The announcement was made on Wednesday by the company's president of corporate development and strategic alliances, Michael Miller, and means that the emphasis will now be on Kubernetes and DevOps.
It comes just 10 days after SUSE product and solutions marketing manager for Cloud Solutions, Matthew Johns, penned a post about upgrading OpenStack.
In July, SUSE appointed a new chief executive, with Melissa Di Donato taking over from Nils Brauckmann who led the company for eight years after it was bought by Attachmate in 2010.
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SUSE has been a big supporter of OpenStack right from the start and whether it will cease to back the development of the software remains to be seen. A company spokesperson told iTWire: "We will continue to work closely with the OpenStack Foundation as we adjust the nature of our engagement in the project to align with our go-forward plans.
"SUSE engineers will continue to be involved in upstream OpenStack development as we focus on supporting our valued customers. In addition, SUSE will continue to evaluate and engage, where appropriate, in specific OSF projects besides OpenStack when they align with our customers’ and partners’ needs."
Miller said: "This decision clearly aligns with developments in the market, as summarised by Al Gillen, GVP, Software Development and Open Source, IDC: 'Digitally determined customers work to achieve differentiation with applications and experiences, rather than through infrastructure deployments'.
"SUSE’s decision to focus its future investments to better enable application delivery moves the company’s value-add higher up the technology stack, to a level where customers want and need tools that empower them to achieve differentiation.”
The company behind the oldest Linux distribution, SUSE was first bought by Novell in 2003. It was then acquired by Attachmate in 2010 and taken private, when the company bought Novell.
In 2014, Micro Focus acquired SUSE from Attachmate along with the other properties that were part of Novell. The amount that Micro Focus earned from the SUSE sale — US$2.535 billion — was more than what it paid for Attachmate as a whole – US$2.35 billion.
In July 2018, SUSE was acquired by its fourth and current owner — Swedish growth investor EQT — and the sale was closed in March this year.
iTWire contacted SUSE for a more detailed explanation of the company's decision. In response, a company spokesperson said: "SUSE is aligning our strategy to meet the current and future needs of our enterprise customers as they move to increasingly dynamic hybrid and multi-cloud application landscapes and DevOps processes.
"We will continue to focus our strategy on a combination of organic and inorganic investment and engineering in the
application delivery area, specifically with solutions including SUSE Cloud Application Platform and SUSE CaaS Platform and related go-to-market activities.
"In addition to increased focus and strategic investment in the application delivery market, SUSE will maintain and grow its commitment to delivering the best enterprise Linux in the industry along with best-in-class software-defined storage based on the Ceph open source project."