And so I want to welcome SUSE's president of Strategy, Alliances, and Marketing, Michael Miller. Thank you. Thanks very much. Now, I heard yesterday that everybody watches this cat

to determine whether or not what the speaker is saying is legitimate, right? So if the arm stops, that means I'm saying something wrong, right? As long as the arm is going, everything is good. OK, I'm going to stick with that. Now, I'm going to try to handle a microphone and a remote

at the same time. I've never attempted this. I don't know how to juggle, so we're not sure how this is going to work out. All right, so that didn't work. OK, so I'll start out by saying my name is Michael, and I've been using Lenox.

Nice to meet you all. And I've been using Lenox for quite a while, though I have to admit that when that picture was taken, I'm so old that when that picture was taken, there was no Lenox. When I was that young, it was the time of Atari.

Anybody remember Atari? Yeah, Commodore 64? Yeah, so I didn't have the right pictures. But I did have, I was using Lenox, I would say, about 18, maybe 19 years. And I had an early stage of my Lenox usage, kind of my formative, youthful stage.

And I experimented with all kinds of different distributions. I used Caldera a little bit, I used Red Hat. I went through a wild and crazy Gen 2 phase, because I felt like I had to build any computer that I allowed in my house, I felt like I had to build it myself, and then run Gen 2.

And that got a little bit high maintenance. So I moved on from there, used Ubuntu for a while. And then, as I became older and wiser, I discovered OpenSUSE. And that was about six years ago. Thank you. I found my way to the light.

And I've been using OpenSUSE ever since. Now, not only am I using OpenSUSE because I love using Lenox, but as you guys know, it's part of my job at SUSE. I actually use, I can use OpenSUSE as my work OS. So I use that as my day-to-day operating system

for everything I do at work, as well as what I do for my own personal use and my hobbies. And I gotta tell you, I am really, really enjoying Leap. I've used a number of OpenSUSE releases over the last six years, and I enjoyed all of them. But Leap has been awesome. The hardware enablement for the machines I use,

the performance, just everything about it has been working fantastic for me as a really stable, productive operating system for both my personal experiments and my work environment. Now, someone's probably thinking, okay, what about Tumbleweed, right? Whenever I wear the Leap T-shirt,

or I mention Leap, somebody says, yeah, but what about Tumbleweed? Okay, so Tumbleweed is awesome as well. I keep a machine under my desk at my home office. That's my Tumbleweed server. And I do stuff on there, tinker around and experiment. So I do use Tumbleweed as well. So I gotta give fair share to Tumbleweed

because it's pretty amazing. Now, part of what I do in my job at SUSE is to give presentations. I go around to different meetings, different conferences, and do keynotes and things like that. And as a techie guy, you find that when you do the same thing repeatedly,

you think to yourself, hey, maybe I should automate that. Or maybe I should somehow make a tool for that. Or if you do, there's four different ways of doing the same thing. You find, I should find one way to do that and make it consistent and build a tool. Anybody familiar with that concept? Something like Yask maybe? Solves, all of us as engineers,

we wanna solve those problems. But when it comes to presenting, especially with keynotes, that doesn't really work so good. When you do that, you end up with something that I like to call YAK, which means yet another corporate keynote. We've all seen them, right?

I mean, and I have to admit, in my years, I have delivered a number of YAKs, and I apologize if any of you were subjected to those. But we're here at the OpenSUSE Conference. The theme is have a lot of fun. So I wanted to be really sure I wasn't delivering a YAK at you guys,

especially at 10 a.m. in the morning after an awesome party last night. So I wanted to do something a little different for an OpenSUSE audience than I would for a typical corporate keynote. So as you might have noticed with the zooming around and stuff, that I'm using Inkscape and a plug-in called Sozi just to kinda have fun and experiment,

do something a little different as part of the presentation. But what I really wanna talk about is SUSE and OpenSUSE. And I have to say, I have to acknowledge Richard for coming up with this clever phrase of OpenSUSE and OpenSUSE. You know, those Brits, they have such a way with language, don't they?

You know, it's kinda too bad that we may not see so much of them anymore, but they're so clever. And when they use expletives, when they're swearing, they come up with these crazy swear words that you've never heard of before. In my team at SUSE, actually, we occasionally have honorary swear like a Brit day,

where on IM or IRC or even on the phone, we're obligated to use British expletives or make them up. Because the other thing about the Brits and swearing, you can just make shit up. And it sounds like something a Brit would say. You can make up make-believe words. And you just have to have the right tone.

