The Swedish private equity fund EQT VIII is buying SUSE from Micro Focus for $2.535 billion. SUSE has been owned by Micro Focus since November 2014, where it has operated as a semi-independent business under the leadership of Nils Brauckmann.
EQT VIII plans to work with Brauckmann and his team to support SUSE’s next period of growth and innovation. The private equity fund will leave SUSE as an independent company. Its strategy includes strengthening its position as an open source player, both organically and through add-on acquisitions. Building SUSE’s public cloud business will be a priority.
“Today is an exciting day in SUSE’s history. By partnering with EQT, we will become a fully independent business,” said SUSE CEO Nils Brauckmann in a statement.
SUSE was founded in 1992, and it was the first provider of an enterprise-grade open source Linux operating system. For the 12 months ended October 31, 2017, it reported sales of $320 million. SUSE employs about 1,400 employees worldwide. The company today provides enterprise-grade, open source software-defined infrastructure and application delivery solutions for on-premise and cloud-based workloads.
OpenStack
In May, SUSE issued its OpenStack Cloud 8 release based on OpenStack Pike.
SDxCentral at that time spoke with Peter Chadwick, SUSE director of product management, at the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, British Columbia. “We’ve been in the open source business for 25 years,” said Chadwick. “We understand the business model of providing enterprise-level support.”
In 2017, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) sold some of its OpenStack and Cloud Foundry assets to SUSE. Chadwick said, “HPE used to have their own version of OpenStack called Helion OpenStack. But last year they transferred their engineering team over to SUSE.”
Asked how SUSE differentiates itself from other OpenStack distributions, Chadwick said, “We are an upstream-first company. When we make changes to open source we push that up. We make it easy to deploy and operate, and we offer support. That is our level of differentiation.”
Also in 2017, SUSE unveiled its container-as-a-service (CaaS) platform. SUSE said the service supports organizations that are either containerizing existing applications directly or using a microservices architecture.