The acquisition of Rancher Labs by open source innovation leader SUSE last year is expected to help local organisations overcome many of the challenges in their digital transformation journey.

This is according to Jaime Naidoo, Business Development Manager at leading IT infrastructure and software distributor Axiz, which is a SUSE partner in Africa.

He says: “As a leading IT infrastructure and software distributor in Africa, Axiz has, over the years, built strong relationships with vendors such as SUSE, as well as with resellers, to provide and distribute end-to-end enterprise solutions our local markets in Africa need.”

Naidoo says SUSE is a proven open source innovator: “The company has a 28-year history and powers mission-critical applications and systems and is embedded in many devices around the world, including vehicles and medical devices. Rancher is equally committed to the open source community. Taking advantage of each other’s expertise in areas like hybrid IT for cloud native or cloud ready environments and edge computing, the two companies develop solutions that enable innovation and agility in today’s complex business environments.”

Says Naidoo: “The acquisition of Rancher has brought together a best-in-class Linux operating system and a market-leading Kubernetes management platform, which will give customers powerful and modular tools on which to innovate and transform. Together, SUSE and Rancher provide enterprise users with the best of open source innovation and stability.”

Naidoo says SUSE and Rancher address a key challenge in digital transformation: “For a data centre or cloud to be agile, organisations cannot rely on a single, heavy vertical stack. Open source software like Rancher and SUSE evolves with enterprise customers as they move beyond software-defined data centres and embrace edge and cloud computing, providing new hybrid and multicloud capabilities and application delivery innovations that enable customers to transform their digital infrastructures as quickly as they need to.”

Jaco Isaaks, Pre-Sales Engineer at Axiz, adds: “SUSE is designed for mainframes, servers, workstations and desktop computers and includes solutions such as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED). They also provide SLES for POWER, SLES for ARM, SLES for SAP as well as high availability and more. SUSE has been working very closely with industry leaders such as SAP, AWS, IBM, HPE and Dell to cater for different use cases such as digital transformation projects, performance, security and automation to provide enterprise-grade software to address key issues within any organisation. SUSE provides a foundation for digital transformation by helping customers simplify, modernise and accelerate their business.”

Isaaks adds: “With the recent acquisition of Rancher, recently named market leader by Forrester, they provide customers with a Kubernetes Management Platform, that manages and scales workloads consistently across thousands of clusters in any environment and supports any Kubernetes distribution. It also allows organisations to monitor the health of all their clusters through a single pane of glass. This has enabled organisations to reduce application deployment times by 80%,” he says.

Naidoo says: “Axiz, together with SUSE, provides resellers with sales support, marketing, partner management, credit facilities, product information and enablement, to name but a few. We are here to assist resellers and customers, and with SUSE only a telephone call or e-mail away, there is a wall of support to ensure a partner’s success.”