Blind me. So anyway, this is really what I wanna talk about today. Now, Doug referred to OCS 11, which was the last time I was here doing a keynote. And that was about five years ago here in Nuremberg. And we had lots of fun at that conference.

And first, I wanna remind everybody of a few of those special moments. You might have remembered Richard with the long green hair. How many people were at OCS 11? Okay, so there's a fair number. Yeah, Richard did indeed have long green hair, and he still has the long green hair. We had Andy with the kilt.

There's Andy's out there. He's not wearing a kilt this year. I think both these guys can pull that off pretty well, the hair and the kilt. We had a mechanical bull. And I've got a great picture here of Joos on the mechanical bull. I also found lots of pictures of people that had fallen off of the mechanical bull.

And I kinda relate that back to the beer. There was an awful lot of old toad open sousa beer at OCS 11, and you combine that with a mechanical bull, and you're gonna have some fun. So I have to thank Kostas for letting me borrow his pictures. The guy took like 600 pictures at that conference, and they're all still up on Google+,

if you wanna see them. They're really fun to see. All right, so moving along here. At that time, when we were at OCS 11, it was a lot of fun, but it was also a very troubled time. There was a lot of FUD. There was a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt floating around.

This was right after Attachmate had acquired, the Attachmate group had acquired Novell. You guys remember when that happened? People thought, oh, well, this company won. Who's Attachmate? I've never heard of those guys. And why the heck are they acquiring Novell? And do they have any idea what the heck to do with SUSE? So there was some real concern

about what is the future of SUSE, and what is the future of OpenSUSE under this new ownership model. And I was coming from the Attachmate business. I was part of Attachmate for, at that time, probably 11 years or so. So it was really nice to be able to come to OCS 11 and be able to talk about Attachmate's plans

and their intentions and what they were thinking about SUSE and OpenSUSE. And I think we all found that what happened after that acquisition was really good for SUSE and OpenSUSE both. Some really great stuff happened. So for example, SUSE became an independent business unit.

So prior to that, it was a product line within the Novell business, not its own independent corporate brand and business unit. So the first thing the Attachmate group did was separate SUSE off and allow it to run as its own independent business unit, which means we could do all kinds of great stuff, including setting up our own website, SUSE.com.

Until that point, there was no SUSE.com. There were just SUSE product pages on Novell.com. So now we have SUSE.com. We also created our own SUSECON, our own user and partner conference. And I think you guys, some of you actually have been there. We've had a lot of great OpenSUSE support

and presence at the SUSECON events. These are pictures from last year's event, which was in Amsterdam, which was awesome. Having an event in Amsterdam is a really, really good idea, I would say. I think we should do that more often. This year's event is gonna be, you guys are gonna think this is totally crazy.

This year's event is gonna be in Washington, D.C., which is not the crazy part, but the crazy part is that it's gonna be the week of the U.S. presidential elections, right? Kinda crazy, isn't it? Yeah, so you might think, wow, D.C. is gonna be a zoo that week. The reality is the town's gonna be empty.

You know, the presidential candidates, or as I like to call them, actors, because it's really just a bunch of theater. The actors are all out in their swing states, you know, trying to move the needle and get their swing voters. Congress is not in session. D.C. is a ghost town that week. So logistically, it's actually a very good week to be there.

The vendors and the venues, everybody loves having an event in town that week. But I'll have to say, we will have to have a little fun with the politics. We just can't resist. Now, I'm not gonna, I have a rule when keynoting, particularly if it's a yak, I don't talk about politics. But since this is not a yak, I'm just gonna say one little thing,

which is, because I can't help myself. I live north of Seattle, back in the U.S., and I'm about 20 miles from the Canadian border. You can see where this is going already. Right? So, you know, I fly off for the week for SUSECON, and my family has already informed me

that depending on how things go, when I come back at the end of the week, they may not be there. They may have already hightailed it over the border, and I might have to go on up to Vancouver, B.C., and try to find them. That's all I'm gonna say. No political opinion there at all. All right, so, in addition to creating SUSECON

as an independent business, creating the website, SUSECON, all of that stuff, we were able to start growing the business. And this is the essential thing. By doing those things with SUSECON, we were able to start growing. And that was the foundation of all the other good stuff that followed. We've had solid, year-over-year, double-digit growth

from that point forward, and we still do. And that growth has allowed us to do some really cool things, some innovation. Many of these innovations, and I've just picked just a couple cool examples. There's so many of them. I didn't wanna try to list them all. But many of these things are things that we do in collaboration and in co-development upstream

with the OpenSUSE community. We're able to do this kind of innovation because the business is able to reinvest in itself because we're growing. And also because we were growing, we were able to actually join into whole new market spaces that we weren't in before. We were able to expand beyond our core enterprise Linux business,

and we joined OpenStack, for example, some years ago. We joined as a platinum founding member. And our own Susas, Alan Clark, who many of you know, is the chairman of the board of directors for the OpenStack Foundation still. He's been the chair of the foundation since its beginning.

