SUSE Completes Move to Independence and Strengthens Asia Pacific Presence

HONG KONG, CHINA - Media OutReach - March 21, 2019 - SUSE®   strengthened its foothold in the Asia Pacific region as a standalone company after the completion of its acquisition by growth investor EQT from Micro Focus. SUSE is now the industry's largest independent open source company and it is well positioned to focus on the needs of customers and partners in this region as a leading provider of enterprise-grade, open source software-defined infrastructure and application delivery solutions, enabling customer workloads anywhere -- on premise, hybrid and multi-cloud -- with exceptional service, value and flexibility.

The EQT investment comes at an opportune time as business enterprises across Asia Pacific are focusing on strengthening their IT systems to cater for the challenges and demands brought upon by a data-fuelled, digital-driven business environment.

SUSE Vice President and General Manager Asia Pacific and Japan Andy Jiang said: "Enterprises across Asia Pacific are facing tremendous pressure in the face of digital disruption and a dynamic business landscape with shorter economic cycles. Increasingly, these organizations are turning to SUSE's enterprise-ready, reliable and secure infrastructure solutions as they entrust their mission-critical systems to SUSE's open, open source solutions and flexible business practices that are free from enforced vendor lock-in. In turn, this drives a momentum that allows SUSE to continue to deliver the innovation that enterprises in this region require to achieve their digital transformation goals."

Growth in Asia Pacific

SUSE brings over 25 years of open source expertise to the Asia Pacific region. It first began operations here in 1999. Today, SUSE has 13 offices located in key cities across the region. This includes a research and development team located in Beijing, China - one of the three major SUSE R&D locations in the world, with the other two in Prague and Nuremburg.

SUSE's Asia Pacific business has achieved strong growth over the past eight years. Revenue from the region is three times the size it was when SUSE became a business unit under Micro Focus in 2014. Since then the company's Asia Pacific workforce has also grown more than twofold. The System Engineering team has doubled while Primary Support Engineer and Dedicated Support Engineer teams have tripled in size. The Sales team has also grown by 50 percent.

Driving customer success

The SUSE Asia Pacific and Japan team serves customers across banking and financial services, the telecommunication sector, large manufacturing companies, government and public sector, and other sectors, that run mission-critical tasks. Three out of the top five banks in China have standardized their IT systems on SUSE. SUSE is also the leading open source vendor for the manufacturing industry in India.

SUSE customers in Asia Pacific include:

• Pacific Textiles in Hong Kong and Macau Government Portal for Civil Servants in Macau
• China Telecom , China Union Pay , Petrol China and Shenzhen Development Bank in China
• Air India , JK Tyre & Industries and Mahindra in India
• Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi and Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan
• New South Wales Fire Brigades and Swinburne University of Technology in Australia and New Zealand

Thriving partner ecosystem

SUSE has also established a strong ecosystem designed to help its customers manage the modern-day demand for a robust IT system that supports fast and reliable application delivery. A major part of the growth story is in the many alliances that SUSE has established with key industry leaders like Amazon, AMD, Fujitsu, HP, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, SAP, VMware and many more.

Additionally, SUSE has collaborated with many technology partners that offer unique capabilities or exceptional technological knowhow. For instance, in 2017, SUSE partnered with Fiberhome Telecommunication Technologies (FTT) to establish a cloud storage technology lab in China. The facility combines the strengths of both companies to help boost influence and service ability in the field of information communications technology. It has since created several performance benchmarks for SUSE Enterprise Storage, the intelligent software-defined storage solution.

SUSE fast forward

As an independent business and trusted partner for enterprise digital transformation, SUSE delivers software solutions, support and services through a multinational organization and an enabled, qualified partner ecosystem underpinned by secure enterprise-grade technologies. SUSE is currently involved in more than 100 open source projects, supported by employees around the world. The company continues to grow as an independent vendor of open source software as it helps organizations of all kinds transform and compete in today's business environment.

SUSE, a pioneer in open source software, provides reliable, software-defined infrastructure and application delivery solutions that give enterprises greater control and flexibility. More than 25 years of engineering excellence, exceptional service and an unrivaled partner ecosystem power the products and support that help our customers manage complexity, reduce cost, and confidently deliver mission-critical services. The lasting relationships we build allow us to adapt and deliver the smarter innovation they need to succeed -- today and tomorrow. For more information, visit  www.suse.com .