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Suse, the company behind one of the oldest Linux distributions, today announced that it is independent again. The company, which provides open-source infrastructure and applications, has been acquired from Micro Focus by growth investor EQT for $2.5 billion (€2.2 billion).

There are few companies that have changed ownership as often as Suse and yet have retained a strong market position. Suse was taken over by Novell in 2004. In the course of 2010, Attachmate Novell, and with it Suse, took over. Four years later, Micro Focus took over the company. Suse then became an independent division, until it was sold to EQT in mid-2018. The completion of the acquisition took quite some time, but from now on Suse will be fully independent for the first time since 2004.

Open-source offer

Micro Focus states that when it acquired Attachmate Group for 2.35 billion dollars (2.07 billion euros), Suse accounted for only 20 percent of the group’s total sales. Since then, the company has significantly expanded its product portfolio outside of Linux and has entered the lucrative market of open-source infrastructure. For example, Suse offers products for and support for open-source projects such as Cloud Foundry, OpenStack and Kubernetes.

Nils Brauckmann will continue to lead the company as CEO. Furthermore, there are some changes in the company structure. Enrica Angelo has been appointed as the new CFO of Suse and Sander Huyts is now the COO. Furthermore, former CTO Thomas Di Giacomo is now the chairman of the Engineering, Product and Innovation department. They all report directly to Brauckmann.

Digital transformation

In an announcement, Brauckmann states that Suse is of critical importance to customers and partner organisations. Our independence is in keeping with our focus on delivering what is best for them. Furthermore, Brauckmann states that Suse will deliver the innovation that customers need to realize their goals around the digital transformation.

The question is how long Suse will remain independent. The open source market is becoming increasingly popular. IBM recently acquired Red Hat for 34 billion dollars (29.96 billion euros).

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.