SUSE’s first technology acquisition will complement organic growth and accelerate business momentum
As part of its growth strategy, SUSE has acquired software-defined storage management assets from German IT firm it-novum, including openATTIC, the open source Ceph and storage management framework. The acquisition allows SUSE to accelerate its use of openATTIC as the management framework for SUSE Enterprise Storage and will help the company deliver simpler, more cost-effective enterprise storage management solutions. As part of the transaction, a team of highly skilled open source engineers from it-novum has joined SUSE.
Nils Brauckmann, CEO of SUSE said, “Acquiring openATTIC from it-novum perfectly aligns with SUSE’s open source strategy – providing software-defined infrastructure solutions for enterprises requiring powerful management capabilities. This transaction is also another tangible indication of SUSE’s increasing momentum. For the first time, our business is expanding through both organic growth and technology acquisition. The storage revolution is underway, and enterprise-grade storage management is essential for customers that will continue to have a mix of storage technologies for many years to come.”
Earlier this year, SUSE and it-novum began developing additional Ceph management functionality for openATTIC, which is becoming the management framework for SUSE Enterprise Storage. Powered by Ceph technology, SUSE Enterprise Storage is a self-managing, self-healing, distributed software-based storage solution for enterprise customers.
Michael Kienle, CEO of it-novum, said, “SUSE’s commitment to open source is second to none in the industry, which makes this transaction a logical step for both our companies. We take our commitment to the openATTIC project, customers and engineers very seriously, and we know all are in good hands with SUSE.”
The transaction also transfers sponsorship of the openATTIC open source project from it-novum to SUSE. Similar to SUSE’s sponsorship of the openSUSE Linux project, the openATTIC project will remain completely open and available for broad community engagement.
“It is a great honor for us to become an official part of the SUSE family,” said Lenz Grimmer, Engineering Team Lead for the openATTIC project. “This transition confirms that the changes we implemented in the project over the last year were steps in the right direction and helped to foster and grow the community and ecosystem around openATTIC. We look forward to working more closely with the SUSE Enterprise Storage team and the entire SUSE engineering organization.”
