Bloomberg reports that SUSE may be about to IPO with a scale of $6 billion

According to Bloomberg, EQT is planning an IPO for German Linux and enterprise software company SUSE. SUSE is the leading open source Linux vendor in the European Union (EU) and is expected to be valued at $6 billion after the IPO.

SUSE has changed owners several times over the years. First, it was acquired by Novell in 2004. Then, Attachmate, with funding from Microsoft, acquired Novell and SUSE in 2010. Then in 2014, Micro Focus acquired Attachmate and SUSE was spun off as an independent unit. Then, EQT acquired SUSE from Micro Focus in March 2019 for $2.5 billion.

SUSE has been very successful under EQT's leadership. SUSE's third quarter revenue was announced in September 2020, up 14% year-over-year. This was despite the severe impact of COVID-19 on the global economy. Cloud ACV (Annual Contract Value) continued to thrive at best, up 81%, marking 14 consecutive quarters of year-over-year growth in cloud ACV.

The German Linux power also reported a 35% year-over-year increase in customer deals valued at more than $1 million to date, a 50% year-over-year increase in ACV bookings for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP applications, and a 25% year-over-year increase in U.S. ACV bookings. In short, SUSE is growing, and growing fast.

SUSE is also growing. In July, SUSE agreed to acquire Rancher Labs, a major move to embrace Kubernetes.

Bloomberg said that the IPO talks are at a very preliminary stage and that these talks may not yet have any results. As for SUSE, a company representative said: "As a company, we are always exploring avenues for development. But as a matter of company policy, we do not comment on rumors or speculation in the market."