Unleashing Cloud Native (and Edge!) Futures

You will have now seen our announcement to acquire Rancher Labs. This is an incredible moment for SUSE, for Rancher, and I would dare to say for the entire industry and adoption of cloud native and container-based technologies. I personally could not be more excited to bring Rancher into the fold!  

Rancher enables computing everywhere with seamless deployment of containerized workloads from the core to the edge to the cloud. And like SUSE, Rancher is 100% open source and focused on enabling users, developers, customers and partners to successfully adopt and benefit from those open source technologies. Several years ago, when I first met the leaders of Rancher, it was already clear they had a very strong, forward looking and disruptive vision of how open source based innovation can pragmatically best serve developers and customers’ business purposes, not only today but for the future as well. We had long and intense discussions with Sheng and Shannon about this vision; we had great exchanges with Darren about the various components and directions of Kubernetes and its ecosystem – the good, the bad and the ugly – and what to do about it after the transaction closes. I’m confident that joining forces will unleash a lot of open source based innovation serving real life needs! 

Following initial Rancher success with early adopters, even before Kubernetes, enterprises worldwide now see the tangible benefits of modern, modular and easy to use Kubernetes Management solutions. As Kubernetes becomes adopted by more enterprises, it will redefine how organizations run key solutions everywhere from on-premises to the cloud to the edge. Kubernetes is the de-facto standard for container orchestration/management, with a vibrant open source community, and it is also a solid and ubiquitous connective tissue for countless open source innovations, from simplifying the life of developers and business applications, to enabling different types of infrastructures and adding AI/ML capabilities.  

Following closing, count on us to leverage the innovation power of SUSE and Rancher to increase the speed at which we evolve existing products. Future versions of SUSE’s CaaS Platform will be based on the innovative capabilities provided by Rancher, and we’ll ensure efforts to upgrade CaaS Platform are as smooth as possible. 

Combining SUSE and Rancher’s leading solutions for computing everywhere will open new IT horizons for our partners and customers! I’m so excited and look forward to welcoming the Rancher team officially to SUSE when the acquisition closes. As we share an ethos and commitment to 100% open source, I know our developers will be eager to jointly collaborate on innovative open source solutions. To those looking to accelerate innovation through global reach and unparalleled access to leading technologies, we look forward to sharing more details upon close with you.