Analyst(s): Mitch Ashley
Publication Date: July 21, 2025

SUSE and Red Hat, recognized for their leading roles as open-source-based companies, announced their responses to digital sovereignty in the European Union marketplace. Placing a strong emphasis on their open-source roots, both companies emphasize technology, data control, and operations as key elements to address this growing need. While open source has its strengths, the risk of projects being forked could create a fragmented ecosystem with regional versions maintained by a limited pool of talent.

Key Points:

• SUSE announces new EU-focused digital sovereign premium support in July 2025, following market concerns attributed to tariff trade talks and alternative vendor sourcing.
• The SUSE announcement comes on the heels of Red Hat’s June 2025 “commitments for sovereign cloud: Your cloud, your rules.”
• SUSE and Red Hat similarly define digital sovereignty around three pillars: technology, data, and operations, placing a significant emphasis on their open-source strategies. However, beyond that point, their approaches to addressing the market diverge significantly.
• Why digital sovereignty is an increasing concern, how vendors and customers are responding, particularly in the EU market, and implications for open source.

Overview:

The market demand for digitally sovereign solutions has continued to escalate following announcements by cloud providers AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle earlier this year. Leading open-source companies Red Hat and SUSE announced their strategies to the market in June and July 2025, respectively.

Although the uncertainty around US tariffs has raised concerns, the issue of sovereignty is more complex. It involves a mix of cybersecurity threats, data privacy challenges, stricter regulatory frameworks with harsher penalties for non-compliance, and the desire for greater control and reduced dependence on a limited number of vendors. Much of the concern about digital sovereignty stems from the growing adoption of cloud technology and the accompanying worries about the protection and control of data.

“Both SUSE and Red Hat clearly take digital sovereignty seriously as their respective customers are looking for guidance and solutions,” said Mitch Ashley, VP and Practice Lead of Software Lifecycle Engineering at Futurum.

SUSE and Red Hat are relying on their respective open-source business models as key strengths to underpin their digital sovereignty approaches. Both approaches similarly utilize a technology, data, and operations framework, while supporting cloud, on-premise, and hybrid environments. How much they lean on their technology message and the operational aspects of their announcements is where they differ.

SUSE Sovereign Premium Support, available in silver, gold, and platinum tiers, is defined as EU-based personnel and EU-based data storage with strict EU access controls. SUSE’s service delivery and support engineers are located and operate exclusively within the EU. SUSE holds up SUSE Linux Enterprise, SUSE Rancher, SUSE Edge, and SUSE AI as examples of how they support control and transparency in their products.

Red Hat’s announcement is more of a reaffirmation and communication of its commitments to a similar set of principles, including statements on how Linux, OpenShift, and Ansible form a robust and secure platform for on-premises, sovereign clouds, and edge deployment. Red Hat’s partner ecosystem brings together ISVs, systems integrators, and service providers to create solutions tailored to meet regional and individual customer in-country requirements.

Red Hat emphasized its reliance on regional, local, and cloud providers with localized data centers that align with Red Hat’s stringent sovereign cloud requirements. In contrast, SUSE provided more specifics about ensuring the use of EU-based personnel and local data storage in its announcements.

Figure 1: Open-Source Usage by Deployment Model and Region

“Open-source software is a key strength for both SUSE and Red. Recent history has shown that nations like Denmark and Germany can shift from commercial offerings to open-source alternatives, like LibreOffice and Linux, where concerns about reliance on a single vendor or company outside of their own are raised,” according to Ashley.

Open source has a significant presence across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid deployment models, as evidenced in Futurum Research’s Software Lifecycle Engineering Decision-Maker 2025 data. Cloud environments lead the way in the use of open source, while on-premises uses are also quite strong.

“In the future, nation-specific variants of open source may become a concern,” according to Ashley. “The potential for forking open-source projects to create nation and region-specific versions could lead to a very complex, even fractured, ecosystem that open-source vendors and customers would deal with.”

Conclusion

At a minimum, the respective vendors in this race are ensuring they can meet the changing sovereignty needs of current customers while preparing to seize any advantage over competitors that may emerge. License changes to and the forking of open-source projects into versions tailored for specific countries are looming trends.

The full report is available via subscription to Futurum Intelligence’s Software Lifecycle Engineering IQ service—click here for inquiry and access.

See the complete press release and blog post about SUSE Sovereign Premium Support on the SUSE website. See Red Hat’s commitment to digital sovereignty blog post on the Red Hat website.

Futurum clients can read more about it in the Futurum Intelligence Platform, and non-clients can learn more here: Software Lifecycle Engineering Practice.

About the Futurum Software Lifecycle Engineering Practice

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