SUSE ( , ) is a German-based multinational

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Op ...

company that develops and sells

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

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 SUSE Linux Enterprise (often abbreviated to SLE) is a Linux-based operating system developed by SUSE. It is available in two editions, suffixed with Server (SLES) for servers and mainframes, and Desktop (SLED) for workstations and desktop comp ...

and the primary sponsor of the community-supported

openSUSE openSUSE () is a free and open-source software, free and open source RPM Package Manager, RPM-based Linux distribution developed by the openSUSE project. The initial release of the community project was a beta version of SUSE Linux 10.0. Addi ...

Linux distribution project. While the openSUSE "Tumbleweed" variation is an upstream distribution for both the "Leap" variation and SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution, 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. In July 2018,

Micro Focus International Micro Focus International plc is a British multinational software and information technology business based in Newbury, Berkshire, England. The firm provides software and consultancy. The company is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is ...

, SUSE's parent company since 2014, announced its plan to sell the business unit to a subsidiary of

EQT Partners EQT AB Group is a global investment organization founded in 1994. Its funds invest in private equity, infrastructure, real estate, growth equity, and venture capital in Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific. , EQT's assets under management a ...

in the first quarter of calendar year 2019. This acquisition was completed on 15 March 2019, making SUSE a standalone business. Under new ownership, their legal name is SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH.

History

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 first computer,

Konrad Zuse Konrad Ernst Otto Zuse (; 22 June 1910 – 18 December 1995) was a German civil engineer, pioneering computer scientist, inventor and businessman. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program-c ...

. The first Linux product sold was an extension of the Linux distribution

Slackware Slackware is a Linux distribution created by Patrick Volkerding in 1993. Originally based on Softlanding Linux System, Slackware has been the basis for many other Linux distributions, most notably the first versions of SUSE Linux distributions ...

, which was delivered on 40 floppy disks. The company translated the distribution in cooperation with the Slackware founder

Patrick Volkerding Patrick Volkerding (born October 20, 1966) is the founder and maintainer of the Slackware Linux distribution. Volkerding is Slackware's "Benevolent Dictator for Life" (BDFL), and is also known informally as "The Man". Personal life Volkerding e ...

into German. While the core of the distribution remained Slackware, in May 1996, S.u.S.E. released its first own distribution based on the

Jurix Jurix was an early Linux distribution created by Florian La Roche, a former employee of the legal department at Saarland University. The distribution was maintained between 1993 and 1999 and hosted on the now-defunct "jurix.jura.uni-sb.de" and "s ...

distribution published by Florian La Roche. In 1997, S.u.S.E. opened an office in

Oakland Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third largest city overall in the Bay A ...

, California, and in 1998, moved the corporate office from

Fürth Fürth (; East Franconian: ; yi, פיורדא, Fiurda) is a city in northern Bavaria, Germany, in the administrative division (''Regierungsbezirk'') of Middle Franconia. It is now contiguous with the larger city of Nuremberg, the centres of the t ...

Nuremberg Nuremberg ( ; german: link=no, Nürnberg ; in the local East Franconian dialect: ''Nämberch'' ) is the second-largest city of the German state of Bavaria after its capital Munich, and its 518,370 (2019) inhabitants make it the 14th-largest ...

. 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.

Acquisition by Novell

On 4 November 2003,

Novell Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi-platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare. Under the lead ...

announced the acquisition of SuSE Linux AG at a price of . Novell had been migrating away from the

NetWare NetWare is a discontinued computer network operating system developed by Novell, Inc. It initially used cooperative multitasking to run various services on a personal computer, using the IPX network protocol. The original NetWare product in 19 ...

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.

Acquisition by Attachmate

Novell was in turn acquired by

The Attachmate Group The Attachmate Group, Inc. was a privately held software holding company based in Houston, Texas in the United States. The major companies held by the group were Attachmate, NetIQ, Novell, and SUSE. Attachmate was owned by Wizard Parent LLC� ...

