Beyond the Server Rack: Udo Wuertz on the SUSE AI Factory

Hey everyone. Welcome back here to our SUSECON coverage. It's day two, day three, I'm not sure, because there was zero day, and does that count as a day?

But in any event, we're here continuing our coverage. I want to introduce you to Udo Wirtz. And Udo is the CTO for FSAS Technologies.

It's a Fujitsu company, so it's part of Fujitsu. Udo, not Usu. Excuse me, Udo.

No problem. Welcome to Techstrong TV. Yeah, thank you.

It's great to be here. It's great to have you on here. Let's start with you better.

Sure. Tell people, I mean, I've said you're the CTO, but give us a sense of your journey. Yes.

So, I'm now since 13 years with FSAS Fujitsu. FSAS, which is a Fujitsu company, so we are driving the platform business. And I was a former CIO in retail business for 17 years.

Founder of a cloud service provider, and then later on, moved to Fujitsu FSAS. And then I had some projects working the Silicon Valley for quite some time. And, yeah, since last October, I'm the CTO at FSAS and Fujitsu Fellow.

I have experience in AI over the last years. Generative AI, really from the very beginning on. Mm-hmm.

But now as a CTO, the role changes. AI is super major topic, but we have quantum computing as well. Absolutely.

We have new technologies such as Monaca, new chips, NVIDIA engagements, and with all the partners. So, it's a lot of things on the table. You got your fingers in a bunch of stuff, but it keeps you busy and occupied, right?

Yeah, definitely. And a lot of travel, right? Sounds like my life.

Welcome to my world. Yeah, but this is why, for me, I'm a little ADD, so it's good for me. There's always something new I can dive into, right?

That's right. When I get bored with this, I dive into that. I think that's the advantage of this job, right?

Yeah. IT is great in this respect. And it's a great time to be in this.

Absolutely. Absolutely is right. So I've got to be honest, I don't know if a lot of our audience is familiar with FSAS.

Yeah. I mean, we are rebranded, so, in the past, the name was Fujitsu Technology Solutions- Okay ... in Europe.

FSAS is a brand which is well-known in Japan as they founded FSAS decades ago. And now we renamed the company, and we are FSAS Technologies, Fujitsu company. And we are the platform business, but I would not only say the platform business in the sense of hardware.

Of course, hardware is an important topic for infrastructure- Sure ... no question. But what we see, and this is the transformation that we have done at FSAS over the last years, is really to bring solutions and solution stack on the infrastructure layer.

So when the customer is looking for serving a specific use case, it's an overall offering. Right. So from the infrastructure layer, the operating systems, whatever you have, including the application if needed, especially when it comes to AI or quantum computing and things like this.

So, this is where we are moving forward, right? Understood. Whoever thought that hardware would be so sexy again, though?

Yeah. Definitely. So right now we see this serenity discussion, right?

We also see a cost discussion. Yes. I mean, when we are here at an event and big announcement regarding the SUSE AI factory with NVIDIA.

And we are launch partner in Europe, the exclusive launch partner in Europe, and this is really great, right? " And you are getting charged by every question you may have, the results that you get. So token, that's the magic word.

I know. I live with it. Yeah.

And it could be super expensive. And the next problem which comes up is API. So when we are using AI, which totally makes sense, with systems or systems interacting with AI.

Think about agents, right? You are out of control how much conversations do they have, and how the invoice will look like at the end of the month. And that- I got to tell you, I had a conversation- ...

and that's the topic ... with my agent today because we're at Techstrong, I am CEO founder. Yeah.

" Yeah. Don't worry about the tokens. It's coffee money.

I want you to tell me what you're doing with it. Yeah. So I had it redo one of our sites.

And it was looking good. I asked it to make a small change, and the whole thing got messed up. Oh, wow.

" Yes. Yep. Tokens aren't free.

" It's math. Yeah. It will not give you tokens.

No, no, no, no. You can't. I think that's where they boxed it in.

Yeah. It did apologize. Not in this case it'll give you money back.

Right. It did apologize and said, "I'm sorry. " Yeah.

