Speaking at a media roundtable during SUSECON 2026 in Prague, van Leeuwen said the company already has a significant presence in India, including a subsidiary and development teams, and plans to expand further.
“India is definitely a place where we continue to invest. We see great opportunities, good growth, it’s a good market for us,” he said, adding that the country’s strong affinity for open source aligns well with SUSE’s core business model. The company also intends to deepen partnerships with major Indian firms to participate in more enterprise projects and government tenders.
SUSE is an enterprise software company whose open-source products help businesses run applications on cloud servers, mainframe computers, and devices at the edges of networks. Its customers include Walmart, Deutsche Bank and Intel, according to its website. More than 60% of the Fortune 500 rely on SUSE to power some of their workloads, according to the company.
The company set up a centre of excellence in Bengaluru in 2023. Imran Khan, chief customer officer, SUSE, had said that it would ultimately like to get at least 20 percent of its total global workforce housed in the center.
SUSE has a customer base in India, with companies such as the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), Malayala Manorama, JK Tyre, Kerala Police, Indian Oil and Mankind Pharma, among others.
While declining to share workforce targets, van Leeuwen indicated that India will remain central to SUSE’s regional expansion strategy, with more visits and engagement planned.
Beyond India, the CEO highlighted a surge in global demand for “digital sovereignty” solutions: technology stacks that reduce dependence on single vendors or jurisdictions. He said geopolitical uncertainties and concerns over business continuity are pushing enterprises, particularly in Europe, to seek alternatives that allow greater control over infrastructure.
SUSE, with its open-source foundation, is benefiting from this shift, he said, as customers look for flexibility to move workloads across vendors without disruption. “Customers are calling us urgently… they want to become sovereign very quickly,” van Leeuwen said.
He also pointed to a growing emphasis on data sovereignty in the context of artificial intelligence (AI). As enterprises move to the next phase of AI adoption, using proprietary data to train models, chief information officers (CIO) are increasingly wary of sending sensitive data to public cloud environments.
“This is the moment where every CIO tells me: I don’t want this in the cloud. I want a sovereign solution,” he said, describing a shift toward hybrid and on-premise deployments for critical AI workloads.
The company is also seeing renewed interest in alternatives to legacy virtualisation platforms, as well as increased activity across edge computing and industrial IoT, where open-source infrastructure can provide end-to-end control.
Despite the rapid growth opportunities, van Leeuwen acknowledged challenges in scaling operations and partner ecosystems quickly enough to meet demand, while maintaining enterprise-grade support.
“We need to ensure we have the capacity, the right people, and the quality our customers expect,” he said.
SUSE, backed by private equity owner EQT, operates as a fully open-source company, competing on service quality rather than proprietary licensing, a model the CEO said is increasingly resonating with enterprises.
SUSE AI Factory, a joint solution combining SUSE’s open-source AI stack with Nvidia’s enterprise AI infrastructure, was launched on Tuesday. The platform is designed to help companies build, deploy and manage AI workloads across on-premise, edge and cloud environments.
The offering aims to address growing enterprise demand for sovereign AI, keeping data and models under local control, amid rising concerns over dependence on proprietary systems.
SUSE is a German acronym for “Software und System-Entwicklung” or software and systems development.
The world’s first provider of an enterprise Linux distribution, was founded by three students and an engineer in 1992: Roland Dyroff, Thomas Fehr, Hubert Mantel and Burchard Steinbild.
(The writer is in Prague at the invitation of SUSE)