Digital Resilience, AI Drift, and the Power of Open Source

I want to introduce you to Andy Fitzsimon from SUSE, who's here with us today. " Thank you so much for having me, and appreciate you guys running through all of this content and all the discussions you're at. We love it.

It's content. That's what we do. Excellent.

Andy, give us a little bit of your background. Sure. So I'm the senior director of portfolio and brand strategy at SUSE, and that means I look at how the world, how our customers, and how our potential customers, most importantly them, are looking at the gaps either in our technology or just in us showing up as a company.

You know that SUSE is about 2,700 employees odd. Many of the people that are adjacent to us in this market, we're talking more than 10X, sometimes 100X. Right?

And we really need to be able to have the same level of coverage, but also the agility that we have with being a smaller organization. I always say you've got to punch above your class. That's exactly right.

It was funny, another article that I did this week was specifically about this edition of SUSECON, and I called it SUSE Ascending. Right. Something like that.

Because you really, I will tell you, kudos to the team. They did a great job here of punching above your weight class, and I think there's a lot of reasons for that. They're in my article.

There's a little pitch. Go read my article. But SUSE Ascendant, that's the name of the article.

Lovely. Love to hear it. But anyway, Andy, I wanted to talk to you today about a survey that you guys released, I think it was Tuesday morning- That's right, yeah ...

first day of SUSECON here, around resilience. And for me, especially after this week, resilience is tied into sovereignty, it's tied into freedom, it's tied into choice- Mm-hmm ... so many other things.

But tell us about this survey. Let's start with, beyond having something to talk about at SUSECON, why'd we do this survey and what some of the key findings were? Yeah, absolutely.

Look, first, thank you for the compliment on the brand and showing up and kind of ascending, I guess, as an organization. I will say that in many cases it's a lot of hard work, but it's also not rocket science. We did some research maybe two years back, and one thing that just kept coming up was, "I like the chameleon.

" Right. Now, I don't care if you're selling probate insurance. Right.

If you have an identity that people like you before they've even got context of what you are, you lean into that. Yeah. And we're definitely leaning into that.

Good for you. You know, my- Hey, look, Geico's got the gecko. Yeah.

Right? Yeah, absolutely. And so SUSE has the chameleon.

Again, in infrastructure, it's amazing to have one animal all to yourself. Mm. How many tech companies have dogs?

How many have monkeys? Exactly. You know, so- We've seen a lot of chimps.

Absolutely. So that's one thing that we've done based on the insights that we have, and that's what SUSE does a lot over the last, I guess, two and a half years or so. We've really been trying to get the antidote to anecdote.

Right? Talk to as many people that have no idea SUSE exists as possible, and see what would prevent them from becoming a partner in the future or what would get them to adopt our technology. And so again, we get these quick wins.

But late last year, around December, some of this stuff is boring. Some of this stuff is boring for anyone else but SUSE. Sometimes it's about, okay, so if we release the SUSE Rancher on AWS, for example, what does that mean for many of the practitioners that are going to use this?

How does this help them with their EKS workloads? We look into that, but who really cares except for us and AWS, right? I mean- Well, no, I'll tell you who cares.

The people who have to... They care about the results, right? Yes.

They care about the results. They care about themselves. Yeah.

And what's their day to day. A lesson I learned back in the dot com days, right? A mentor of mine, Brad Feld, who's pretty well-known VC, author, and stuff like this, he was the managing partners for SoftBank Venture Capital.

Right. This is back in the dot com. Yep.

They had 250 companies in their keiretsu. My job was to meet with them and figure out which ones made sense for us to do deals with at a company I was involved in that had gone public. Mm-hmm.

So I really got into the mind of startup entrepreneurs. I got into the what made, which ones were successful, which ones weren't. Mm.

And here's the thing, every single startup, successful startup, felt in some small way what they were doing made the world better- There you go ... for someone. Completely agree.

And that's why SUSE has its North Star as choice. That's exactly it. So yeah, it may not be the guy walking in the streets of Prague that do it, but someone- Yeah ...

life is a little easier because of what you're doing. And tapping into that and really understanding the diverse and dynamic conversations is something that has been an absolute privilege. Mm-hmm.

But it's also eye-opening. Now, this research that we've released on Tuesday is actually off the back of a lot of in-depth, one-on-one interviews with IT leaders that we had all the way back in December, and we kept hearing the vocabulary change, but the challenge being similar. Right?

Some people were talking about the NPM supply chain issues that have been going on. Many would name-drop a Cloudflare, a US East 1 outage. It's not because those services aren't great.

We all have hug ops. We all have downtime. It's that many of these things, the criticality of how they were leveraging these services and the preparedness that they were thinking of, their high availability or just their performance, it was made real in these moments.

Mm-hmm. And so, we talkDigital sovereignty or digital resilience. Many folks talk dates where things happened.

Right. They learnt a very bad lesson, right? Yeah.

And they can be price increases with your vendor, et cetera. But it's why we wanted to go broader than just the individuals- Yeah ... and talk to about 309 IT leaders around the world, and see kind of which part of this is a common story.

