SUSE Boosts Partner Training Initiatives at SUSECon 2015

Enterprise Linux developer SUSE kicked off its annual SUSECon 2015 conference this week in Amsterdam, where the company gathered hundreds of customers, partners and journalists to show off its latest product and service announcements and to detail the company’s growth. SUSE announced a host of new product and partner-centric news, most notably a host of changes in its worldwide training partner program.

The new courses, which are available now to all of SUSE’s worldwide partners, include new programs for SUSE OpenStack Cloud and SUSE Enterprise Storage, in addition to online technical training and certifications—a first for the company.

For SUSE’s worldwide partner ecosystem, the company has poured additional resources into further developing its partner training program to help partners and customers better understand how to utilize its services. Chief among these efforts is a new offering that combines all of SUSE’s training initiatives into a single bundle, which is available for an annual subscription fee. SUSE President and General Manager Nils Brauckmann said the company is offering a bundled solution instead of individual education modules to increase partner expertise, thus helping them to more effectively sell SUSE solutions.

“My primary goal with providing training services is not to optimize the revenue stream,” said Braukmann in an interview with The VAR Guy. “My primary objective is to make sure that we have as many people trained on the relevant underlying technologies that [power] our products … and as many people being trained not just on the base technology but also on our products.”

In addition to its revised worldwide partner training program, SUSE launched several new technical training courses specifically for SUSE OpenStack and SUSE Enterprise Storage. The company said each program will cover components and tasks required to deploy and manage OpenStack clouds and Ceph-based storage clusters, so customers can ultimately gain a better understanding of their compute and storage environments.

And for the first time ever, partners are now able to take certification exams for Certified Linux Administrator and Certified Linux Professional online. Previous certification was only available in a classroom setting. SUSE is also making it easier for customers to search for training courses offered by partners through a new search capability, so they can find the most convenient method for solutions training.

Finally, SUSE has teamed with the Linux Foundation to offer a cross-level certification bundle, which allows Linux administrators to cut down on the time needed to acquire all four SUSE and Linux Foundation certifications. The agreement will allow participants who currently have entry-level Linux Foundation Certified Sysadmin certification to also take the advanced SUSE Certified Linux Professional exam, which awards the participant with both certifications as well as SUSE Certified Linux Administrator and Linux Foundation Certified Engineer certification.

“We really think of training as something that enables our partner ecosystem to succeed at deploying and selling our solutions with us to customers, and secondly allowing our customers to be successful with those solutions,” said Michael Miller, SUSE’s global channel chief. “We really wanted to enable the partners and the end customers of our partners to use our solutions easily.”