Abhinav Puri of SUSE, vice president and general manager portfolio and community, appears at SUSECON 2026. Paul Nashawaty of theCUBE Research, practice lead and principal analyst, interviews Puri about SUSE's strategy for autonomous agentic enterprise infrastructure. Puri describes how enterprises must prioritize choice and control while closing the production gap between experimentation and measurable return on investment. They examine transitioning from managed to autonomous infrastructure, SUSE's "nervous system" metaphor, MCP servers, and scaling artificial intelligence, AI, from developer laptops to large deployments.
Puri asserts that organizations require deterministic guardrails for non-deterministic AI agents to contain impact and protect intellectual property. They advise avoiding vendor lock-in to maintain control over data and processes and to adopt platforms that scale from edge deployments to AI "super factories." Nashawaty frames 2026 as a shift from experimentation to production, emphasizing the need for secure sovereign infrastructure and measurable ROI.
Forgot Password
Almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please verify your account to gain access to
SUSECON 2026. If you don’t think you received an email check your
spam folder.
In order to sign in, enter the email address you used to registered for the event. Once completed, you will receive an email with a verification link. Open the link to automatically sign into the site.
Register for Susecon 2026
Please fill out the information below. You will receive an email with a verification link confirming your registration. Click the link to automatically sign into the site.
You’re almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please click the verification button in the email. Once your email address is verified, you will have full access to all event content for Susecon 2026.
I want my badge and interests to be visible to all attendees.
Checking this box will display your presense on the attendees list, view your profile and allow other attendees to contact you via 1-1 chat. Read the Privacy Policy. At any time, you can choose to disable this preference.
Select your Interests!
add
Upload your photo
Uploading..
OR
Connect via Twitter
Connect via Linkedin
EDIT PASSWORD
Share
Forgot Password
Almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please verify your account to gain access to
SUSECON 2026. If you don’t think you received an email check your
spam folder.
In order to sign in, enter the email address you used to registered for the event. Once completed, you will receive an email with a verification link. Open the link to automatically sign into the site.
Sign in to gain access to SUSECON 2026
Please sign in with LinkedIn to continue to SUSECON 2026. Signing in with LinkedIn ensures a professional environment.
Are you sure you want to remove access rights for this user?
Details
Manage Access
email address
Community Invitation
Abhniav Puri, SUSE
Abhinav Puri of SUSE, vice president and general manager portfolio and community, appears at SUSECON 2026. Paul Nashawaty of theCUBE Research, practice lead and principal analyst, interviews Puri about SUSE's strategy for autonomous agentic enterprise infrastructure. Puri describes how enterprises must prioritize choice and control while closing the production gap between experimentation and measurable return on investment. They examine transitioning from managed to autonomous infrastructure, SUSE's "nervous system" metaphor, MCP servers, and scaling artificial intelligence, AI, from developer laptops to large deployments.
Puri asserts that organizations require deterministic guardrails for non-deterministic AI agents to contain impact and protect intellectual property. They advise avoiding vendor lock-in to maintain control over data and processes and to adopt platforms that scale from edge deployments to AI "super factories." Nashawaty frames 2026 as a shift from experimentation to production, emphasizing the need for secure sovereign infrastructure and measurable ROI.
play_circle_outlineResilience Redefined: Choice-Driven Infrastructure for Agentic AI Enterprises to Absorb Geopolitical, Technological, and Financial Shocks
replyShare Clip
play_circle_outlineSUSE’s Shift: Closing the AI Production Gap by Replacing Legacy Infrastructure with Autonomous Platforms and Digital Coworkers
replyShare Clip
play_circle_outlineThe SUSE Nervous System: AI-Orchestrated Infrastructure and Turnkey Sovereign Platforms for Enterprise AI
In this interview from SUSECON 2026, Abhinav Puri, general manager of portfolio and community at SUSE, joins theCUBE Research's Paul Nashawaty to discuss how open-source infrastructure is evolving from passive platform to intelligent, autonomous foundation for the modern enterprise. Puri opens by reframing resilience — no longer about uptime but about an organization's capacity to absorb shock from geopolitical, technological and financial disruptions. He argues that as AI agents become embedded in core workflows, enterprises risk surrendering control over pr...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
How has the concept of resilience for organizations evolved recently, and why is having flexible infrastructure and choice important in the AI/agentic era?add
How has the conversation about AI evolved in enterprises, what challenges are preventing organizations from getting tangible ROI (the "production gap"), and how is SUSE addressing those challenges?add
How does SUSE view its role in modern enterprise IT, and what are its two complementary approaches—"AI for infrastructure" and "infrastructure for AI"?add
