SUSE continues to grow and announces its partnership with Microsoft

After several years, SUSE returns to being an independent company. This is a historical distribution of Linux appreciated in the enterprise, so much so that towards the end of the 90s it was one of the most used in Germany and Northern Europe.

The cornerstone of its business is the sale of services and solutions such as SUSE OpenStack Cloud, a platform for managing private clouds, SUSE Enterprise Storage, a Software Defined Storage (SDS) management tool and SUSE Manager, an open-source solution for SDI management, Software Defined Infrastructures.

In 2004, SUSE was acquired by Novell and then sold to Attachmate in 2010 and acquired by Micro Focus in 2014. The last change of ownership took place in 2018, when SUSE passed into the hands of EQT, before returning to independent in the first months of 2019.

Despite the many changes of ownership, the company continues to grow and in 2018 it saw an increase in turnover of 15%, reaching almost 400 million. Along with the business, the number of employees is also growing, especially in the engineering and sales sectors: last year, 300 new people were hired, bringing the total workforce to 1,750. The future seems to be even brighter, according to CEO Nils Brauckmann:

” As exciting as SUSE’s growth and innovation have been over the past few years, we are only at the beginning. SUSE is now in a better position to quickly offer customers and partners a greater degree of innovation through both an organic growth of acquisitions. All this while maintaining the necessary direction to provide open solutions that allow us to remain at the forefront in our respective markets. We continue to evolve so that customers and partners can be successful. ”

The new features presented at SUSECON

During the SUSECON recently held in Nashville, the new features of SUSE were presented, including support for second-generation XEON Scalable processors, the OpenStack Cloud 9 platform and SUSE Cloud Application Platform 1.4, the first software distribution to introduce a Cloud Foundry Application Runtime within a completely native architecture on Kubernetes.

The most interesting announcement is in any case the collaboration with Microsoft that led to the launch of the first Linux enterprise image for SAP HANA Large Instances on Microsoft Azure. It is a solution dedicated to mission-critical applications for SAP Hana environments, particular databases entirely managed in RAM so as to guarantee high performance. In the case of Large Istance, we speak of systems that require memory cuts often exceeding 500 GB. The SUSE solution supports up to a maximum of 60 TB of memory.

” This is a customer-oriented solution that we jointly developed with Microsoft to make available those advanced levels of high availability and storage security that SAP HANA Large Instances customers need ” – specifies Daniel Nelson, SUSE vice president of Products and Solutions – ” We have developed a certified SAP platform for Azure that is pre-configured to make customers more productive in a shorter time. SUSE allows companies with open source solutions like this to perform best-of-breed digital transformations and implement the management of hybrid and multi-cloud workloads needed to constantly promote innovation, competitiveness and growth “.

More information on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications for SAP HANA Large Instances on Microsoft Azure is available at this address.