And the meter was running againIt is what it is. But another thing is though, it's not like in the old days where you went and bought a Sun server, a SPARC 2 or something. Yeah.

And build everything by your own, right? Right. Connect cables and- Right.

Now, you're buying this- I was born in this age. Me too. Oh.

I could tell you stories. But anyway, but now you literally buy a stack. True.

On the hardware. It's already loaded. Yeah.

Your virtualization layer, your cloud native layer- Yeah ... your AI layer. Yeah.

Whether we're talking about inference chips or GPUs or a combination of, and we talked quantum right before. That's coming, too. Yeah.

It's a very different world- Yes ... where you're buying integrated stack. Yeah.

And I think the assumption is everything is getting easier, but it's not. It's getting more complex. It might be easier from a customer point of view to consume resources, but it's getting more complex to assign them in a proper way.

I think the only thing that's easier is it's one SKU maybe. Yeah. Right?

But when you dive in, it is much more complicated. Yeah. If you don't mind, I want to talk about the SUSE relationship.

Sure. So I would imagine as part of this stack that you're offering with- Yeah ... Fujitsu through FSAS- Yeah ...

SUSE Linux, maybe SUSE Rancher, SUSE Virtualization- Yeah ... a good chunk of this SUSE stack are all- Yes ... part of that.

As far as I know, we are the largest in Europe, a partner of SUSE. We have a longtime relationship. SIP business as an example.

Sure. So this is where we traditionally are using SUSE. But over the last years, and I said it this morning in the keynote, a few years ago, I think it was three years or so, we kicked the tires for our AI test drive, which is an infrastructure in Frankfurt where we have the capabilities for customers to do all of those testings.

And we said, "SUSE, we have to improve," because at that time, three years ago, SUSE had some headroom for improvement in terms of make use out of the GPUs and so on. " And then we kicked the tires for SUSE AI. And so it was handmade with the team, with Jens Adam from SUSE, Mark Connelly, Jochen Riedesa and Motaz Kader and others.

And at the end, we created some white papers and best practice guides on how to install it. And then it was also the time when they took over Rancher. Yeah.

And we had really one of the very first Rancher installations. " Also, at that time, not everything was fully integrated. But then it has matured over the years, and it's really great to see right now how this works.

So on one hand, we have SUSE AI factory with NVIDIA as announced this week. Yes. I think this is also super important for developing AI solutions.

To the contrary, we also have ready-to-use AI solutions, bullet-proven, already in the market, where customers get a predefined set of functionality where they pay for and they can use it immediately right away, everything based on SUSE. So SUSE is definitely a strategic partner in Europe- Yeah ... for our AI solutions.

And the infrastructures we have shown, Jochen Riedesa, he's with me today as well for a presentation. So he was showing solutions we have with Osaka and others. Those are project names.

So where we are showing a Rancher stack, where we have solutions on top, where we have NVIDIA under the hood, et cetera. So I think the worlds are now connecting together, and that's really interesting. It is.

And I wrote about this this morning on one of our sites. Yeah. There was a baseball executive many years ago, Branch Rickey.

Okay. He's the guy who brought Jackie Robinson into baseball. Okay.

But they once asked him about luck, and he said luck is 80% perspiration- ... 20% inspiration. Yeah.

" All of these things they're working on, the AI- Yeah ... the cloud native, the open infrastructure, the sovereignty- Yeah ... have come together at this moment in time to put them in a very good position.

Yeah. But it's the perspiration- Yeah ... the work that has done it, working with Fujitsu these years.

Yes. Last topic I want to turn to, though, is our audience is a global audience. We're about- Sure ...

40% US, 30% EU, Europe, EMEA. Yeah. The rest of the world.

Yes. Japan, we think of as, look, a very mature IT market. Sure.

But a little bit of a black hole. Yes. How are they feeling about AI, about digital sovereignty?

Yeah. Is it similar to what we're seeing here, what we hear in the States? Yeah.

And realizing you're based here. You're not in Japan. I'm based in Europe.

Yes. I'm based in Europe. But what do you see?

