modernization. So with that comes a need for having a, you know, a good platform and solution stack that caters for not only virtualization, but container, container orchestration, and also those further up abstraction layers as well, right? Mm-hmm.

Uh, you mentioned ai, uh, I think it would be remiss of us not to talk about that in some way, shape, or form here. And, uh, you know, I think one of the interesting things I've observed through these conversations is that that's also front of mind. How do they position themselves to be ready for ai?

Um, and you know, I think we also saw this at Q Con last year, that realization of just how fundamental and foundational these cloud native art solutions are to providing ai. Right? If you think about it, you know, I go to hugging face today and I download a, a model that comes as a container or a series of containers.

Okay, what do I do with that, right? I need some container orchestration platform to take care of that. I'm gonna look at some kind of ML ops layer and underpinning that I need the infrastructure layer, right?

You still have the compute storage networking, but it's what you do with that, that matters, right? You need to look at the, uh, uh, infrastructures code elements, uh, to make sure that you can have programmability and automation so that you get that seamless experience when you're delivering on that AI outcome. So Yeah, Absolutely.

You know, and we didn't even mention the whole move to microservices. Oh, yeah. And Nate Cloud Native and stuff like that.

It, it really is an interesting time. College people watching this. Were not here.

They didn't see you talk. Right. If you don't mind, give them, I don't know, a three minute, five minute summary of, of the things you, you discussed there.

Yeah. So the, the particular session I had, or, uh, the keynote was around SUSE virtualization. Uh, so one of the big highlights is that, uh, between Susa and Dell, we've gone through, uh, testing, validation and certification, uh, of our market leading storage platforms through our CSI drivers and CSM modules, which essentially bring those market leading and, and, and, and enterprise grade storage features that we all now love to the cloud native and Kubernetes world.

So we talked about that. Uh, we also had a session, uh, yesterday where we just looked at the overall partnership with SUSE as well, you know, 20 years worth. We've done a lot together.

Mm-hmm. A range of different integrated solution stacks and, uh, you know, a lot of value there from the edge to the data center. And the cloud suse have been a great partner.

And, uh, you know, I think we're gonna continue to provide a lot more value to the future as we these, these organizations align. So yeah, it's been, it's been great. Uh, it's resonating with customers, which is the most important thing.

So, yeah. You know, I, I was sitting through yesterday, uh, in the solution showcase right down the hall here. I, last night, uh, I, I saw a demo and it was the first time I really saw the A to Z Yeah.

SUSE solution. Yeah. Right.

Where we talking about, you know, a re a repo Yeah. Their own repo, yeah. Security from the new Vector acquisition, uh, uh, observability.

Yeah. Obviously Linux and Rancher and K eights and all that stuff. It really, you know, I was thinking, I was talking Mitchell Ashley, who works with us, an analyst at Futurum and Techstrong, who else has the, that breadth of, you know, I think a Red Hat perhaps.

Yeah. Um, but as Dell, I mean, this is a great partner for you, right? Yeah, absolutely.

And I, I think, you know, that to your point, you know, it's, it's extensive, right? Mm-hmm. I think one thing that really plays there is, is the, that Susan have taken a look at, at, at the overall view of the technology landscape.

And I guess they've prioritized a couple of different key areas. You know, they've looked at the build, the run, the manage, right? Yeah.

Uh, which are key elements of building and deploying software and how they can support that journey, right? Make it easier for the developer, make them more productive when it comes to developing, committing code and, and, and, you know, packaging, uh, standing up environments, uh, you know, orchestration and, uh, all the other niceties that we have in that, in that world. So yeah, they are very uniquely positioned.

They're a great value add partner for us, uh, and, uh, yeah. Excited for the future. Absolutely.

I want to go another place with you. So yesterday, one of the keynotes I caught was, uh, a data center provider here in, uh, mostly in North America, I think called Switch. Yes.

Yeah. And then later we're talking to the folks from Aussie, uh, Aussie Broadband. Yeah.

