| SUSE S.A. | |
| Trading Name: | SUSE S.A. |
| Type: | Private held (Société Anonyme) |
| Industry: | Computer software |
| Foundation: | Fürth, Germany |
| Area Served: | Worldwide |
| Key People: | Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen (CEO) |
| Num Employees: | 2,300 (2023) |
SUSE S.A. ([1] pronounced as /de/) is a German multinational open-source software company that develops and sells Linux products to business customers. Founded in 1992, it was the first company to market Linux for enterprise. It is the developer of SUSE Linux Enterprise and the primary sponsor of the community-supported openSUSE Linux distribution project.
The openSUSE "Tumbleweed" variation is an upstream distribution for both the "Leap" variation and SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution. Meanwhile, its branded "Leap" variation is part of a direct upgrade path to the enterprise version, which effectively makes openSUSE Leap a non-commercial version of its enterprise product.
On 2 September 1992, Roland Dyroff, Burchard Steinbild, Hubert Mantel and Thomas Fehr founded the Software and Systems Development Corporation (German: Gesellschaft für Software und Systementwicklung mbH). The name S.u.S.E. was an acronym for Software- und System-Entwicklung (Software and Systems Development). The name alludes to the inventor of the modern computer, Konrad Zuse. The first Linux product sold was an extension of the Linux distribution Slackware, which was delivered on 40 floppy disks. The company translated the distribution in cooperation with the Slackware founder Patrick Volkerding into German. While the core of the distribution remained Slackware, in early 1994, S.u.S.E. released its first own distribution based on the Jurix distribution published by Florian La Roche.
In 1997, S.u.S.E. opened an office in Oakland, California, and in 1998, moved the corporate office from Fürth to Nürnberg. In December 1998, the name was changed from S.u.S.E. to SuSE. In the following years, SUSE opened a total of six national and four international (USA, Czech Republic, Great Britain and Italy) branches. On 25 November 2002, Richard Seibt became CEO. In Hong Kong, SUSE's products are distributed by TriTech Distribution Limited.
On 4 November 2003, Novell announced the acquisition of SuSE Linux AG at a price of . Novell had been migrating away from the NetWare kernel and used this acquisition as a migration path for its customers. The acquisition was completed on 13 January 2004, and the name was changed from SuSE Linux AG to a Novell, Inc. subsidiary under the name SuSE Linux GmbH and SUSE Linux Products GmbH. SUSE Linux Products GmbH was entirely responsible for the development of the SUSE Linux distribution and was led by Markus Rex. During the transfer, both the partner and the sales organizations were integrated into Novell. Richard Seibt became CEO of Novell EMEA and left on 9 May 2005.
In August 2005, the openSUSE community project launched to open up the development of SUSE Linux for external users and developers. SUSE Linux Enterprise has since been developed using the openSUSE community.
Novell was in turn acquired by The Attachmate Group on 27 April 2011. Under its new owner, SUSE remained a separate company. By June 2012, many former SUSE engineers who had been laid off during Novell's ownership had been brought back.
On 20 November 2014, The Attachmate Group and Micro Focus International finalized their merger, making Micro Focus International SUSE's new parent company. SUSE operated as a semi-autonomous business unit within the Micro Focus Group, with former president Nils Brauckmann promoted to CEO and member of the Micro Focus Group board.
On 9 November 2016, SUSE announced the acquisition of assets relating to the OpenAttic storage management assets from the German IT firm it-novum. OpenAttic was integrated into SUSE Enterprise Storage as a graphical tool to manage and monitor Ceph-based storage clusters.
On 9 March 2017, SUSE announced the completion of its acquisition of assets relating to the OpenStack and Cloud Foundry products from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Development teams and code related to those products were to be used to expand SUSE's IaaS and PaaS capabilities. As part of the agreement, HPE was given the option to OEM those products to produce their Helion OpenStack and Stackato products.
On 2 July 2018, Micro Focus announced that it would sell its SUSE business segment to Blitz 18-679 GmbH, a newly-created subsidiary of EQT AB, for $2.535 billion. On 15 March 2019, SUSE announced the completion of the acquisition. Blitz 18-679 GmbH later adopted the name Marcel BidCo GmbH and is currently an ultimate parent of SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH, which continued operations of SUSE LINUX GmbH, a company dissolved on 28 August 2019.[2]
On 22 July 2019, Melissa Di Donato, former SAP COO, was appointed CEO of SUSE.[3]
On 8 July 2020, SUSE announced its definitive agreement to acquire Rancher Labs, which provides a Kubernetes management platform. The acquisition closed on 1 December 2020, at which time Rancher CEO and cofounder Sheng Liang became SUSE's President of Engineering and Innovation.
Early in 2021 sources indicated that SUSE was preparing for an IPO before summer with a projected value of 7-8 billion euros.An official ITF (Intent to Float) statement was then released on April 26, 2021.On May 19, 2021, SUSE went public at Frankfurt Stock Exchange at an original issue price of 30 euros, with EQT AB retaining 75.7 percent. The headquarters of the newly formed SUSE S.A. was set to Luxembourg.[4] Nürnberg remained the largest software development office though.
On 28 October 2021, SUSE announced that it had acquired NeuVector, Inc., a provider of full lifecycle container security, for $130 million in cash and stock.
On 17 August 2023, EQT Private Equity announces intention to delist SUSE and merge into an unlisted Luxembourg entity.[5]
On 13 November 2023, SUSE S.A. announced that the merger was completed. The company previously known as SUSE S.A. was merged with Marcel New Lux IV S.A., a Luxembourg Public Limited Liability Corporation. The new company changed its name to SUSE S.A. and the old company's shares were delisted from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.[6]
See main article: SUSE Linux.
Starting with the launch of the SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 platform in July 2006, the SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 platform was the basis for both the server and desktop, with an almost identical code base.
, SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 is the latest available version.
The primary server Linux distribution from SUSE is SUSE Linux Enterprise Server ("SLES") targeted to large organizations for physical, virtual and cloud workloads. All versions are available for multiple processor architectures, including Intel x86, ARM, AMD x86-64, IBM Power, IBM S/390 and z Systems, and Intel Itanium. SLES is available in both on-demand and bring-your-own-subscription ("BYOS") images on Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine.
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server has several optimized editions created in the context of the respective partnerships. These editions are derived from the base Server product: