SUSE is claiming it has become the most widely available enterprise Linux vendor in the cloud. Although that may be an arguable — and likely unprovable — point, you can’t argue with the company’s success in the cloud.

SUSE has made significant inroads with cloud vendors, including Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) as of earlier in 2012, and now the company is sporting 20 global cloud services providers as partners and more than 15,000 enterprises as customers. SUSE also claims 9,200 certified apps from more than 1,800 ISVs.

The reason for this growth? According to the vendor, it embraced the channel with the SUSE Cloud Provider Program, which was designed to help cloud services providers tailor solutions to emerging cloud business models. Since the program’s launch in 2010, the vendor has worked with some of the top cloud providers, including 1&1, Amazon Web Services, Dell, Fujitsu, IBM (NYSE: IBM), Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), Tencent, SHI, SGI, Verizon (NYSE: VZ) and Vodacom Business — all of which are running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server in their cloud offerings.

The company has even had success in the Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) cloud platform. The company managed to add Microsoft Windows Azure to its cloud program — a move identified as a good idea earlier in the year on Talkin’ Cloud.

Regardless of whether SUSE has really become the top Linux distribution favored by cloud providers is something that is bound to be argued by its supporters and detractors. As noted on Talkin’ Cloud in January, Rackspace pegs the Ubuntu distribution as the Linux version of choice by its cloud customers. And don’t forget about Red Hat, which continues to build out its cloud strategy.

For cloud services providers looking to Linux as a viable option for building cloud services and platforms around, there is no shortage of choices, but SUSE is trying to present itself as the best choice with tools to make it as easy as possible to build optimized SUSE Linux Enterprise operating system images and application workloads.