Greetings from SUSEcon 2013! SUSE is hosting a bash in lovely Lake Buena Vista, Florida, and it is my duty to endure the great food and gorgeous weather to report on it. It’s brutal, but it has to be done.
SUSECon officially kicked off this morning with keynotes from Nils Brauckmann, President of SUSE, Chris Hallenbeck, Global Vice President, SAP Americas, and Jim Wasko, Director, Linux Technology Center at IBM. I’ll tell you all about them later, because right now you need to watch the dancing chameleon videos. They are brilliantly produced and funny. Who says computer nerds aren’t funny?
Chameleon Dance, the opening video for SUSECon.
Who is SUSE, anyway?
SUSE is one of the oldest surviving Linux distributions, born in 1992 when Linux itself was a mere year old. It was created from Slackware (the oldest surviving Linux distribution, and still maintained by its creator) by Roland Dyroff, Burchard Steinbild, Hubert Mantel and Thomas Fehr in Fürth, Germany. SUSE stands for Software- und System-Entwicklung (Software and Systems Development). Novell bought SUSE in in 2003, and then Attachmate bought Novell in 2011. SUSE operates as an independent business unit, and is now based in Nuremburg. Red Hat, the other big enterprise Linux, is #1 in revenues, but SUSE is #1 in a number of other areas: mainframe, autotive, aerospace, supercomputing, and certified hardware support.
A few more SUSE nuggets:
- 80% of the US Fortune 500 aerospace and defense companies use SUSE
- 80% of all Linux running on mainframe computers is SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
- 70% of the US Fortune 100 general merchandisers, specialty retailers, and food and drug stores use SLEPOS, SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service. SLEPOS runs retail front- and back-ends, including cash registers and other point-of-sale devices. Walmart, the retailer that is eating the world, uses SLEPOS.
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the most widely used commercial enterprise Linux distribution in China
- 70% of all SAP applications running on Linux run on SUSE Linux Enterprise
That’s all for now, because I must go prepare to endure more fun and feasting. Stay tuned for coverage of a whole lot of great technical sessions.
Editor’s Note: Carla Schroder is attending SUSECon, which is taking place Nov. 12 – 15 in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. She will be reporting from the conference throughout the week for Linux.com, courtesy of SUSE.