And we really think that it's transformative over the last six months or so, how increased this conversation has become, how prioritized this conversation- Well, look ... has become. There's the crossing the chasm model, right?

Mm-hmm. Mainstream, early adopters, later mainstream, laggards. Mm-hmm.

Any time you're over 70% on a given, whatever it is you're measuring or looking at- Mm-hmm ... you've achieved critical mass at 75%. More or less, yeah.

Some of the things in here were in the high 90s, right? 98% of- One of the ones that if you've been in the tech industry for a while, you'll appreciate this. Thinking back to the Linux is cancer debate around- Yeah ...

open source, we asked a simple question, right? How important is open source to your digital resilience plans, right? 94% said it was very or extremely important.

There was, I think... Let me do the math here. 6% there said it's pretty important, not very or extremely, but it's important.

Right. Nobody even said somewhat. Nobody even said not at all.

" That's what I'm saying. This is like, it's almost unanimous. We're in 2026, and nobody is saying, "I don't know about open source," because everybody gets it, right?

And that's one of my favorite reflections as we've gone through this phase of software is eating the world, open source is eating software. You know what I mean? And now AI's eating it all.

We'll talk more about that in a minute. We will, yeah. But yeah, no.

" All right. Maybe the survey's off by 10%, so instead of 94, it's 88 or whatever it may be, right? Once you get over 50%, you're talking of one in every two.

I think that's great. You could- At 75, it's three of every four. Bingo.

And so that's why to me, 75 is the critical mass number. At that point, it's the dominant... Look at laptops for instance, right?

Mm-hmm. There was a time where Microsoft was, I don't know, 96% of laptops. Yeah, absolutely.

Right? Full market saturation, right? They were using the M word, right?

And trying to break them up. Yeah. But even today, where Mac is now, I don't know, Mac's probably about 25% of the market.

Mm-hmm. And we all could look here. That's a Windows, that's a Mac.

Sure. You could look around. I love this anecdote for what it's worth, because we're talking personal productivity, not necessarily enterprise criticality.

Yeah. And I love it because I catch an Uber if I'm in a hurry sometimes. If that company disappeared tomorrow, I would still be able to get from point A to point B.

I am resilient to my vendors. And that's a great way- Right? Right.

That's a great way of looking at it. Resilient means not being locked in. Yeah.

Resilient means having choice, or as I've started bandying about this week, resilient and sovereignty- Mm-hmm ... means freedom. Absolutely.

Right? And it's freedom that you should be able to exercise- Yeah ... very fast.

Mm-hmm. And that's something that you probably heard Frank Feldman say in his keynote, if you haven't got the ability to get out, which is something that open source always gives you, you're not a partner, you're an annuity, right? You can definitely be held hostage.

We've been putting out all week a SUSECON preview newsletter every day this week. Uh-huh. Today's newsletter, hey, go get it if you haven't seen it.

You can probably sign up on LinkedIn for it. I actually have Frank's quote in there that for SUSE, openness or open is more than a slogan on a T-shirt. I think that's very true.

Right? That's exactly what he said. It's kind of cute because we've had these conversations maybe in the mid-2000s.

Open source, what is it? Is it a development model? We're pretty sure it's not a business model, but we talk about it in a broader context than just putting code- Right ...

into a repository and releasing it, right? It's, for SUSE, an ethos. Right.

Kind of informs a lot of what we do. And that, to be fair, that's not just from the middle of this decade. This goes back to 30 years plus ago when SUSE was- Yeah ...

they've always been an open company, an open advocate. And- That's always been the source here ... and we work with some of the smartest people in the world, and they consider part of their pay packet the ability to contribute upstream.

Yeah. And that's absolutely fine, right? And there's so many good reasons why that should be the case.

But again, to the SUSE Ascendant article. Yeah. The world has come around to this.

99%, 100% of people are- Oh, yeah ... open source aware. So I think that's huge.

What else did we have in this resilience? So there are some really interesting motivating factors, right? So one of them that actually shocked me especially, was that we asked people, has a foreign entity ever breached their sovereignty, right?

Their platforms. And more than half. More than half said yes, and more than half of that said yes, it was a major incident, right?

So we're not talking about IT leaders that don't know what's going on in their estate. We're talking about people that have, not trauma, but muscle memory about many of these things motivating their resilience, right? Right.

It's very real in that case, and it's the same with AI. Mm-hmm. Many of these folks are talking about it as a forcing function for data transparency, right?

They think that if they were given a bucket of money, maybe 20% extra budget-They would probably spend it on implementing AI first. Yeah. But within that is the right way to implement it, right?

The best way to create continuity of service where you don't have quality drift. It's kind of weird to think about quality drift in the age of AI- Yeah ... because the models keep getting better, right?

We were just talking about it. Yeah. They do keep getting better.

But there's also now this model crashing thing they're talking about. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Where all of a sudden you get a little hiccup. Yeah. " Right?

