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Dear Valued Business Partner,

Our last PartnerNet Newsletter featured what SUSE® is doing to lead the way in the enterprise Linux market place, and outlined the many areas where SUSE has effectively gained the No. 1 leadership position.

The enterprise Linux server market remains healthy, growing 20 percent year over year. In the coming months and years, SUSE plans to aggressively exploit this opportunity, further strengthening it's leadership position and rapidly growing it's business.

Close collaboration with customers, partners and communities are the pillars of success for SUSE. Providing you, our partners, with sales and technical training, and giving you reassurance to develop customer solutions around SUSE offerings, are key elements of our go-to-market strategy. In fact, I encourage you to actively engage with our regional SUSE teams around the globe in productive, mutually beneficial relationships and develop opportunities together.

SUSE is ready to work and partner with you. Whether you engage with us in co-marketing to build sales pipeline, registering newly identified sales opportunities and using our help to close business, or building your own solution and service offerings based on our SUSE platform, the SUSE team is looking forward to working closely with you in a trusted relationship. Here are specific examples where I see opportunities for you, our value-added partners:

• Enterprise customers are accelerating their move of mission-critical applications and workloads from Solaris and UNIX to Linux platforms. These application and workload migrations are increasingly being targeted in virtual environments. You should support your customers' transition requirements by selling SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. This is a great opportunity to sell your own professional services around SUSE Linux Enterprise implementations and migrations. More+
• For customers who want to run SAP workloads on Linux you should offer SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications. This is the only Linux platform optimized to specifically support SAP applications. More+
• SAP partners can deploy and build professional services practices around SAP's HANA solution, which is sold exclusively with SUSE Linux Enterprise. Your partnership with SUSE places you in a unique position to support your customers in this fast developing market. More+
• VMware partners can work with their customers to implement SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware, which is included with each and every VMware vSphere shipment. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware is the most highly integrated Linux solution available in the market today for VMware's customer base. Customers who received a basic entitlement to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware with their vSphere license often have a need for standard or priority support subscriptions. This represents a unique up-sell opportunity for our business partners.

These are just a few of the many examples where SUSE and our partner community can together serve our customers and achieve mutually profitable business for our organisations. I invite you to learn more by contacting your local area SUSE team, or visit www.suse.com.

2012 is also the year in which SUSE will be celebrating it's 20 year anniversary as a commercial Linux provider, in addition to launching several new products—including a Cloud Infrastructure solution based on OpenStack. SUSE is looking forward to celebrating it's anniversary with you while we continue to engage with you and keep you informed about the latest and greatest from SUSE.

My commitment to you foremost is that SUSE will strive to be a vibrant partner for you, helping you keep your customers satisfied and your business healthy. If you're interested in becoming a SUSE partner, please contact us through www.suse.com/partners/.

Let's have a great 2012 together.

Kind regards,

Nils Brauckmann
President and General Manager, SUSE