Suse will continue its open strategy following purchase

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A pioneer of the open source era, SUSE, the first company to provide open source services to companies, is acquired for 2.535 billion dollars by the Swedish private equity group EQT Partners. This acquisition comes shortly after SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 is available in beta.

Largest operation in SUSE history

With 1400 employees worldwide, SUSE achieved sales of nearly $35 million in the last twelve months of 2017. The amount of the sale is 26.7 times the adjusted operating income of the SUSE software unit for the 12 months ended October 2017.

Since its creation by German students, SUSE (Software- und System-Entwicklung) has been bought several times, notably by the American software company Novell in 2003 at 120 million dollars in 2003, with the aim of a competitive strategy with Microsoft’s operating systems. Without success, Novell itself was bought by Attachmate Group for 2.2 billion. In 2014 Attachmate merged with the British software company Micro Focus for 1.2 billion dollars. The acquisition by EQT Partners, therefore, represents the most significant transaction in the company’s history.

SUSE to focus on infrastructure

SUSE appears to be pleased with the new partnership with its new owner EQT Partners and is also committed to focusing on its expansion into the IT infrastructure field.

“This is exciting news for all of us at SUSE and marks the next step on our path of growth and momentum. The investment and support provided by EQT will enable us to continue to drive our strategy. ยป

What about open source?

In the announcement on the company’s blog, SUSE wants to reassure about its commitment to the open source world and the continuity of development projects:

“SUSE intends to continue its commitment to open source business and development model and actively participate in communities and projects aimed at bringing open source innovation to the high-quality enterprise. Reliable and usable solutions. Our genuinely open source model, where open refers to the freedom of choice offered to customers and not just the code used in our solutions, is integrated into the SUSE culture, differentiates us in the marketplace and has been the key to our years of success.

The company also confirms the continuation of the current management team: “The current management team led by SUSE CEO, Nils Brauckmann, will remain and continue to focus on the success of customers and partners with a deep commitment and commitment to communities and open source projects.