Guest: Brent Schroeder (LinkedIn)
Company: SUSE (Twitter)

Many companies are still at the start of their digital transformation journey and there are a lot of considerations to take into account when adopting new technologies. Operational expertise, time, and bandwidth are just three barriers that can slow down a company’s progress when moving to cloud-native technologies. 

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Brent Schroeder, Global CTO at SUSE, to discuss digital transformation and what is hindering some companies from adopting these new technologies. He goes into depth about the cultural considerations and how companies are adapting to skills shortages. He also takes us through some of SUSE’s key focuses and how they are trying to simplify things for developers and help people navigate the complexity of Kubernetes.  

Key highlights from this video interview are:

• Companies are trying to accelerate their transformation with cloud-native lying at the center of this. Even with some macroeconomic headwinds, Schroeder feels that companies still need to invest and innovate in cloud-native technologies like AI and Edge to continue moving. 
• Many companies are still very early on in the digital transformation process. Schroeder tells us that some of the barriers are operational expertise, and time and bandwidth to make the transition. He talks about how they need to continue to make it easier and faster for companies to adopt the technologies. 
• Schroeder talks about the cultural considerations for this transition. He feels that companies are trying to tackle skill set challenges by aligning their business needs with the resources they have. He discusses the role of platform engineering and how it is abstracting away some of the nuances of the underlying technologies so developers can focus on developing code. 
• More AI and ML are coming into the operation spaces, such as in observability. Schroeder explains how AI is being used to help offset the complexity of Kubernetes by optimizing the different services. He talks about how AI is being used in security to catch anomalous behavior and prevent data loss or malicious activities. 
• Schroeder takes us through how SUSE is helping tackle these challenges by helping build a unified platform across distributed enterprise IT simplifying things for the developer and the operations and reducing risk in adopting new technologies. He tells us SUSE also focuses on the supply chain to production security. 

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.