>> Hi, welcome back. Paul Nashawaty, I come to you live from the show floor at SUSECON 2026. I'm here with Abhinav Puri, GM of Portfolio and Community. Abhinav, nice to see you.>> Hi, nice to be here, Paul.>> Great to have you on. So, a lot's happening with the power of agentic and enterprise with choice. Let's start there, choice happens. Let's talk about what this means.>> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, let's take a step back. A few years ago, as enterprises, we used to talk about resilience. The conversation naturally gravitated towards uptime. In 2026, that's no longer the case. Now, from an organization's perspective, they need to have the ability to absorb shock. And shock can be from any geopolitical events, from any technological innovations, from a financial perspective. It could come from any angle. And that's where resilience steps in. Now, if you take it one step further, organizations can do that if they are building, as IT leaders, their infrastructure, in a flexible way and in a manner that they have choice. And that becomes, Paul, particularly relevant and important in the AI and the agentic era of today. Because when your language models are more embedded in your workflows, when your AI agents are driving your autonomous operations, you're effectively handing over control of your IP, of your data, of your business processes, all of which combined contribute to your organization's competitive mode. So, that is where choice and the ability to have control as an IT leader becomes absolutely critical.>> No, absolutely. I think this makes a lot of sense. I think when we think about the agentic era and what's happening, 2025 was a year of innovation and experimentation. So, the tinkering era. The era that I think people were trying things out, but they also don't want to be left behind.>> True.>> I see 2026 as a year of implementation and really going forward. So, when you're empowering the agentic enterprises, what does this mean for SUSE? I saw it on the keynote. I saw it in some of the conversations. There's a lot happening on the show floor that's really keeping a lot of buzz around this. What's your perspective of this?>> Yeah. So, let's break it down into two parts. Part one you rightly called out. Last three years, actually, Paul, all of us have tinkered with chatbots. We've all leveraged some AI capabilities of some software, and now we're all playing with agents. This is happening, and this is happening now. However, if you walk around SUSECON this year, you'll see that the conversation has fundamentally shifted. It is no longer about what can AI do. It has shifted to, how can I get real tangible ROI from my investments? And that there is a production gap, which is the gap between experimenting with AI and getting tangible outcome from your investments. And here is the reality. Here is the hard truth of 2026, that the infrastructure that most organizations and enterprises have today, that's based on a legacy foundation, that was designed to host applications and host workloads. That was designed to be managed. It wasn't designed to think. So, now from SUSE's lens, what we are doing is we are moving from managed to autonomous. SUSE, for the last 30 plus years, we've mastered the art of software defined. And now, we are elevating the infrastructure for IT leaders from simply a platform or a foundation to a digital coworker.>> Yeah. No. I love that approach, because when we're thinking about AI, it's more than just a technology conversation. It's a people, process and technology conversation for sure. There's no question. But there's something that I do want to double click on what you was talking about. We have to think about people's environments today. So, bridging the production gap between what organizations do with their heritage environments to the next generation. And that choice, that ecosystem happens, it really matters. So, when you're looking at these AI projects that are in motion, a lot of them stall because they don't know how to get going. They don't know how to implement security regulations and compliance. They don't have the data sovereignty issues. What are your thoughts around this?>> Yeah. So, what we realized, Paul, is that a lot of times organizations, let's say, get stuck in the experimentation phase. And don't see value coming out from production environments, because of the fact that they haven't set the guardrails effectively within which their AI agents, their AI applications are allowed to operate. Remember, that these are non-deterministic agents. So, you need, as an organization, as an IT leader, to set deterministic guardrails effectively around these, to ensure that they're operating and the impact radius of what these agents can do is contained. So, that is extremely important. Now, here is where choice, again, plays a very critical role, because as an IT leader, I don't want to get locked into a proprietary stack. Because then what's happening is I'm not just... I'm paying a tax, so to speak. And it's not a dollars per token kind of a tax. The tax that as an IT leader I'm paying is of control. I'm losing control over my proprietary business processes, my data, my intelligence. And that is a challenge, which organizations strategically need to step up and think about.>> All right. So, let's talk about that, because that was a key message that was coming out of the keynote, it was coming out of the sessions. We talk about the three pillars, the resiliency, the sovereignty, and the scale. A lot of people will talk about resiliency and sovereignty. Fair enough. Scale is a big factor here. When we start looking at bridging the gap and tying in the LLMs that you might want to use for your data sets, let's talk a little bit about that.>> Yeah. So, think of it this way. You and I, as end consumers, as individuals, we can start playing with AI in any shape or form we like to, to today. There's so many options available for us. From an enterprise's perspective, you need to invest in technologies that allow you to scale from a workstation to the AI super factories of tomorrow and to the edge. So, you need a bridge that allows you to move your AI agents and your applications from a developer's laptop to thousands of factory flows. And that becomes critical, and which is where you need an enterprise provider who supports you in that journey, who enables you to scale in an autonomous manner.>> Very good. No, I like that. Scaling is important. Having the vision to scale, having that as part of your architecture. There was also the discussion about the nervous system. And so, what does this mean? When we look at the conversation that we saw on a previous session was AI for infrastructure, but infrastructure for AI. That might be confusing to the audience. Let's double click into that.