SUSE Linux Attracts 22,700 Hardware and Software Partners
Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) recently became the world’s first $1 billion open source company. Now, the folks at SUSE, promoter of the rival Linux distribution, are seeking bragging rights of their own. Indeed, SUSE says it now has more than 9,200 certified third-party applications and supports over 13,500 hardware, storage and networking devices. Impressive. But is SUSE in growth mode?
The VAR Guy’s educated hunch: Absolutely yes. Attachmate acquired Novell and its SUSE business roughly a year ago. Over the past year, SUSE has been freed from Novell branding, and SUSE is once again run from its own European headquarters.
Customer Base
Now in its 20th year of business, SUSE says it has 15,000 customers. Over two-thirds of the Fortune 500 run SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. And SUSE claims it is the most widely used commercial enterprise Linux distribution in China.
SUSE has also been promoting SUSE Studio to speed software appliance development, and SUSE Manager to ease IT management — including mixed SUSE and Red Hat customer installations.
How Much Growth?
In a prepared statement, SUSE President and GM Nils Brauchmann said the organization accelerated its growth and profitability over the past year — no small feat considering some partners and customers were skeptical of SUSE’s management under Attachmate’s ownership.
Still, SUSE doesn’t disclose actual financial and growth figures. And Red Hat seems to be gaining momentum across its Linux, virtualization, middleware and now storage businesses.
A few days ago, I began to consider dropping LXer from aKregator, as I’ve never particularly liked its darlings – Ubuntu and GNOME – which comprise an overwhelming proportion of its news items.
A few items like this about other Linux matters could well make me change my mind.
Paleoflatus,
The VAR Guy appreciates your readership. Whenever he covers open source, it’s from the channel partner/channel integrator perspective. Hope you find the content worthwhile.
-TVG
You’re doing a good job and I still find it worth-while, so thanks for that. I just get a bit tired of GNOME and Ubuntu hype on some of the Linux reports. I’ve used Linux with KDE since 1995 and it’s always been interesting to watch GNOME playing catch-up. It’s also a good thing that Canonical are sponsoring a dumbed-down version of Linux for beginners, although there are lots of other distros that are also easy to install and use.
Keep up the good work – I appreciate your efforts.
Paleoflatus:
A sincere thank you from The VAR Guy. And please feel free to post constructive criticism as well. It keeps The VAR Guy focused on the right thing: Reader feedback.
Best,
-TVG
how does 9,200 applications and 13,500 devices translates to 22,700 partners? surely not every application or every device is is made by an independent partner not doing anything else.
also how many of the devices are due to support from the upstream kernel, and how many are simply packaged upstream applications?
i don’t quite see the accomplishment of suse here.
debian and fedora can probably boast with the same numbers.
on the other hand it is very nice to see that suse survived novell. novell was probably right to buy suse originally, using suse to keep the company alive. it didn’t work out in the end, but i am very happy that it didn’t destroy suse.
greetings, eMBee.
eMBee,
Your feedback is noted and you raised some good points. Perhaps The VAR Guy overstated the “partner” number based on the fact that one partner may have multiple apps or hardware offerings certified for SUSE.
Guilty as charged, but still interested in SUSE’s progress.
-TVG