SUSE Accelerates Digital Transformation in Japan with Infrastructure Resilience and Open Source AI - Supporting Escape from Rigid Vendor Lock-in

At "SUSE Summit 2026 Tokyo," a new open source architectural blueprint was unveiled to enable flexible adoption of the latest AI and container technologies without the constraints of proprietary clouds or forced migration costs.

Tokyo, Japan – July 8, 2026 – SUSE, a global leader in enterprise open source solutions (Japan Branch: SUSE Software Solutions Japan K.K., Country Manager Gen Watanabe), held its flagship event in Japan, "SUSE Summit 2026 Tokyo," on July 7, 2026. During the event, SUSE introduced a comprehensive strategic roadmap focused on supporting Japanese companies in building resilient and modern infrastructure, optimizing IT spending across virtualized environments, and establishing autonomous AI growth through open standards.

A Path to Digital Sovereignty, Modern Virtualization, and Large-Scale AI Utilization

During the event, SUSE highlighted critical challenges currently faced by Japanese businesses, such as the need to transition AI from experimentation to full-scale production while simultaneously addressing escalating cybersecurity threats and unpredictable cloud and hypervisor costs. According to SUSE's global research report, "Navigating Digital Resilience 2026," structural anxieties are rapidly increasing, with many IT leaders expressing stronger concerns about system resilience compared to three years ago. The survey found that 94% of organizations recognize open source as essential for achieving digital resilience, citing security (63%), multi/hybrid cloud flexibility (52%), and disaster recovery combined with innovation (45%) as investment priorities.

To address these challenges, Japanese CIOs are prioritizing the modernization of their core execution environments. The transition from temporary tactical responses to a true "AI Factory" requires an operational foundation that seamlessly integrates legacy virtual machines (VMs) with modern containerized workloads. By offering a cloud-native and open platform approach to virtualization and container orchestration, SUSE enables companies to break free from restrictive and costly vendor hypervisor lock-in, simplifying cloud-native operations from core data centers to physical edge environments.

A Practical Approach to Infrastructure Resilience and Modernization

SUSE presented recent customer trends in Japan and announced three diverse yet consistent awards recognizing structural resilience and cloud-native transitions based on open source technology. These are:

Mizuho Bank: Facing the end-of-support deadline for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) running on over 200 on-premises servers, Mizuho Bank successfully transitioned to a strategic bridge to next-generation infrastructure, avoiding a multi-billion yen OS migration. Standardization on SUSE Multi-Linux Support (MLS) ensured continuous security patching for legacy systems, safely avoiding vendor lock-in. This strategic initiative allowed the bank to preserve internal IT resources and personnel, smoothly preparing for a medium-to-long-term migration to container-based cloud-native IT infrastructure.

Award Category: Digital Sovereignty Pioneer

CyberLinks: To regain digital sovereignty from vendor lock-in, CyberLinks decided to "move away from VMware." After a rigorous year-long evaluation, they adopted SUSE Virtualization, confirming equivalent or superior performance. An efficient, team-led migration process lowered migration hurdles and achieved co-optimization of infrastructure and applications. Moving forward, CyberLinks plans to drive strategic IT investments and seamlessly manage both virtual machines and AI workloads under a single control plane with an integrated AI-native platform centered on SUSE Rancher.

Award Category: Virtualization Visionary

MicroAd: MicroAd modernized its data infrastructure using SUSE Rancher Prime, migrating from traditional Hadoop clusters to a modern data lakehouse architecture. This initiative reduced infrastructure operating costs by 20% and decreased management workload by 50%. Even less experienced engineers can now effectively operate Kubernetes clusters.

Award Category: Cloud Native Champion

Dramatically Improving Sovereign Enterprise AI Performance with NVIDIA and FSAS Technologies

SUSE CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen introduced "SUSE AI Factory with NVIDIA" as part of the company's product roadmap. This is a turnkey, pre-validated enterprise platform specifically built to streamline the creation, governance, and deployment of mission-critical private AI applications. Built on SUSE Rancher Prime and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), in conjunction with NVIDIA AI Enterprise tools, this solution directly integrates AI execution capabilities with an enterprise-grade containerized and virtualized layer. This allows companies to securely run private AI models within their own environments, addressing globally tightening sovereignty requirements.

SUSE emphasized the critical role of its local Japanese partner ecosystem, introducing FSAS Technologies as a launch partner. FSAS Technologies, a Fujitsu Group company, leverages the European "SUSE AI Factory" to combine NVIDIA's high-performance computing capabilities with SUSE's robust open source cloud-native framework, enabling this technology giant to provide secure, end-to-end sovereign solutions fully compliant with Japan's regional data governance and infrastructure standards.

Executive Comments

"In today's rapidly evolving infrastructure landscape, having a wealth of choices is the absolute foundation of true enterprise resilience, especially as IT teams grapple with the dual challenges of scaling modern AI and optimizing legacy environments. By unifying virtualization and containerization under a single, open control plane, SUSE AI Factory with NVIDIA addresses these complexities while directly confronting global sovereignty concerns. This approach ensures complete security, architectural stability, and uncompromised freedom of innovation," said Thomas Di Giacomo, Chief Technology and Product Officer (CTPO) at SUSE.

"Japanese companies are increasingly seeking to optimize soaring hypervisor costs and manage legacy technical debt without compromising data sovereignty. By partnering with trusted market leaders like NVIDIA and FSAS Technologies, we are helping CIOs securely transition to hybrid cloud and AI-ready architectures. This transition allows our customers to escape excessive vendor dependency while ensuring the stability required for their mission-critical operations," stated Gen Watanabe, Country Manager of SUSE Japan.

About SUSE

SUSE is a global leader in enterprise open source software.

By transforming community innovation into secure, sovereign, and AI-ready solutions, SUSE helps customers break free from vendor lock-in and regain control of their IT. Through industry-leading Linux, Kubernetes, edge, and AI infrastructure solutions, SUSE provides the flexibility to innovate everywhere, from the data center to the multi-cloud and out to the edge. SUSE is also the only company to manage numerous Linux and Kubernetes distributions. At SUSE, community, interoperability, and continuous innovation are prioritized, enabling "Choice Happens." Learn how to achieve mission-critical resilience at https://www.suse.com/ja-jp/.