SUSE, the world’s largest independent open source company, has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Rancher Labs, which provides a Kubernetes Management platform.
“The merger of a leader in Enterprise Linux, Edge Computing and AI with a leader in Enterprise Kubernetes Management will disrupt the market to help customers accelerate their digital transformation journeys,” said SUSE CEO Melissa Di Donato.
“Only the combination of SUSE and Rancher will have the depth of a globally supported and 100% true open source portfolio, including cloud native technologies, to help our customers seamlessly innovate across their business from the edge to the core to the cloud,” she said.
SUSE and Rancher will deliver computing everywhere with the latest AI and seamless deployment of containerised workloads from the edge to the core to the cloud.
“Rancher and SUSE will help organisations control their cloud native futures,” said Rancher CEO Sheng Liang. “Our leading Kubernetes platform with SUSE’s broad open source software solutions creates a powerful combination, enabling IT and Operations leaders worldwide to best meet the needs of their customers wherever they are on their digital transformation journey from the data centre to cloud to edge.”
The deal is expected to close before the end of October, subject to customary closing conditions including receipt of regulatory approvals.
SUSE customers will benefit from the robust capabilities of Rancher’s industry leading cloud native technologies, named by Forrester WaveTM as a leader in Enterprise Container Platform Software. Rancher’s customers will on the other hand gain access to SUSE’s global support network and broad open source portfolio.
This combination is also a huge win for SUSE’s global partner ecosystem who will now be able to provide an even broader range of solutions to their customers with Rancher’s solutions.
Rancher will continue its strategy to be open and support multiple Kubernetes distributions and operating systems. Rancher’s infrastructure-agnostic architecture supports any Cloud Native Computing Foundation-certified Kubernetes distribution including Google GKE, Amazon EKS, and Microsoft AKS, as well as projects like Gardener.