>> Yeah. That's a great point, actually. So, let's take a step back in terms of how do we, as SUSE, see our role in all of this. So, what we are doing as SUSE is we are engineering the future of a modern enterprise, where we are converting the passive infrastructure into an intelligent, agentic, digital collaborator for our platform teams, for our IT teams. And our approach here is two-pronged. To enable that two-pronged approach, we think of it as a body. A body has a brain, and it's the nervous system that is actually executing and enabling you to act in the way you act. So, SUSE's technologies and software are the nervous system for your organization's IT infrastructure. And we are doing it in two forms. Form one is what we call AI for infrastructure, which is effectively, we are infusing AI capabilities across our portfolio to allow organizations to orchestrate these complex autonomous operations. And part two is what we call infrastructure for AI, which is us allowing and providing organizations a turnkey platform, which they can leverage to have a sovereign private enterprise environment. So, that's the approach here.>> So, that might sound scary to some folks. It sounds like a centralized nervous system having like the... The way you describe it makes a lot of sense. But let's talk about it and break it down a little bit into how is this complex for organizations to understand. How is it implemented for a net new environment to a heritage environment? What are the steps that somebody would have to take and where's the friction?>> Yeah. So, from SUSE's perspective, we have a lot of customers who are currently using SUSE technologies. So, to make that step for them extremely easy to start, I'd say experimenting with this and start using this in their production environments. We are encapsulating all of the intelligence that we have at SUSE and SUSE's products into context. And that context is wrapped into something that we are shipping called MCP servers, which is effectively the intelligence of our products wrapped into a technology that can plug into customers' existing environments. And they can, as an example, work with our technology in even natural language. So, that is how we are making the barrier to adoption and integration with their existing systems very easy.>> Yeah. But I do want to touch on something that's an important point to not gloss over. This is not just for your existing SUSE customers. This is for->> Anyone.... >> anyone. So, let's talk about that, because if somebody's coming from an external environment, is this a big step for them? Is there a big learning curve? What's the steps?>> It's actually not, because here's how we see it, that no vendor today, no technology vendor can operate in a silo. For any end customer, to be able to leverage AI effectively in a way that gives them tangible ROI, they need a choice of platforms that they engage with. And there are tens of thousands of customers out there, some who use SUSE technologies, others who don't. And to your point, for any net new customer, they would already be using some sort of AI platform of their choice. What SUSE has done with these MCP technology that I'm talking about is, it is like a USB adapter. It can plug into your system of choice. So, it's that easy to adopt. Irrespective of which AI agentic platform you have, with our USB adapter, you can simply plug in our technology and you can manage infrastructure in an intelligent way at scale.>> Yeah, great analogy. I mean, it simplifies that vision of what it looks like. Let's talk about pathways to innovation. When you're looking at innovation, AI has changed that for a lot of organizations. From the core data center to the edge, to the cloud, there's new applications being built every day, lots of applications. And not just from professional developers, but it's also being developed across the lines of business. So, how would you advise organizations and our viewers here, that if they're on their journey, regardless where they are in their journey, if they're fully mature or if they're just getting started, how would you advise somebody to leverage what SUSE's doing?>> Yeah. I think I'll take a step back there, because the very first thing for any organization, when they start playing around with any kind of application development, whether it is a, let's call them citizen developers, so to speak, like individuals like you and me who can now build applications of our choice. So, the most important thing is to have the right use cases in mind. Use cases that will give you tangible business outcomes. Use cases whose end outcomes will give you tangible, measurable ROI. That's the first step from an IT leader's standpoint. When you have done that and you're architecting your infrastructure, that would support these applications. So, you have to think of it this way, SUSE is the infrastructure provider, the software infrastructure provider. And your applications, your end user business applications will be running on top of the software infrastructure that we provide. So, from an IT leader standpoint, once you've identified these are the applications we need, these are the outcomes that they will deliver, now I need to build for an infrastructure that is sovereign, that is secure, that is intelligent, and that acts as my digital coworker, and that allows me to scale as I grow my implementation. And that is what SUSE brings to the table with our portfolio.>> No, absolutely. That's a great way to sum that up. So, all right, here's the thing. I'll give you a vision. We fast-forward, we're sitting here next year at SUSECON 2027 in Dallas. Where do you see this all going in the next year?>> Yeah. So, what we talked about, an autonomous enterprise, I see that being real. I see IT teams, I see platform teams will be acting as a governor of SRE agents. These are AI agents who will be automating a lot of tasks right now, which involve a lot of manual intervention. And that would be pervasive. So, right now, we're talking about that as a future. Next year, that would be happening. And all our focus and discussions would be, how do we now continue to scale it in a manner which is secure, in a manner which is safe? That's how I see the next six to 12 months shaping up.>> Abhinav, it's really great having you on and your perspectives of where AI is going. It's obviously that it's near and dear to your heart. So, thank you for being on theCUBE today. Thank you to the audience as well.>> Thank you, Paul. Thank you for having me. It was great talking to you.>> Absolutely. And thank you for watching. Paul Nashawaty coming to you live from SUSECON 2026 from theCUBE, your leading source of tech news.
