SUSE expanded its AI platform today with new tools and a new partnership but SUSE AI, which first launched in November of 2024, lags far behind other AI platforms.
“The product delivers valuable insights into AI workloads, LLM token usage, and GPU performance, and increased functionality to support the development of agentic workflows,” says Abhinav Puri, VP and GM of portfolio solutions and services at SUSE. The updated product also has enhanced security features, including LLM guardrails.
“Our vision is to be the platform of choice for running AI applications,” says Puri.
Enterprises are wrestling with a gamut of tools and technologies that are always changing, he says. SUSE AI help gets this under control with a curated, integrated selection of the best tools available.
When SUSE AI launched four months ago, this included three core components, including Ollama for installing and managing LLMs and RAG embeddings, the Milvus vector database, and OpenWebUI.
Today, several other components were added, Puri says, including MLflow, which can help manage the entire agentic AI lifecycle.
“And every few weeks we’ll continue to add to the library,” Puri says.
SUSE also announced a partnership with Infosys today. The system integrator has the Topaz AI platform, which includes a set of services and solutions to help enterprises build and deploy AI applications.
SUSE is also integrating the Infosys Responsible AI toolkit into the SUSE AI platform, which provides security and observability.
“By making the Responsible AI toolkit open source, we are fostering a collaborative ecosystem to tackle the complex challenges of AI bias, opacity, and security,” says Balakrishna D. R., executive vice president and global services head for AI and industry verticals at Infosys, in a statement.
“Not only are we providing these tools but also blueprints — step-by-step implementation guides and reference architectures,” says Puri. “So our customers have a faster time-to-market with their AI deployments.”
Tough competitive landscape
SUSE is a latecomer to the AI game.
Red Hat, which dominates the enterprise Linux space, launched RHEL for AI in Mary of 2024. RHEL AI supports agentic orchestration and Red Hat OpenShift AI provides a unified platform for creating multi-agent systems.
Red Hat is also a much bigger player than SUSE, accounting for the majority of the enterprise Linux market.
Red Hat reported $6.5 billion in annual revenues in 2024, with a double-digital annual growth rate. By comparison, SUSE, which last reported its financials in 2023, had about $0.67 billion in annual revenues at that time.
OpenAI, DataBricks and other AI companies also offer agentic platforms, as do all the hyperscalers, and enterprise vendors like Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, and SAP. For some experts, SUSE AI is a little too late.
Andy Thurai, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, has doubts about how valuable SUSE’s AI platform will be for enterprises, since many are starting with the options available via the hyperscalers they already work with.
“Or they partner with hybrid providers, like Dell or HP, who provide a packaged version for you, with an ecosystem,” he says. “Without providing an ecosystem, how much traction would SUSE have? I have no idea.”
People already using the SUSE operating system might find it useful, he says, but the people who work on the operating system level are not usually the ones building AI applications, he says.
“It comes across as very ‘me, too,’” Thurai says.
Source:: Network World