You know how polite they are. But there is that. But we do keep getting, and I do think we're going to see drift in AI.

It's already happening. Yeah. We've seen this as some of the quotes in the report.

We have one person talking about their cybersecurity fraud tools, right? Mm-hmm. They've invested in AI detection of fraud in particular, right?

They've seen quality drift, or at least they made that comment. Yeah, no, I agree. I see it.

You're betting your business on something that should always work, right? And it's kind of this, we've left the set and forget moment. Mm-hmm.

Now we're in this kind of set and expect, and we're going to have to be in this set and maintain- We are ... kind of. Look, so I've rebuilt some of the Techstrong sites using AI.

I've lived this this week. Mm-hmm. Right?

Realizing that, wait a second, when you go three, four clicks downstream- Yeah. Yeah ... it kind of, you fell off a cliff.

Yeah. So, I get it, no doubt about it. What else is in this report, though?

There was some sovereignty. We actually looked at the confidence of different countries, so we did try... This is an interesting thing about our approach to research, right?

When we do screeners, we're not necessarily trying to discriminate heaps by vertical, because we do think that many of the respondents from any particular vertical that are very active on an issue will overrepresent themselves. And that's actually good. Yeah.

So, in this report, we are leaning towards the manufacturing space, which aligns really well with our industrial IoT motions at the current moment, as well as when you think about it, the needs for sovereignty and digital resilience in that, right? Mm-hmm. It's very much about tenancy.

It's very much about their estate. And there aren't necessarily vendors that, in many of the workloads that we're talking about, particularly manufacturing, right, there's no one to do it for you. Your competitive advantage is doing it yourself.

Right. Right? No doubt.

And so hearing from them was very eye-opening- Mm-hmm ... because we've got people that are accountable for the entire operation of their business, not just, "Well, I've got vendor here for this and vendor Y for that, and I tie them together and I fire the guy who screwed up last time," right? That type of leverage, firstly, doesn't exist anymore.

Right. Especially once you've fully adopted a technology, and it's not open. Right.

But secondly, it's not a competitive edge, right? Yeah. So, I think that's been one of the big revelations that really is behind the whole open source thing is, it used to be a competitive edge to have one throat to choke.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. They're there 24/7.

But I think people realize that the walled garden, the lock-in, is a terrific inhibitor of choice, of freedom, of... It's almost like you're so inbred that you can't... Do you know what I mean?

It's a good point. Actually, maybe about a week or two ago, The Economist and Telstra, shout out to my Australian friends- Mm-hmm ... put out a digital resilience report of their own that really double-clicked on the vendor strategy.

Right? The fact that there isn't much insight into their vendors and the resilience of their vendors. Yeah.

And I mean, that's fine. We mentioned the Cloudflare, we had two outages last year. Whatever.

It might have ruined someone's afternoon. It didn't ruin anybody's day. But no one kind of saw some of these things coming.

" That's not the case. You still need to build in your own failover. Look, we had a, I'm not going to mention names, but a password manager that we had used- Oh.

It's a honey trap, right, for any kind of cyber-attack. But they have a breach once, it could happen. We're all...

Twice, boy, they're a big honey pot. I think I know who you're talking about. Yeah.

The third time, the fourth time, I don't know if I want to trust them with my passwords anymore, right? Pretty much. It's time to move.

So, I think that's human nature. A little bit of human nature is like, you just got to go with it. Yeah.

Andy- What is it? Once burnt, twice shy type thing? Yeah.

Right. Well, exactly. There is that, and there's fool me once, shame on me.

Yeah. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Glad you didn't do that. Fool me three times- Yeah ... and I'm a fool.

But anyway, we're running low on time. Where could people go maybe get more on this report and dig in for themselves? This is what I'm really proud of.

com. We're not asking for your email address. We're not asking for your title.

Don't even need to register. Everyone can get it. This is just a pulse at the current moment that helps the industry, right?

We think that there isn't a rapid enough read on all of these multifaceted changes, and we just want to be able to contribute to that. I love it. And so we're glad to put it out there.

We will be basing some of our technology decisions on this. We've seen in the keynote that a lot of these things, they're- Play into the currents that you're swimming in, right? Right.

And it's about responding to reality, right? Not just, in open source, I'm guilty of this, building the next cool thing, right? We all are.

And at SUSE, we have some amazing, intelligent customers. We have super fans. Mm-hmm.

But we want to make sure that the friends we haven't met yet, and that is many people who have maybe not interacted with SUSE commercially before, they're taken care of. We're anticipating them, right? Yeah.

Because there's a lot of them, and they're all running out of the one exit in many cases. Yeah. We definitely want to give them that choice.

Absolutely. You know, Andy, never forget, the whole key is if you can make someone's life a little bit better with what you're doing, it was worth it. Mm-hmm.

Absolutely. I agree with that. Appreciate the time.

Thank you. Thank you. Andy Fitzsimon here on Techstrong TV.

We got more day three SUSE Con coming. Stay tuned. This is Alan Shimel.

We'll be right back.