SUSECON 2026, Prague, Czech Republic – As a partner-first Linux and open source vendor, SUSE is focused on making its channel and business partner relationships stronger, easier to manage, and more profitable.
At the company's annual
SUSECON conference held in April, ChannelE2E sat down with two SUSE executives,
Hayley Wienszczak, head of global partner programs and success, and
Christine Puccio, partner strategy and business development, to talk about the company's partner-first approach.
"My whole job is to look after our partner ecosystem," Wienszczak told Channel E2E. "Here at SUSECON, I am meeting with those partners. Many of them came to get training and certifications, so a part of my job is also technical training and partner enablement."
One small MSP from China, which has been working with agentic AI for the last five years, met with Wienszczak to discuss how it is helping its customers, she said. "We take all of that learning and feedback, and my question to them was, 'How can we help you grow? What is it that we need to invest in?'"
At the partner breakfast at the conference, Wienszczak said she received more feedback from partners about how SUSE can improve some of its buying programs to make their work easier. "They are seeing customers wanting more agility around what they can do on-premises and off-premises. They are also asking if we can make it easier to make those moves. From a programmatic point of view, they are asking how they can access benefits that help them grow their businesses."
Partners at the event also highlighted the importance of having early access to information about new SUSE products, features, and services that are being developed and delivered to the market before they are released.
"More than 98% of our business is indirect, so our partners are our lifeblood," said Wienszczak. "And if we can arm those partners with pre-announcements, we will be working with them earlier in those development cycles. The pre-release cycles really help them take our technology and what we are doing, pivot it, and bring the value it delivers into a combined offering. Then we can land on go-to-market opportunities quicker for them and for us."
Wienszczak said she works closely with SUSE's ecosystem leaders across North America, Latin America, EMEA, and the Asia Pacific region, where local partners work with SUSE partner executives for everything - from training to marketing, partner program benefits, deal registration, channel market development funds (MDF), and more.
"We also survey our partners every year as well to get their voices in," she said. "We are also increasing our communications cadence and the ability for partner voices to come in. It is super important, and that is something we definitely want to improve upon."
SUSE and its New Sovereign Specialization for Partners
At SUSECON 2026, the company also
launched a new Sovereign Partners Specialization to its existing technical specializations for partners, adding a new layer that aims to build on an evolving sovereign product strategy theme from SUSE. The company is making partner investments in its emerging sovereign approach, which is designed to help partners and customers connect and integrate IT systems across a company's infrastructure to provide joint security, privacy, efficiency, and compliance for improved operations.
"It is an agile layer on top of the SUSE Partner Program, which is very much about putting structure around a known business pattern," said Wienszczak. "The sovereign space is emerging, and it is really important that we work with some early-mover partners and really drive joint success. That is what the joint sovereign specialization is starting now."
The market for this sovereign approach to bringing IT systems together is still in the early stages, but SUSE sees multiple plays developing across the marketplace in the future, she said. "As we mature, we can bring in each of those markets," said Wienszczak. "That is the agile approach."
The initial focus of the sovereign efforts is with managed service providers (MSPs), which is her business niche.
"We are doing it with a set of partners that we have worked with, qualified and that already have sovereign status, so they have field certifications and are already invested in that marketplace," she said. "They are also existing SUSE MSPs, so they know our technology stack, so this is pragmatic. We are now trying to drive together and focus on how we bring new customers onto a SUSE sovereign stack. We are investing with those partners to help them build that stack and secure the first customers on it with a joint reference account."
To involve channel partners in addition to MSPs, SUSE has opened up new co-sell registration to ISVs, system integrators, and other partners to give them more value in deals and work with SUSE, said Wienszczak. "That means that we can start to unlock incentives, and that is something we will continue to build out over the coming six months. We are currently replatforming our whole program to enable that."
Taking a Partner Strategy Approach
Christine Puccio, who heads SUSE's partner strategy and business development efforts, is taking a longer-term view of the company's partner relationships, looking at how its product and services offerings can be used to target and bring in new partner connections.
Formerly SUSE's vice president of cloud, Puccio now works on big projects with large business partners, such as AWS, to find ways to expand SUSE's business exponentially by helping its partners solve their technical needs by incorporating SUSE products.
For years, SUSE has had a dominant strategic partnership with SAP, but SUSE realized it had to further diversify its partnerships, Puccio emphasized.
"If you are going on that path, you look at what other partners are going to bring you," she said. "When we did the AWS deal, they were looking at how they could complement their Amazon Linux to bring that to the enterprise level," said Puccio. "They did not want to hire all of the people to do that because they did not want to put the costs into it. So, we created a brand new agreement that allowed us to supply them with thousands of (code) packages for it. What I loved about that was that it really brought us back down to our open source roots, because it really comes down to giving customers a choice."
Internal Amazon employees at Amazon Prime and others inside the company are using Amazon Linux, which essentially embeds SUSE into that supply chain," she said. "I love that deal, it was one of my favorite deals I have ever done."
Puccio says this approach is what helps SUSE when "we want to go bigger in market-making. Really, it is business development. Things like that are what I sniff after when I'm looking at [business expansion]."
SUSE also closed a deal with AWS around SUSE Rancher for AWS, a fully managed SaaS offering available through AWS Marketplace. Puccio said the deal has her team looking at ways to expand product-led growth for SUSE products, including Rancher.
With product-led sales deals, the product does the talking, without the need for a sales team, she said. "You need to have the product be able to sell itself, and when a customer uses it, like AWS, I see value immediately. We did that with AWS because many customers want the enterprise Kubernetes experience. But AWS is not going to deliver everything that Rancher has under the hood. They will try to, but they only stay in their cloud. You want to go to the specialist."
Puccio is always seeking such connections with other products and vendors. But while Puccio does not work directly with MSPs or other channel partners to help build such connections and alliances, that could change in the future, she said.
"We just have not really put such a program together yet," she said. "I would probably say next year. We are still proving the model too, because this is what is important."
