SUSE Linux sold for $2.5 billion
Swedish private equity firm purchases the company behind the enterprise Linux service.
SUSE Linux, and its associated software business, has been sold by Micro Focus International to EQT Partners ( www.eqtpartners.com) for the not insubstantial sum of $2.53 billion, which, as Channel News Asia reports is 26.7 times the operating profit of the SUSE software unit for the 12 months before the end of October 2017 for more details see http://bit.ly/LXFSUSEsale.
That’s certainly a vote of confidence for SUSE, which was initially created by German students (SUSE is an acronym for Software- und SystemEntwicklung). In 2003 it was acquired by Novell for £210 million in a bid to make SUSE an alternative to Microsoft’s OS dominance with Windows. It didn’t succeed, and in 2010 Novell was sold for $2.2 billion to the Attachmate Group (which, ironically, was backed by Microsoft).
In 2014 Attachmate was merged with Micro Focus for $1.2 billion. So, SUSE is no stranger to being haggled over, and in a blog post ( http://
bit.ly/LXFSUSEBlog), the team claims that, “This is exciting news for all of us here at SUSE and it marks the next step in our trajectory of growth and momentum. The investment and support provided by EQT will enable us to continue driving our build and buy strategy of expanding both organically and through technology acquisition.”
For projects that rely on the open-nature of SUSE (such as openSUSE), there will be relief to read that SUSE will continue its commitment to open source, with the team confirming that “in keeping with our 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.”.