SUSE acquired industrial IoT platform Losant, signaling new software-as-a-service (SaaS) ventures for the open source giant.

In an exclusive interview with SDxCentral, Keith Basil, VP and GM for SUSE's Edge Business Unit, described the Losant USP as "industrial operational awareness made easy and modernized," shifting SUSE into open industrial process automation at the edge while rounding out the firm’s edge portfolio from infrastructure down to the sensor level. Specifically, the Losant addition extends its capabilities from the near and far edge into the industrial “tiny edge,” where sensors and constrained devices generate operational data.

“These are devices that are too small to run a full-blown Linux with Kubernetes plus the workload, which means there's no resources there to run that type of stack,” Basil explained. “Early on, we thought that if we could get connectivity to the devices and plumb those into Kubernetes, that was the win, but it wasn't enough. So we wanted to create that pool of data that we can extend and use for other capabilities, particularly around these integrations and APIs."

“Think of Losant, similar to the way we see Rancher. Ultimately, it's a Kubernetes application,” Basil added, referring to the subject of a previous SUSE acquisition of Kubernetes firm Rancher Labs.

“Architecturally, the software is split into two parts. There's a control plane side, very similar to Rancher, and then there's a downstream side, in this case, Losant's Edge Gateway agent for the edge capability running on-premises that gives us the connectivity to the devices that collects the data," Basil continued. "But there is an overall umbrella control plane layer as well that is a SaaS based layer in this use case, and so this is probably the first SaaS acquisition for SUSE.”

Founded in Cincinnati in 2015, Losant offers a platform for device orchestration and real-time intelligence, with the firm recognized in Gartner's "2025 Magic Quadrant for Global Industrial IoT Platforms." Its key selling point is a low-code environment to help reduce technical barriers to industrial IoT (IIoT) adoption and accelerate solution development.

With these tools brought into SUSE’s edge suite, including SUSE Linux Micro and K3s, SUSE is hoping to offer open source economics, architectural flexibility, and the ability to modernize operations without proprietary constraints, increasing IIoT adoption in manufacturing and industrial settings as both IoT and AI workloads increasingly converge at the edge.

Basil positioned the service as appealing to “a broad spectrum under our definition of the industrial umbrella," including businesses ranging across maritime, smart building management, health care, fleet management, and facilities management. For these businesses, SUSE is hoping to streamline processes, improve asset performance, and unlock new operational edge-based efficiencies.

The VP added customers are already upbeat on the acquisition, such as clients of both firms, including one large equipment manufacturer based in South America.

“The real win here in this industrial space is operational awareness. It's great that you have the plumbing, but the question is, okay, what's happening there? What are the actuators doing? What are the sensors sensing? What are the cameras seeing? The left hand side of that equation is this dashboarding capability for that awareness,” Basil said, referring to the Visual Workflow Engine and extensible dashboards inherited from Losant. These enable speedier deployment and time-to-value for operational technology (OT) teams. This is down to the integration of infrastructure data, business logic, and enterprise systems through a unified view.

Basil also noted recent edge-based inference shifts have brought the much-mooted Industry 4.0 a little closer to fruition, with “the technology for modernization [becoming] tangible and real.”

“As AI becomes meaningful in the edge space, particularly, we have to have access to the devices and the historical data,” Basil added, noting Losant has already stubbed out a model context protocol (MCP) integration into the platform for large language models (LLMs) and AI agents to connect and communicate.

“So I'm going to be working with our AI team and business unit to make sure that we can demo LLM integration with the industrial platform so you could query via text the state of that operational awareness that we're trying to achieve," Basil said.

Future moves will also see SUSE open-sourcing Losant, which Basil said would give customers more confidence and stability in the face of the usual worries that come with mergers and acquisitions.

“So the open sourcing, the SUSE enterprise legacy, the fact that we're going to work upstream to make this platform even better with collective input is a really good thing, alongside SUSE being kind of seen as a neutral partner amongst the industrial equipment manufacturers," Basil explained.

The integration with SUSE’s edge portfolio is also expected to be completed by April. Longer term, Basil said the Losant acquisition means SUSE “needs to build up its SaaS capabilities.”

“Because, classically, this integration is something that's not traditionally been in SUSE’s wheelhouse, but with the acquisition of Losant and their phenomenal team coming over, we have that capability now, so we want to buffer that to make sure that we are squarely in that business and doing the best for our customers," Basil said.