The Origins: 1992

In September 1992, three German university math students and a recently graduated software engineer formed a company to develop software, as well as 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.u.S.E,” 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 the IBM mainframe that was enterprise-ready and commercially supported. About the same time, SUSE partnered with SAP’s LinuxLab and eventually became the first Linux provider to be designated an “SAP Global Technology Partner.”

In January 1999, SUSE announces the foundation of “SUSE Press,” which is the in-house publishing company for software and books around (SUSE) Linux. SUSE Press continued until October 2004, when it became self-contained and renamed to “Millin-Verlag,” which is still operating today.

How did the SUSE Logo get its name? The birth of “Geeko” happened in the early spring 2000. After a four-week “naming contest,” which started Feb. 1 and ended Feb. 26 at CeBIT 2000, the name Geeko was selected out of 2000 proposals. A gecko is a kind of lizard, and the name refers to “geek” (but also was an allusion to one member of the SUSE management team at that time, Vice President of Technology Partners, later CTO of SUSE, Juergen Geck, whose nickname was Gecko).

In spring 2000, SUSE split the existing SUSE Linux distribution into a “SUSE Linux Personal” and a “SUSE Linux Professional” edition, for the first time targeting two different user groups-“end users/home users” and “advanced users/businesses.” Thus, the company was preparing the road for the next step, a real Enterprise Server Edition.

With the release of Version 7.0 in the summer of 2000, SUSE Linux became available in two targeted versions-one for the home offices and new users, and one for advanced users, appropriate for server implementations.

SUSE Linux 7.0 Professional was voted best server solution at Comdex in November 2000. The product also won the “Best Server Solution” award in the 2000 Penguin Playoffs competition hosted by Linux Journal magazine.

In May 2001, Banco Mercantil, a Venezuelan bank moved to SUSE Linux on an IBM mainframe. Banco Mercantil replaced 30 existing NT servers with a single IBM mainframe. The bank also moved applications running on Sun Microsystems and HP servers to the Linux platform.

SUSE Linux AG celebrated its tenth anniversary with a big ceremony in Nuremberg, Germany, featuring some 300 prominent guests and open-source leaders. Representatives of the strategic partners Conectiva, Turbolinux, The SCO Group, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Novell and IBM praised SUSE as an innovative software and systems developer.

Deutsche Flugsicherung (German Air Traffic Control) became a reference customer for SUSE, and still is. With one of the busiest airspaces both in Europe and worldwide, DFS is using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for its mission-critical workloads. DFS has developed on SLES its own radar data-processing software, which it sells to other Air Traffic Control organizations in the world.

With the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 in July 2006, SUSE for the first time integrates and supports an enterprise-ready virtualization technology-Xen-with a Linux distribution.

Following in this tradition, SUSE is the first Linux distributor to include Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technology as a technical preview with the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 in March 2009.

In 2010, SUSE and Amazon Web Services announced they had teamed to offer Amazon EC2 Running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. The combination of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Amazon EC2 enables companies to extend their workloads from the data center to the cloud on a reliable and secure enterprise Linux platform. Amazon EC2 Running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server also allows developers to create and test innovative software that leverages the flexibility of on-demand computing capacity, as well as the ability to deploy these solutions in the cloud.

In Aug 2004, Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and IBM DB2 Universal Database 8.1 set TPC-C price-performance benchmark world records on HP hardware. The first benchmark with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and IBM DB2 Universal Database Express Edition set a new world record for best price-performance with $1.61/tpmC (transactions per minute) on an HP ProLiant Server.

In September 2006, Oracle sets a world record for two-tier SAP sales and distribution standard application benchmark running SUSE Linux on a Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST 580 server.

In September 2009, SGI sets world records on Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) benchmarks, running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. SGI announced the SGI Altix 4700 platform, powered by dual-core Intel Itanium 9040 processors (1.6GHz), claimed three SPEC benchmark world records at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching, Germany. SGI benchmarking experts used a single-system image (SSI) node with 1,024 Itanium cores, 4TB of memory and Novell’s SuSE Linux Enterprise 10 operating environment to achieve record-breaking results on three SPEC benchmarks for computer systems.

In April 2011, SGI announced a performance gain of up to 35 percent in the speed of the SGI Altix UV server line based on the Intel’s Xeon E7 processor product family. This results in four new world record benchmarks running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

In 2004, Linux New Media Awards at LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in Frankfurt, Germany, awarded the all-in-one offering for Linux users, SUSE Linux, the “Best Distribution for Beginners.”

In 2006, AppArmor, integrated in SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, wins “Best Security Solution” Product Excellence Award at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco.

In April 2007, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 won the 2007 SIIA CODiE Award for “Best Open Source Solution.” The CODiE award recognizes excellence in software, content and education platforms, applications and services.

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 maximize utilization and minimize the costs of managing their heterogeneous, mixed IT environments.

Caption: SuSE Linux AG completed the acquisition of Novell in early 2004. In November 2003, Novell had announced that it had entered into an agreement to acquire SUSE for $210 million.

In 2011, Novell was acquired by The Attachmate Group, which re-established SUSE as an autonomous business unit. In April 2011, The Attachmate Group announced the completion of the acquisition of Novell under the terms of the definitive agreement disclosed Nov. 22, Novell now operates as two separate business units under the Novell and SUSE brand names and joins Attachmate and NetIQ as holdings of The Attachmate Group.

In 2005, SUSE helped launch the openSUSE open-source project. Commercially supported Linux software from SUSE had always been developed and distributed under open-source models and licenses, but openSUSE further opened up development processes, allowing programmers and users to test and help contribute toward the development of its community and commercial versions.

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