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.

Attachmate and Micro Focus merger

On 20 November 2014,

and

finalized their merger, making

SUSE's new parent company. SUSE operates as a semi-autonomous business unit within the Micro Focus Group, with former president Nils Brauckmann promoted to

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...

and member of the Micro Focus Group board.

Acquisition of OpenAttic

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 SUSE Enterprise Storage (SES) is a Linux-based computer data storage product developed by SUSE and built on Ceph technology. The second major release was available in November, 2015, and announced at SUSECon 2015. New features in 2.0 include cr ...

as a graphical tool to manage and monitor Ceph-based storage clusters.

Acquisition of HPE OpenStack and Stackato

On 9 March 2017, SUSE announced the completion of its acquisition of assets relating to the

OpenStack OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software plat ...

and

Cloud Foundry Cloud Foundry is an open source, multi-cloud application platform as a service (PaaS) governed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation, a 501(c)(6) organization. The software was originally developed by VMware, transferred to Pivotal Software (a joint ...

products from

Hewlett Packard Enterprise The Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE) is an American multinational information technology company based in Spring, Texas, United States. HPE was founded on November 1, 2015, in Palo Alto, California, as part of the splitting of the H ...

(HPE). Development teams and code related to those products were to be used to expand SUSE's

IaaS The first major provider of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) was Amazon in 2008. IaaS is a cloud computing service model by means of which computing resources are supplied by a cloud services provider. The IaaS vendor provides the storage, net ...

and

PaaS Platform as a service (PaaS) or application platform as a service (aPaaS) or platform-based service is a category of cloud computing services that allows customers to provision, instantiate, run, and manage a modular bundle comprising a computing ...

capabilities. As part of the agreement, HPE was given the option to OEM those products to produce their Helion OpenStack and Stackato products.

Sale to EQT Partners

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

, 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. On 22 July 2019,

Melissa Di Donato Melissa Di Donato is an American-born businesswoman based in the United Kingdom and the CEO of SUSE. Career Early in her career, Melissa Di Donato worked on enterprise resource planning system, SAP ERP, SAP R3. She had various positions at IBM, S ...

, former

SAP Sap is a fluid transported in xylem cells (vessel elements or tracheids) or phloem sieve tube elements of a plant. These cells transport water and nutrients throughout the plant. Sap is distinct from latex, resin, or cell sap; it is a separ ...

COO, was appointed CEO of SUSE.

Acquisition of Rancher Labs

On 8 July 2020, SUSE announced its definitive agreement to acquire

Rancher Labs Rancher Labs is an open source software company based in Cupertino, California. The company helps manage Kubernetes at scale. Rancher Labs was founded in 2014 and has 30,000 active teams. Rancher Labs was funded with $10 million in 2015, $20 mi ...

, 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.

Initial public offering

Early in 2021 sources indicated that SUSE was preparing for an

IPO An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...

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 The Frankfurt Stock Exchange (german: link=no, Börse Frankfurt, former German name – FWB) is the world's 12th largest stock exchange by market capitalization. It has operations from 8:00 am to 10:00 pm ( German time). Organisation Locat ...

at an original issue price of 30 euros, with EQT Partners retaining 75.7 percent. The headquarters of the newly formed SUSE S.A. was set to

Luxembourg Luxembourg ( ; lb, Lëtzebuerg ; french: link=no, Luxembourg; german: link=no, Luxemburg), officially the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, ; french: link=no, Grand-Duché de Luxembourg ; german: link=no, Großherzogtum Luxemburg is a small lan ...

. Nuremberg remained the largest software development office though.

Acquisition of NeuVector

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.

Products

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.

Linux

Server

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 In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between th ...

, 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 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon.com's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of ...

Microsoft Azure Microsoft Azure, often referred to as Azure ( , ), is a cloud computing platform operated by Microsoft for application management via around the world-distributed data centers. Microsoft Azure has multiple capabilities such as software as a ...

