In this interview from SUSECON 2026 in Prague, Peter Smails, general manager of cloud-native at SUSE, joins theCUBE Research's Paul Nashawaty to discuss how open-source principles are becoming a survival requirement for enterprises navigating hybrid and multi-cloud complexity. Smails argues that while open source is not a new concept, many vendors have drifted toward proprietary models at precisely the wrong moment — when customers most need resilience and digital sovereignty. He explains why avoiding single points of failure demands a trusted, interoperable ecosystem rather than opinionated vendor stacks, and details how SUSE Rancher Prime delivers consistent operations across data centers, multiple clouds and edge environments from a unified control plane, reducing complexity for organizations increasingly reliant on generalist IT teams.

The conversation also explores how the post-VMware landscape is sharpening demand for modern virtualization alternatives. Smails details how SUSE Virtualization enables organizations to run traditional virtual machines and container-based workloads under a single, consistent management interface — letting enterprises modernize at their own pace without disruptive rip-and-replace migrations. He underscores that encapsulation remains a valid path for heritage systems where refactoring isn't practical, while the underlying platform quietly enables a path forward. The discussion closes on SUSE's deep involvement in open-source governance, from its top-five contributor status to active participation in the Linux Foundation, CNCF and emerging European sovereign cloud policy. Smails frames standards not as abstract governance but as the foundational substrate that makes interoperability, common control planes and trusted ecosystems possible — and argues that SUSE's community investment is ultimately what gives enterprises a credible, durable alternative to proprietary lock-in.

In this interview from SUSECON 2026 in Prague, Rhys Oxenham, vice president and general manager of AI at SUSE, joins theCUBE Research's Paul Nashawaty to discuss how open-source infrastructure is bridging the gap from AI experimentation to enterprise production at scale. Oxenham frames SUSE's approach through two distinct lenses: AI for infrastructure, where intelligence is embedded into how enterprises deploy, manage and operate systems, and infrastructure for AI, where open platforms provide the foundation for running AI workloads. He highlights how agentic AI — enabled through MCP server integrations — is moving from automation to autonomous decision-making, and why shadow AI has become the defining enterprise threat as organizations face growing pressure to demonstrate tangible return on investment to executive leadership.

The conversation explores how SUSE is helping customers cross the "production chasm," moving validated pilots into governed, secure deployments at scale. Oxenham introduces the concept of "private enterprise AI," clarifying that "private" refers not to a locked-down data center but to organizational ownership of intelligence across hybrid environments, from the far edge to the public cloud. He argues that digital sovereignty has outgrown its reputation as a European compliance checkbox, repositioning it as a universal business imperative. The SUSE AI stack — built on SUSE Rancher Prime and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server — gives organizations the freedom to deploy and pivot across infrastructure without proprietary lock-in. From maximizing GPU utilization through observability-driven best-fit placement to the accelerating enterprise adoption of agentic AI in the year ahead, Oxenham outlines why the infrastructure decisions organizations make in 2026 will shape their competitive position in the AI era.