Celebrating SUSE’s 20 Years Of Linux Love

SUSE has announced its plans to celebrate the company’s 20th anniversary with a year-long campaign highlighting the company’s history and future.

The long-time provider of enterprise Linux  s will showcase major historical milestones and discuss plans for the future through a series of worldwide events that will include SUSECon 2012, the premier event for its customers, partners and enthusiasts. The company’s roots go back to the fall of 1992.

German start-up to US spin-out

“We have a lot to celebrate in 2012,” said Nils Brauckmann, president and general manager of SUSE, in a statement. “SUSE today is the recognised market leader in several important segments, and is well positioned to take advantage of an ever expanding market for commercial Linux and open source technologies. We plan to recognise the people, the events and the technological developments that have helped bring us to where we are today.”

SUSE plans to roll out information and activities highlighting how the company has evolved from its early beginnings in the open source industry, to forging partnerships with some of the world’s leading technology vendors to deliver innovation, investment protection and enterprise-quality software infrastructure to a generation of customers.

In September 1992, three German university math students and a recently graduated software engineer formed a company to develop software and function as an advisory Unix group. Seeing the potential of Linux, the team decided to distribute Linux operating systems and offer support services. It chose the name “S.USE”, using an acronym for a German term that meant software and systems development. The name was eventually shortened to “SUSE.”

In 1999, SUSE forged a partnership with IBM that spawned several other projects, including a joint effort to port Linux code to the mainframe. A year later, SUSE was the only company to offer a Linux operating system for IBM mainframes that was enterprise-ready and commercially supported, SUSE officials said. Around the same time, SUSE partnered with SAP’s LinuxLab, eventually becoming the first Linux provider to be designated a SAP Global Technology Partner, the company said.

Meanwhile, in 2006, SUSE signed a landmark business and technical collaboration agreement with Microsoft that led to a joint research facility for improving Linux interoperability with Microsoft Windows. Today, the partnership continues to help customers maximise utilisation and minimise the costs of managing their heterogeneous, mixed IT environments.

Solid partnerships

SUSE continues to maintain active partnerships with other established global technology leaders such as AMD, Dell Fujitsu, HP, Intel, Oracle and VMware that have resulted in helping customers solve today’s incredibly complex IT challenges.

SUSE product milestones begin with the 1994 shipment of the company’s first Linux distribution – S.USE Linux 1.0. Its next significant product followed in 1996 with the release of S.USE. Linux 4.2, the first version to be developed completely by SUSE, rather than simply translated.

In 2000, SUSE introduced SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, a server operating system targeting corporate users. SUSE officials said it was the first globally distributed, fully supported Linux server operating system for enterprise production environments.

Other notable product introductions include SUSE Studio, an appliance and application image creation tool launched in 2009. SUSE Manager, the company’s Linux Server management  , launched in 2011. And most recently, SUSE debuted its OpenStack-powered cloud infrastructure.

A stalwart of the open-source community, SUSE has long-served and contributed to a large number of open source projects and partnerships. Perhaps the biggest is the openSUSE project, which was established in 2005.