SUSE is one of the longest-standing enterprise Linux companies, founded in Germany in 1992 — making it older than Red Hat. The company develops SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), a commercial Linux distribution widely used in enterprise environments, particularly in Europe and among SAP customers.
SUSE’s product lineup includes Rancher (acquired in 2020), a popular Kubernetes management platform that supports multiple Kubernetes distributions. NeuVector provides container security, and Harvester offers an open-source hyperconverged infrastructure solution built on Kubernetes.
The Rancher acquisition was a strategic move that positioned SUSE as a major player in the Kubernetes ecosystem. Rancher’s multi-cluster management capabilities and its lightweight K3s distribution for edge computing complemented SUSE’s existing Linux business.
SUSE has had an interesting corporate history — it’s been owned by Novell, Attachmate, Micro Focus, and EQT Partners. The company went public on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in 2021 and was later taken private again by Marcel LUX III SARL in 2023. SUSE maintains strong partnerships with SAP, Microsoft, and major hardware vendors.
