'Significant' number of HPE OpenStackers flung to SUSE

A "significant" number of Hewlett Packard Enterprise staff are accompanying OpenStack code going to SUSE Linux.

The Linux shop is taking them along with software and people for HPE's Platform as a Service and its Cloud Foundry efforts.

SUSE would not reveal financial terms of the deal nor how many HPE staff are shifting.

Michael Miller, president of strategy, alliances and marketing at SUSE, called the migration a "significant addition" to the team.

Under the agreement, detailed today but announced in September, SUSE has become HPE's preferred technology partner for OpenStack, PaaS, and as an OEM.

SUSE's corporate owner Micro Focus announced the HPE deal in September, saying it was to "merge" with HPE's software business segment.

HPE will rely on SUSE to build and deliver the cloudy code, with HPE strapping that software on its own hardware, adding extensions and flogging services.

HPE will retain control over its HP Hellion OpenStack and HP Helion Stackato PaaS brands.

It's not an exclusive marriage, however, with both HPE and SUSE free to work with others.

Under the agreement, SUSE is getting HPE's core OpenStack and Cloud Foundry technologies with anything from HPE that's closed source being opened.

Miller said HPE's work on NFS, mission-critical workloads and large-scale deployments would be "great technologies to expand the SuSE OpenStack cloud".

The deal also means that SUSE is entering the PaaS market.

PaaS was once an element in the Holy Trinity of cloud, alongside IaaS and SaaS, but has been squeezed out by the other two.

However, Miller insists that PaaS is a growth opportunity for SUSE with the pace of customer enquiries speeding up in the last six to nine months.

Miller said of the relationship with HPE: "HPE's solution is larger than just the OpenStack distribution component. We provide open source software defined infrastructure distributed components that can be used by all the other vendors to build their own products and services. That's what HPE will do."

SUSE would bring expertise in combining open-source code to keep building HPE's OpenStack, he added.