British Micro Focus has sold its SUSE business to investment firm EQT Partners. This involves an amount of 2.53 billion dollars, converted to 2.17 billion euros. SUSE is a German software company, known for its Linux distribution, among other things.
SUSE writes that the acquisition still needs to be approved by Micro Focus shareholders and regulators, making it likely to close in early 2019. According to CEO Nils Brauckmann, the acquisition will make SUSE a ‘completely independent company’. The organization expects that there will be no changes in areas such as employees, relationships with customers, partners, products and services.
The open source company had revenue of $320 million in fiscal year 2017. according to EQT. The priority would be to expand SUSE’s existing cloud offerings, as well as “expanding product offerings so that SUSE can continue to play a leading role in commercializing open source for enterprise customers.”
The German SUSE, which was founded in 1992 and whose name stands for Software- und System-Entwicklung, today has approximately 1400 employees. It supports the development of the Linux distribution openSUSE and provides enterprise customers with the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server service, among others. In 2003, the company was acquired by Novell, which merged back into Attachmate in 2011. In 2014, this was then reunited with Micro Focus.