Type Subsidiary Headquarters Nuremberg, Germany Founded 1992 | Industry Computer software Area served Worldwide | |
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Key people Nils Brauckmann (President and GM) Products SUSE Linux Enterprise
SUSE Manager
SUSE OpenStack Cloud
SUSE Enterprise Storage
SUSE Studio Founders Hubert Mantel, Roland Dyroff, Thomas Fehr, Burchard Steinbild Parent organizations Novell, Micro Focus, The Attachmate Group, NOVELL, INC. | ||
Suse company overview new
SUSE (SUU-zah) is a German-based, multinational, open-source software company that develops and sells Linux products to business customers. Founded in 1992, it was the first company to market Linux for the enterprise. It is also the primary sponsor of the community-supported openSUSE Project which develops the openSUSE Linux distribution. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Micro Focus International.
Contents
- Suse company overview new
- History
- Acquisition by Novell
- Acquisition by Attachmate
- Attachmate and Micro Focus merger
- Products
- Server
- Offerings based on the Server product
- Special editions of the Server product
- Desktop
- Management and Cloud
- References
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 SuSE was an acronym for Software- und System-Entwicklung (Software and Systems Development). The first Linux product sold was an extension of the Linux distribution Slackware, which was delivered on 40 floppy disks. The company translated the distribution in cooperation with the Slackware founder Patrick Volkerding into German. While the core of the distribution remained Slackware, in May 1996, SuSE released its first own distribution based on the Jurix distribution published by Florian La Roche.
In 1997, SUSE opened an office in Oakland, California, and in 1998, moved the corporate office from Fürth to Nuremberg. 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. It is distributed by TriTech Distribution Limited in Hong Kong.
Acquisition by Novell
On 4 November 2003, Novell announced the acquisition of SuSE Linux AG at a price of US$210 million. Novell had been migrating away from the NetWare 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 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, The Attachmate Group and Micro Focus International finalized their merger, making Micro Focus International SUSE's new parent company.
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.
Server
The primary server Linux distribution from SUSE is SUSE Linux Enterprise Server targeted to large organizations for physical, virtual and cloud workloads. All versions are available for multiple processor architectures, including Intel x86, ARM, AMD x86-64, IBM Power, IBM S/390 and zSeries, and Intel Itanium. Trial versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 and 12 are available on the site.
Offerings based on the Server product
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:
Desktop
In the desktop family, the primary distribution is SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, the successor to Novell Linux Desktop. SUSE also offers the SUSE Linux Enterprise Workstation Extension that adds desktop features to the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. The popular LibreOffice office productivity suite is also distributed and supported by SUSE and sold as LibreOffice from SUSE.
Management and Cloud
SUSE software management and cloud tools include: