Suse to Acquire Enterprise Kubernetes Platform startup Rancher Labs

SUSE has signed an agreement to acquire Rancher Labs. The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Founded in 2014, Cupertino headquartered Rancher Labs offers a market-leading Kubernetes Management platform. The platform supports Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)-certified Kubernetes distribution including Google GKE, Amazon EKS, and Microsoft AKS. To date, Rancher Labs has raised $95 Million in four funding rounds.

The deal will close around October 2020, notes the announcement.

Executive Opinion

SUSE CEO, Melissa Di Donato, said, "This is an incredible moment for our industry, as two open source leaders are joining forces. 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. 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."

Rancher CEO, said, Sheng Liang, "Rancher and SUSE will help organizations control their cloud native futures. 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 center to cloud to edge."

SUSE's acquisition of Rancher Labs

The announcement noted that the acquisition will lead to the world’s largest independent organization that can digitally transform the organizations with open source and cloud-native solutions.

The acquisition will help SUSE expand its computing offering in a larger spectrum. From the seamless deployment of containerized workloads from the edge to the core to the cloud is now possible.

The future versions of SUSE’s CaaS Platform will be highly influenced by Rancher's capabilities, notes the announcement.