The company has named Enrica Angelone as its chief financial officer and Sander Huyts as new chief operations officer
SUSE on Monday announced that it has become the largest independent open source company with the completion of its acquisition by Swedish growth investor EQT from British mainframe company Micro Focus.
The company has finalized its $2.5 billion acquisition by EQT from Micro Focus, which itself had acquired it back in 2014.
SUSE, the company behind the oldest Linux distribution, was first bought by Novell in 2004. Novell was then acquired by Attachmate in 2010. In 2014, Micro Focus acquired SUSE from Attachmate along with the other properties that were part of Novell.
Reshuffles executive ranks
In a statement, the company said it has expanded its executive team, adding new leadership roles and experience to further boost its growth.
SUSE has named Enrica Angelone as its chief financial officer and Sander Huyts as new chief operations officer.
Thomas Di Giacomo, formerly chief technology officer for SUSE, has been appointed as president of Engineering, Product and Innovation. However, SUSE CEO Nils Brauckmann will remain at the helm of the company and all three aforementioned executives will report to him.
“Current IT trends make it clear that open source has become more important in the enterprise than ever before. We believe that makes our status as a truly independent open source company more important than ever,” Brauckmann said.
“Our genuinely open, open source solutions, flexible business practices, lack of enforced vendor lock-in and exceptional service are more critical to customer and partner organizations, and our independence coincides with our single-minded focus on delivering what is best for them,” he added.
How SUSE’s independence status will benefit customers?
The company believes that it is now even better positioned to focus on the needs of customers and partners as a leading provider of enterprise-grade, open source software-defined infrastructure and application delivery solutions.
It also said that its transition was timely as containers are enabling new levels of agility and the need for digital transformation built on open source software-defined infrastructure and application delivery technologies is growing.
“SUSE’s return to the role of an independent open source software company comes at a pivotal point in the industry,” said Al Gillen, Group Vice President, Software Development and Open Source, IDC.
He continued, “As one of the industry’s largest purely open source software companies, SUSE’s independence will benefit customers as the company builds on its heritage of technical excellence, value-driven partnerships and community engagement to deliver timely technology solutions to the market.”
SUSE is currently involved in more than 100 open source projects, supported by employees around the world.
Johannes Reichel, Partner at EQT, said, “SUSE’s market presence, strong leadership, focus on customer success and ability to partner successfully have been and will continue to be crucial as SUSE enters this next phase of its evolution. It is in the right place at the right time with the right resources to help transform the way organizations around the world do business.”
