SACHIN VIG
Director-
Strategic Channels & Alliances (Indian Subcontinent)
SUSE
Evolving Marketing Strategy for the AI Era
In today's AI-centric landscape, our growth strategy extends beyond simple marketing; it is fundamentally a go-to-market imperative. We operate on a 100% indirect model, and our partners are the force multiplier that lets us engage customers at scale across five distinct routes to market, from resellers and cloud marketplaces to MSPs and ISVs.
As AI moves from experimentation to real deployment, we're seeing customers lean harder into partners who can offer AI-ready, GPU-backed infrastructure, so our strategy has shifted toward enabling and certifying that ecosystem rather than just broadening our reach. It's less about chasing volume and more about backing the 20% of partners who drive 80% of outcomes with the right skills and tools to have credible AI conversations with customers.
Technology-driven Trust, Partner Ecosystems, and Customer Experience
Trust, for us, starts with compliance and openness. We're EAL4++ certified, and with India's DPDP Act coming into effect next year, data sovereignty has become a real differentiator. Customers want infrastructure that keeps their data private and auditable, and our open, non-proprietary architecture is built for exactly that.
On the partner side, we invest heavily in enablement, training, and certifying engineers in DevOps and DevSecOps, because while there is a big appetite for open source in the market, enterprises are equally requiring skilled hands to implement it. That combination of regulatory readiness and partner capability builds durable trust with customers, more than any single marketing channel.
Brand Positioning in Competitive Market
Openness is our sharpest differentiator. SUSE's integrated portfolio, spanning Linux, Kubernetes, and Edge solutions, empowers enterprises to build, deploy, and manage AI-driven applications with consistency and scale. In a market still dominated by proprietary lock-in, we give customers the freedom to choose their own stack, their own LLMs, and their own path, without being tied to a single vendor. Beyond that, our ecosystem priorities for the next 12-18 months are about deepening our presence in BFSI, manufacturing, government, and PSUs- the verticals with the clearest near-term demand and expanding into 15-20 additional tier 2 and tier 3 cities to capture growth beyond the metros.
On outcomes, we're pushing every AI conversation from proof-of-concept to production via initiatives like the SUSE AI Factory with NVIDIA, because that's ultimately what customers and the market will measure us on: not pilots, but tangible results.
