Looking back and forward - Suse celebrates 25th anniversary

This September, Suse celebrates its 25th birthday. Of course, such a milestone is a nice occasion to pause for a moment or to review what has been achieved and to look a little ahead.

Look back:

At that time, when the company was founded in 1992, the open source operating system Linux was still extremely young, since Linus Torvalds had only announced on the Internet a year earlier that he was working on a free operating system and had solicited cooperation.

Linux was still a long way from enterprise IT use and was regarded as something for geeks. But the company's founders Roland Dyroff, Thomas Fehr, Burchard Steinbild and Hubert Mantel had the vision and the belief that Linux would one day succeed, especially in data centers.

Their company S.u.S.E, short for "Software and System Development", provided the world's first enterprise Linux distribution a few years later.

Until around the turn of the millennium, the efforts of the then Unix top dogs to win the favor of companies with an enterprise open source solution were rather smiled at.

But Suse's first own Linux distribution (Suse Linux 4.2.) became the leading one in Europe in 1997. This laid the foundation for success in the North American and Asia-Pacific markets. Partnerships were formed with IBM, SAP and Oracle.

With Suse Linux Enterprise Server (for IBM S/390) the first SLES saw the light of day; it included the installation and configuration tool YaST.

And, also around the turn of the millennium: the availability of SLES for x86 architectures - as well as the opening of the SAP Linux Lab in 1999 with Suse as one of the first partners and founding members with the objective of developing an enterprise Linux for mission-critical SAP use.

From the turn of the millennium until around 2010, Suse significantly increased its offensive speed. Through forced partnerships, through a steadily increasing number of customers as well as through numerous innovations: Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop for Business, openSuse, Suse Studio and XEN and KVM, the first virtualization technologies for Linux in the enterprise environment, became available.

Partnering was expanded; for example with AMD, Intel, Fujitsu or HP(E), but also with Microsoft and SAP.

In 2009, Suse became involved in the then-secret Hana project - with the subsequent Hana exclusivity of five years. From 2010, Suse expanded its activities by providing other open source technologies or solutions for enterprise use, such as data center deployment.

2011 saw the availability of Suse Manager for infrastructure automation; a year later Suse OpenStack Cloud (for IaaS orchestration) or in 2015 Suse Enterprise Storage based on Ceph.

Also important: the increased involvement in the Cloud Foundry Foundation (PaaS). In the SAP environment in particular, Suse was able to develop into the preferred and market-leading operating system platform from 2001 with the availability of Suse SLES and from 2010 of the version SLES for SAP Applications, which was further optimized for SAP. Both for SAP Classic and for Hana and for Hana cloud-based SAP solutions.

Looking ahead:

Today, Suse is in a position to further expand its radius of action as one of the key players in IT and to profit from the ongoing open source wave - in both the SAP and non-SAP environments.

The focus is on the shift towards the Software Defined Data Center or "An Always Open Data Center" and the delivery of innovative, value-added enterprise solutions.

In the process, investments are made in existing solutions or they are permanently further developed and extended with new features.

New Suse solutions are also in the pipeline. Investments are also being made in the many partnerships that Suse has cultivated as an independent open source solution provider - for 25 years now.