Aussie Broadband they saw. So, you know, it's an interesting time to be in the data center business. I mean, a little history.

I helped take a company public during the dotcom days in 99, 2000, we were what they called at the time, a SP application service provider. There's no cloud. Yeah.

We're building data centers and we're hosting apps. We actually were Dell host, I, I had done a deal with Dell. Dell had just gotten into servers maybe two years before.

Right. And we were Dell hosts. So if you wanted to host a server with websites or what have you, we, it was a great, we would lease a server from Dell, right.

Put it in our data center. Yeah. Dell would bill it, and as Dell hosts take their percentage Sure.

And give us back, plus we pay them on the back end. It was a great deal for Yeah, that's great. Um, But in, in any event, you know, there's a lot, there hasn't been this much action in data centers since then, right?

Data center space is at a premium like colo centers. Yeah. You know, they're, they're fault.

We're trying to build data centers literally as fast as we can. Yeah. But what the guy from Switch was saying yesterday, and the RC broadband was, you know, these new servers and the AI servers and the GPU stuff, the heat, the electricity needs.

Yeah. It, it, how, you know, when you look at it is Dell, where, what do I mean? It's an opportunity obviously.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But what do you, what do you, how do you see this playing out? Well, it's, it's interesting, right?

And I think a lot of this, uh, is driven through ai, right? Because everyone's realizing, wow, you know, the, the amount of computation you need, storage, networking, net infrastructure piece is, has floated to the top very quickly, uh, because we know that we need that in order to be successful with ai. And I think that's driven a lot more innovation in that area.

Uh, you know, Dell has been investing in this space for a really long time, and I think that's really starting to show, right? Because, you know, obviously, uh, we have, uh, some great plays out there specifically for AI with our server and compute platforms, but it's also, you know, the programmability that we've built into it, uh, standardization of our rest APIs, uh, that help make that journey with the infrastructure just a little more seamless. Mm-hmm.

Uh, but yeah, it's, it's, it is an interesting time. Uh, we've seen a, a huge kick in in terms of that investment. And, uh, I think we're gonna see a lot more innovation in that space moving forward.

Yeah. And, and I would expect Dell to be at the head of it, right? Yeah.

Yeah. And it is your, it's kind of your market. Yeah, it's, uh, it's definitely a focus for us.

And, uh, I think we are really at the infancy of this uptick in, uh, I think there's gonna be a lot more focus moving forward and, uh, you know, I'm excited to be on this journey and along to the road. Excellent. Yeah.

Colin, last question with a lot of noise here. I people could hear it. I guess it's in between session time right now.

People are breathing it out. Thank goodness. Our mics are pretty good.

It'll filter it. We'll do it in post, but, um, impressions of Sussan talking to people, hearing the buzz. Yeah.

Seeing the sessions. What, what's your take? Sussan has been, uh, a great conference so far.

Uh, you know, the, the reason I like this conference is it's not too big, you know? Right. It's a reasonable size, but it's not, uh, on the grand, grand scale, which means that you can actually have some better quality conversations.

Yeah. Uh, you know, I've, I've got to meet a, a range of different people here and, you know, heading through this solution showcase is, that's always a, a fun activity for me. I love hearing the elevator pitch.

I love hearing what people are solving for. Uh, so that's been really good. And also, I've learn a lot as well.

You know, this is an opportunity for me to take a pause from my day job and, uh, sit, consume, listen, uh, because everyone brings a really unique perspective. And obviously, you know, there's a range of different solutions that we need in industry to be successful with Part Native. And obviously we talked about ai.

So overall, great experience so far. I've got to meet yourself. We are having a chat now.

So again, that networking opportunity. Uh, so yeah, I'm enjoying it. And, uh, hope to be back next year.

Fantastic. Colin Rutherford of Dell here on Textron tv. Thanks for joining us.

We'll continue some suse, uh, con coverage in just a little bit. Stay tuned.