, and

Google Compute Engine Google Compute Engine (GCE) is the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) component of Google Cloud Platform which is built on the global infrastructure that runs Google's search engine, Gmail, YouTube and other services. Google Compute Engine en ...

=Offerings based on the Server product

= * SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, a Linux operating system optimized for SAP workloads * SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service, a Linux operating system for the retail industry that includes a version of Linux tailored for user touch points and in-store servers * SUSE Linux Enterprise High Performance Computing, an infrastructure solution for

high performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a multid ...

* SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension, an integrated suite of open source HA clustering and storage replication technologies

=Special editions of the Server product

= 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: * SLES for VMware (entitlement was included in VMware vSphere; product end-of-availability has been announced) * SLES for

* SLES for

, which includes a specially tuned kernel * SLES for ARM

Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi () is a series of small single-board computers (SBCs) developed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in association with Broadcom. The Raspberry Pi project originally leaned towards the promotion of teaching basic ...

support, a specially packaged version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for ARM, tailored for

3 Model B * SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time, a special version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server that turns the general-purpose operating system into a

real-time operating system A real-time operating system (RTOS) is an operating system (OS) for real-time applications that processes data and events that have critically defined time constraints. An RTOS is distinct from a time-sharing operating system, such as Unix, which m ...

Desktop

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop SUSE Linux Enterprise (often abbreviated to SLE) is a Linux-based operating system developed by SUSE. It is available in two editions, suffixed with Server (SLES) for servers and mainframes, and Desktop (SLED) for workstations and desktop compu ...

, the successor to Novell Linux Desktop * SUSE Linux Enterprise Workstation Extension, an add-on extension that adds desktop features to the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server *

LibreOffice LibreOffice () is a free and open-source productivity software, office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was fork (software development), forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of t ...

office productivity suite is also distributed by SUSE

Software-defined infrastructure

* SUSE OpenStack Cloud, an automated cloud computing platform based on

for deploying and managing Infrastructure-as-a-Service private clouds. SUSE announced that they would discontinue sales as of October 2019 * SUSE Enterprise Storage, a

software-defined storage Software-defined storage (SDS) is a marketing term for computer data storage software for policy-based provisioning and management of data storage independent of the underlying hardware. Software-defined storage typically includes a form of storag ...

tool based on Ceph enabling the use of commodity servers and disk drives for cost-effective, resilient, and scalable storage. SUSE announced they would discontinue sales as of March 2021

Management

* SUSE Manager, a comprehensive Linux server management tool based on Uyuni (a fork of

Spacewalk Extravehicular activity (EVA) is any activity done by an astronaut in outer space outside a spacecraft. In the absence of a breathable atmosphere of Earth, Earthlike atmosphere, the astronaut is completely reliant on a space suit for environmen ...

, based on

SaltStack Salt (sometimes referred to as SaltStack) is a Python-based, open-source software for event-driven IT automation, remote task execution, and configuration management. Supporting the "infrastructure as code" approach to data center system and n ...

) for package and

patch Patch or Patches may refer to: Arts, entertainment and media * Patch Johnson, a fictional character from ''Days of Our Lives'' * Patch (''My Little Pony''), a toy * "Patches" (Dickey Lee song), 1962 * "Patches" (Chairmen of the Board song) ...

management, system provisioning and monitoring

Application delivery

* SUSE CaaS Platform ("Container as a Service"), an application development and hosting platform for container-based applications and services based on

Kubernetes Kubernetes (, commonly stylized as K8s) is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Google originally designed Kubernetes, but the Cloud Native Computing Foundation now maintains ...

* SUSE Cloud Application Platform, a platform-as-a-service environment based on

and

References

External links

* {{authority control 1992 establishments in Germany 2003 mergers and acquisitions 2019 mergers and acquisitions Companies based in Nuremberg Free software companies Linux companies Micro Focus International Private equity portfolio companies Remote companies Software companies established in 1992 SUSE Linux