July 2018
SUSE Announces Plans to Operate as a Fully Independent Business
SUSE today announced plans to partner with growth investor EQT to continue momentum, strategy execution and product expansion as an independent business. The completion of EQT’s acquisition of SUSE from Micro Focus is subject to Micro Focus shareholder and customary regulatory approvals and is expected to occur in early 2019. Read the press release.
Having enjoyed seven years of continuous expansion, SUSE is set to be acquired from Micro Focus by EQT, which is a development-focused investor with extensive experience in the software industry.
Further investment and support will enable SUSE to scale and strengthen its position as a leading provider of enterprise-grade, open source software-defined infrastructure and application delivery solutions growing both organically and through add-on acquisitions.
Post-completion of the transaction, under the continued leadership of myself and my leadership team, SUSE will move to the next stage of its corporate evolution and operate globally as an independent company.
SUSE intends to continue to deliver and innovate based on current and future market requirements, operating with its current mission, vision and strategy.
To ensure continuity, the SUSE business expects staffing, customer relationships, partnerships, product and service offering, commitment to open source leadership and support for the key open source communities to remain unchanged.
Along those lines, here are three points I’d like to emphasize:
• Continued Growth and Momentum for SUSE. Today’s announcement is clearly good for SUSE and also for our customers and partners. The further investment and support provided by the partnership with EQT will fuel continued expansion, advance innovation and will drive the build and buy strategy required to meet customers' increasing need for digital transformation, built on open source software-defined infrastructure (SDI) and application delivery technologies.
• A bright future for Open, Open Source. In keeping with its 25-year history, SUSE intends to remain committed to an open source development and business model and actively participate in communities and projects to bring open source innovation to the enterprise as high quality, reliable and usable solutions. This truly open, open source model, where open refers to the freedom of choice provided to customers and not just our code, is embedded in our culture, differentiates us in the market place and has been key to our success.
• Stability and Continuity for our Customers and Partners. The current leadership team will remain and will continue to focus on the success of customers and partners with a deeply rooted commitment to and engagement with open source communities and projects. SUSE staff, customer and partner agreements as well as industry and community agreements will transfer with the SUSE business maximizing business continuity for our customers and partners.
As I said, today’s news is exciting for SUSE, its partners and its customers, as well as the open source community at large.
I look forward to continuing and strengthening our relationship in the coming year.
If you have any questions about today’s announcement, please do not hesitate to reach out to your SUSE representative for more information.
Best Regards,
Nils Brauckmann
Chief Executive Officer
SUSE
As far as openSUSE is concerned, apparently this will mean nothing and it’ll be business as usual - or rather lack of it since it’s free.
This morning we all learned the news that the openSUSE projects main
sponsor, SUSE, currently owned by MicroFocus, intends to be acquired
by EQT Partners in Sweden.
Nils Brauckmann (CEO of SUSE) personally called me this morning to
assure me this news will have no negative impacts on openSUSE.
This will be the third acquisition of SUSE since the creation of
openSUSE, the second under the leadership of Nils and his team.
Just as happened in that case, SUSE will be making no changes in its
relationship between the company and the openSUSE Project.
SUSE remains committed to supporting the openSUSE community, who play
a key role in helping SUSEs success, which is expected to continue
under their new partnership with EQT.
If anyone has any questions, concerns, or feedback, please feel free
to discuss them on this list or email me directly.
On Mon 02 Jul 2018 08:16:03 PM CDT, jetchisel wrote:
Miuku;2872020 Wrote:
> Received this in my mail today…
> >
Code:
> > July 2018
>
> SUSE Announces Plans to Operate as a Fully Independent Business
>
>
> As far as openSUSE is concerned, apparently this will mean nothing
and it’ll be business as usual - or rather lack of it since it’s free.>
>
>
> Y = yet
> A = another
> S = suse
> O = owner
Hi
Shouldn’t that be Y(et)a(nother)S(USE)T(akeover)?
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
SLES 15 | GNOME Shell 3.26.2 | 4.12.14-23-default
If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface,
please show your appreciation and click on the star below… Thanks!
We’ll see.
If I bought something new and shiney, I’d want it to be re-branded in my name, and Microfocus may not want their Domain name used in a product they no longer have an interest in.
After a few days’ musings,
Unless there’s something I’m not seeing, I think the takeway is that EQT almost certainly is investing in SUSE because it thinks it sees a growth and financial opportunity which means that it should be a good marriage. There are many other kinds of business relationships where the investors and the business aren’t well aligned, but based on the type of company and prior investments, EQT and SUSE should be able to have good synergy.
And,
Unless we hear something different I guess openSUSE will keep doing what it’s doing, but the product has been modified to more easily provide an entry point to SUSE products.
Let’s just hope though that this tighter integration between open source and paid services doesn’t follow the example of Oracle who pretty much ruined most of its open source products by choking off funds and placing onerous restrictions on what was a pretty good collection of open source.
