The EGGER Group, headquartered in St. Johann in Tyrol, is one of the international leading manufacturers of wood-based materials. The family company, founded in 1961, now operates at 22 locations in 11 countries worldwide, with approximately 12,000 employees. Its customers include the furniture industry, the specialist wood trade and DIY and hardware stores.
Sustainable business practices are at the core of EGGER's corporate DNA. This commitment dates back to the company’s founding, as Fritz Egger senior deemed wood far too valuable to simply throw it away. The company generated a consolidated turnover of €4.13 billion and produced 10.8 m³ of wood-based materials and timber in the 2024/2025 financial year.
At-a-Glance
For over 20 years, EGGER, a leader in the wood manufacturing industry, has relied on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as the foundation for its mission-critical SAP systems. By standardizing its core data center with SUSE, the company advanced its digital transformation journey and reduced administrative overhead. Building on this successful partnership, EGGER is now taking a step into the cloud native world. With SUSE Rancher Prime, EGGER now manages its rapidly growing Kubernetes environment, enhancing efficiency and enabling faster innovation for its next generation of applications.
Scaling a global IT infrastructure
As a company that has always been at the forefront of its industry, EGGER knew that its continued success depended on a robust and scalable IT infrastructure. Sustainable, high-quality wood products are in demand, and business is booming for EGGER. To support this continuous growth, the company’s decision-makers increasingly rely on analytics to uncover valuable insights into the business.
Oliver Widhölzl, Data Center Operations Manager at EGGER Group, explains: “Our global operations processes are highly centralized and digitized, driven by SAP ERP business systems. Our decision makers need detailed information right away, and keeping up with the demand for analytics was a significant challenge.”
The IT team’s first major challenge came with the end of support for its existing hardware and software stack, necessitating a complete overhaul of the core data center. The team needed a new solution that was cost-effective, stable and certified for its mission-critical SAP systems.
As the company grew, so did the complexity of managing a diverse, multi-platform environment. The team needed to avoid the complexities and increased costs that can come with different Linux distributions and management tools. They also had to support new, demanding workloads like AI and machine learning while maintaining a lean operational model.
More recently, EGGER faced the challenge of managing a rapidly growing, on-premises Kubernetes environment. After initially using community versions of open source components, the team sought a unified, professionally supported platform to manage its containerized infrastructure and ensure the stability and security required for enterprise-grade applications.
“We’ve achieved a significant improvement in system performance compared to our previous setup. Why would I use anything else when I have a solution that works 100%? Since implementing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, we have never had a crash or a system failure caused by the operating system.”
Leveraging SUSE solutions
To meet these challenges, EGGER has relied on open source solutions for over two decades to provide a secure, stable and long-term foundation for its IT strategy. The company’s relationship with SUSE dates back to 2005, when it became an early adopter of Linux in its core data center, an approach that had a positive impact on the company’s competitiveness.
To deliver the level of performance and reliability required, EGGER runs a total of 250 virtualized servers with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server across 50 physical Cisco UCS blade servers, with the VMware virtualization platform and NetApp storage arrays split across three data center locations. The newest systems are 45+ SAP HANA instances powered by SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications. Additionally, EGGER deploys a substantial number of the open source SUSE Linux Leap distribution for various less critical applications and services.
Beyond SAP applications, the group also relies on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for approximately 150 systems that run everything from Oracle databases to Java application servers and manufacturing control systems. To centrally manage and monitor all SUSE Linux instances, EGGER uses SUSE Multi-Linux Manager. Using the automated patching capability of SUSE Multi-Linux Manager, the group can keep its systems up to date with minimal manual effort.
Most recently, as its on-premises Kubernetes environment rapidly grew, EGGER migrated to SUSE’s Rancher Prime Suite in 2023. The decision was driven by the need for a unified platform to centralize management and provide robust container security.
Widhölzl highlights the critical advantage of this unified approach: "The ability to get everything from a single, tested source was a highly beneficial for us. Knowing that SUSE tests the packages in advance gives us confidence. It simplifies our security efforts and ensures that all our packages work together harmoniously. That's significant progress for our IT environment."
The impact of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications
Enhanced performance and reliability
For EGGER's business-critical SAP systems, uninterrupted availability is essential. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications has been an exceptionally stable and reliable foundation for more than 20 years.
"We've achieved a significant improvement in system performance compared to our previous setup.”, Widhölzl notes. “Why would I use anything else when I have a solution that works 100%? Since implementing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, we have never had a crash or a system failure caused by the operating system."
This level of reliability and performance allows EGGER to maintain maximum uptime for its SAP applications, ensuring smooth and efficient business operations.
Boosts IT efficiency
By building its business on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, EGGER is boosting the efficiency of its IT function, which helps the IT team meet the growing demand for analytics across the organization. Since migrating its business intelligence application to the SAP HANA database, EGGER has significantly accelerated key analytics reports. Now, business users gain instant insight into operational data, enabling true data-driven decision-making.
"Standardizing on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with a consistent configuration across 270 Linux instances has considerably increased IT efficiency," Widhölzl comments. "The combination of SAP HANA and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications is allowing us to harness the full analytics potential of our business data, identify new business opportunities and drive our growth.”
The impact of SUSE Rancher Prime
Accelerates digital innovation
EGGER's Kubernetes environment, powered by SUSE Rancher Prime, is driving a new wave of digital innovation by hosting a wide range of applications, including Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and AI workloads. The IT team efficiently manages a massive environment of over 200 critical bots and has deployed a GPU cluster to run large-language models and other AI projects.
SUSE Rancher Prime's intuitive interface and centralized management capabilities enable the team to handle this immense scale and create a self-service environment for developers. This approach has accelerated EGGER's digitalization goals, boosting agility and efficiency.
Widhölzl explains: "The DevOps integration was one of the main reasons we chose SUSE Rancher Prime. When our colleagues in the development team need bots, they can just deploy them themselves. We've defined the boundaries, but essentially, it's a self-service system."
The impact of SUSE Multi-Linux Manager
Automates operations and reduces manual effort
Faced with the complexities and high costs of its diverse multi-platform environment, EGGER turned to SUSE Multi-Linux Manager. The company has now consolidated management into a single, unified solution, notably simplifying its operations and reducing costs.
By leveraging this unified solution, automation for patching and other maintenance tasks now enables the EGGER Group to efficiently manage one of Austria’s largest SAP environments with a lean IT team. Widhölzl explains, “We’re taking advantage of AutoYaST and other automation tools. Integration with SUSE Multi-Linux Manager gives us a comprehensive overview of our entire Linux environment, regardless of the distribution. Granular data on our inventory facilitates system maintenance and IT compliance.”
He further concludes: “Building on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications and SUSE Multi-Linux Manager has helped us lift our IT efficiency to new heights. The combination of SAP HANA and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications is allowing us to harness the full analytics potential of our business data, identify new business opportunities and drive our growth.”
What's next for EGGER?
EGGER’s IT team plans to continue building on its close partnership with SUSE to advance its digital transformation agenda, particularly in the areas of AI and strategic cloud adoption. While EGGER will remain primarily an on-premises company, it will continue to use a hybrid approach, selectively adopting cloud services where they make the most sense.
The enduring relationship between EGGER and SUSE is a testament to the value of a trusted, long-term partnership.
"For 20 years, it's actually one of the most consistent software solutions we've had at EGGER," Widhölzl notes. "That's a constant we can build on and that we very much like to build on."