So now we have an OpenStack distribution as well. And then we also engaged in Ceph in the early days of Ceph, back in the ink tank days. We engaged in Ceph before many others did, and now have a really exciting distributed storage product. We just released our third version of that technology as well.

So now we've expanded the scope of what we're doing in these new areas, which also expands the scope of what we can work together on and collaborate on with the OpenSUSE community as well. Now, everything was growing great, growing, doing all this stuff, and bam, another acquisition happened.

Micro Focus acquired the attachment group. Now, putting aside the fact that it's a UK-based company, and I'm not gonna speculate on what that may or may not mean at this time, I don't think there was a lot of uncertainty and doubt this time. Again, putting aside yesterday's announcement,

I think everybody realized this time when there was an acquisition, there wasn't, oh no, what's the future of SUSE? I think it was very clear, and it's clear because the Micro Focus leadership team articulated this during the acquisition process, and then they followed through on it afterwards, that SUSE will remain an independent business unit and brand.

In fact, I would say we've even become slightly more independent, and we've increased our investments in a lot of ways. We've maintained our core leadership team. Nils Brockman, who was our leader, is now CEO of SUSE. His team is the same group, myself, Ralph Flocksa, and others, and then we've actually invested

in expanding the executive team, and a guy named Thomas just joined us as CTO, and he was actually here this week. I hope some of you met him while he was here. So we've actually become a little bit more independent and actually expanded that same leadership team. And that growth and expansion is great,

but what really matters is investing back into the company in the form of people. So right now, if you went out to our job site, you would see over 110 current job openings. We are hiring like crazy. In fact, I would say that we'll probably hire on top of this about another hundred people

by the end of our fiscal year. That is a lot of people, and it's across all different functions in the organization, but the one area where I would say the majority or the biggest area of hiring, of course, is engineering. There are a lot of engineers coming on board to work with us and work on all those new technologies.

And that brings me to what are we working on? So what's really cool, if you look at the new stuff that we're doing and that we can all collaborate on together, it's a whole new spectrum. It includes things like NFV and software defined networking, platform as a service, Cloud Foundry,

high performance computing, containers and Docker, all kinds of exciting stuff. And we're bringing in new staff and we're developing new technologies and strategies. And our relationship with, our collaboration with, and our co-development with OpenSUSE is fundamental to all of these things that we're doing.

Whether it's OpenStack and Ceph, whether it's these new technology areas, our relationship with the OpenSUSE community is the foundation of how we innovate and engineer all of this stuff. Now, I feel like we've come a really long ways if you look back at OCS 11 and where we are now,

we've done some amazing things just to get here and we've stuck through some hard times together. There was a time, I think, when OpenSUSE community was in doubt about whether this was really gonna work. We came through that and we're growing together. And most recently we did something that I think is like revolutionary in the industry.

It's a completely new model for co-developing and innovating together. And you guys might have heard about some of this. For example, Kulu presented some of this about our shared core package concept at Fosden this year. It's really the foundation of a whole new way

for us to innovate together and get a increase in agility and innovation while maintaining stability at the same time. And what this allows us to do is create a whole range of distribution options that serve as all kinds of different needs. Everything from personal users,

people experimenting, knowledge workers, makers of all kinds, developers, people creating stuff, IT infrastructure, enterprise professionals, as well as the largest supercomputers in the world. This co-development produces a distribution,

one of these, whether it's Leap, Tumbleweed, or Slea, that fits all of those different needs. And we can move faster, innovate more, and bring more technology to the world faster because we have this shared core and this co-development model. And the first time we tried that was really Slea 12 SP1 and Leap 42.1.

And that really worked well. I mean, I think it was just amazing. I think we've proven how well that new revolutionary model can work. And it works so well that later this year, as we do the next batch of releases, we're gonna move even closer together, where we'll be sharing a kernel, systemd, gnome,

and we're gonna keep building on this model. And it's quite amazing. In fact, this is, I think, even cooler. It's the fact that we can now start Slea 13 when the development cycle starts on that. We can start that based on a Tumbleweed snapshot.