In some cases, Japan is a black hole for us as well. Okay. But to be honest, so what we see isIn the past, the approach of a customer in Japan is a little bit different to what we have.

So you trust well-known companies, and Fujitsu is one of those, in IT number one and so on. And when they give advice how to make something, and to build infrastructures and solutions, they do it. They follow your recommendation.

At the same point in time, the company makes sure that we have the resources for the customer available, and this could be also that the resources are in the office of the customer and working there to bring the project up and running. Europe is a little bit different. We have a lot of competition in Europe, and customers are very innovative in the sense that they are looking always into new technologies and can they- Yeah ...

build them by themselves. Right. I would not say that Japan is not doing this, but Japan has a little bit of different approach in this respect.

In Europe, companies always searching for the new topics might be the same in US. Yeah. And you have to compete.

They are asking for features. Mm-hmm. They are asking for the implementation of new technologies, for new processor generations, the latest GPUs and frameworks from NVIDIA and whatever when we think about AI.

And so this is where we, of course, have to compete, and this is what we are doing, and therefore it's really great to develop such solutions here and bring it on SUSE AI and connecting the dots, as I said before, right? What also has changed is sovereignty approach. Mm-hmm.

So we have seen the geopolitical situations over the last one, two years has changed. To say the least. And from a European perspective, I think it's very clear that we have to be more independent, which is difficult- Yeah ...

because we are consuming a lot of, especially US-based services, as they are the major services on this planet, right? Yeah. Those Amazons and Microsofts and Googles and you name it.

But I think it's also important to be more sovereign and one of the fields of tension, I think that's the term in English, right, is we have a lot of regulations. We would not live in the European Union if we would not have regulations. And we have a strong regulation regarding data protection, data safety.

US has also regulations such as the CLOUD Act, right? And in some cases, from a legal perspective, they are not matching. No.

But from a decision-maker point of view, a CIO who would like to consume US cloud services, his headquarter is located in Europe, and he has to stick with the rules in Europe. Sometimes it's not that easy. No.

The head of Microsoft France said, whether or not they're in France or not, if the US government wants access- That's the thing ... there's a problem. That's the thing.

Look, we live this every day. Yes. Because it's even worse in the US because every state has their own- Yeah ...

regulations. Yes. So you could have 50 different regulations that don't always- Yeah ...

match. Yeah. We could talk about it off camera.

It's a mess- Yeah, yeah ... to say the least. Yeah.

We're out of time, though. I know you said you have a YouTube station. Yeah.

A YouTube channel of your own. Yes. Well, put a plug in for it then.

Where can people watch you on YouTube? Yeah. It's a German channel, honestly.

That's okay. We get people from- It's WirGetKaidi, but it's a nonprofit channel, and honestly, I have to renew some videos. Ah, okay.

It's about how AI works. The basics are there, and we have shown also with self-driving cars and things like this. So if you would like to learn and how AI works, so this could be a good channel.

There's one topic that I have in mind, which is Mamoru. Oh, okay. This is a topic that we had this morning in the keynote.

Yes. And this is an agentic platform which allows you to manage and operate your infrastructures. Really?

Based on SUSE, connected with NVIDIA devices, and it's up to a level that it could autonomously react with functions that you have proven and give allowance to the AI to work with it. I love it. It's available now?

It's available now for POC installations, so we have first customers. So yesterday, we had a conversation with a customer that he has more than 20,000 devices, and they would like to implement Mamoru, and we are now working on it. Can you spell Mamoru for the folk?

It's Mamoru, M-A-M-O-R-U, and it's a Japanese term, and it means strong, taking care. It's very positive, so it's a kind of protector. I love it.

So the terminator, so to speak, in a positive sense. I'll be back. It's a positive sense.

I'll be back. I'll be back. Okay.

Udo, thank you so much for coming on. Yeah. I appreciate it.

As you said, you are the biggest partner here in Europe with SUSE. And I can see why, right? Yeah.

It's a win-win- Yes, definitely ... relationship. All right.

All right, folks. We're going to take a break. Thank you.

Thank you. Check it out, FSAS with Fujitsu. We're going to take a break.

We'll be back with more here at SUSECON.