SUSE to Acquires Rancher Labs

July 8, SUSE and Rancher Labs announced that they have reached an agreement on SUSE acquiring Rancher. They have not released the details as to the price of the purchase. SUSE will acquire Kubernetes management technologies.

Rancher Labs is an open-source company founded in 2014 to develop technologies for managing container operations. Their flagship product “Rancher” is a Kubernetes management platform, and “Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE)” is a CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution. Rancher Labs has 37,000 active users and more than 100 million downloads.

By acquiring Rancher, SUSE will be able to deliver computing everywhere with AI and deploy containerized workloads from the edge to the core of the cloud. Rancher’s infrastructure-agnostic architecture supports any CNCF-certified Kubernetes distributions including Google GKE, Amazon EKS, and Microsoft AKS.

SUSE is a big, independent open-source company. Even after the acquisition, Rancher will continue its strategy to be open and support CNC-certified Kubernetes distributions.

Following the acquisition, Sheng Lian, the co-founder and CEO of Rancher, will assume the role of president of engineering and innovation. In March 2019, SUSE has once again become an independent company. Starting with the acquisition, SUSE will execute both organic and inorganic strategies.

Melissa Di Donato, CEO of SUSE, has commented that “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,” and can create a complete open-source portfolio, including cloud-native technologies.

SUSE
https://www.suse.com/
Rancher Labs
https://rancher.com/