And if you compare that to what we used to do, and we used to have to wait for a stable OpenSUSE build release long before the Slea development started because we needed time to adapt and tune before we were ready to even start the Slea development. So you had this big gap, kind of this blackout period,

where you couldn't incorporate new innovation into Slea because you needed that blackout period. But now, because Tumbleweed is this consistent, standard, stable build, the Slea development can start and grab the latest Tumbleweed snapshot and just go from there. There's no blackout period, which means we can incorporate more of the very latest upstream innovations

directly into the Slea development process and bring more innovation to market faster and maintain stability at the same time. And that's really the heart of what this model allows us to do. So I'm really excited to be part of this. I'm really proud of what we've all done together.

And I look at this both from the perspective of an OpenSUSE person who's passionate about OpenSUSE and dedicated to OpenSUSE as a user. And I look at it from the point of view of a SUSE employee and all the great things that we can do for our customers and partners. And I feel like we're entering a whole new era

where our trust in each other, our co-development, our innovation that we're doing together is gonna allow us to do all kinds of cool stuff and keep having lots of fun. So with that, I would like to show how everything that we talked about, everything we do together is all part of the chameleon.

We're all green on the inside. We're all in this together and let's keep doing that. Thank you. Okay, so speaking of fun, as you guys probably know,

we really enjoy doing music videos at SUSE. You've probably seen some of them. You might've seen the, what does the chameleon say one or the hot patching one. Well, I've got a video I wanted to roll for you guys that we literally just put through production this week. Nobody else in the world has seen this.

Maybe five people have seen this. So I wanna roll this for you and I'm gonna try not to screw this up. Okay, why am I not?

Told you holding this mic has just got me all out of whack. Space, that should do it. All right, let me do this. Find my mouse. Trust me, you're really gonna love this when I really start playing it.

If I can get there, cause I can't see what I'm doing. Now I really messed it up. All right guys, bear with me for a minute. Richard's gonna save me. It worked in testing.

It worked on my machine. So I thought hitting space would just do it. Yeah, me too. Yeah, there we go, okay.

All right, so that was called Code Together. I think that's pretty awesome. Now I, however, and I think the cat approves, that's good. I however think we probably need to do one thing. We need to get Richard with the long green hair

into that video. That's what I think. I think that would make it even better. All right, so Richard, do we have time to do a little Q and A, do you think? Should we do that? Five minutes, wow, that's all right. What do we got? Any questions?

How'd you like the video? Oh no, oh no, no, no, not Andy, no, oh no. Damn it. Great that the emphasis is on collaborating

between both sides of the chameleon, but there are certain open source based projects that are products from SUSE that haven't completely bought into the messaging in so much as the open source

projects that these products are based off of haven't been integrated within OpenSUSE in its entirety. So if I take Leap or Tumbleweed and try and install that project based application, it's not there.

Or it doesn't work properly as it should. Are there moves afoot to make sure that everyone's seeing green all the way through? That's a very good question. So I think, I don't know, if Ralph is comfortable

responding to that, you might have a more intelligent answer to provide than I would. I'm so glad Ralph is here. That's the moment where engineering is on the spot. So I can tell you that my guys actually want to contribute a lot to OpenSUSE. And if I look at my cloud team, they usually have

the packages there first and then put them into our OpenStack product. It is all a matter of time, and you saw all the open positions, and open positions don't do work, they're just open slots. So I think my promise is once we have more staffing, I think you'll see more contributions back into OpenSUSE.

The spirit is there, the willingness is there, but the guys are just overworked. But from their heart and from their thinking, they definitely want to do that. And we will fully support it, right Michael? That's exactly what I was gonna say. Yeah, Andrew, I just wanted to add to that one.

I'm one of those guys, SUSE manager isn't fully as easily to install as it is on Slack. We definitely plan to do more in that respect, especially because we are starting to take over the upstream project. Spacewalk is mostly a SUSE project these days,

and we will have to find a new government model. I guess one of the things we probably will do is fork it into an OpenSUSE project. Actually, it was mainly a matter of resources, of setting priorities, but yeah, we definitely want to make it more open in that regard, and also accept contributions if anyone wants to manage,

I don't know, Raspberry Pis with it or so, to open it up so that maybe at some point we can incorporate that into the product. Any other questions? All right, Michael, I want to thank you for coming out,

and we appreciate your talk, and you being here. Thanks, everybody, thank you.