SUSE

+$600m Acquisition & IPO

Rancher Labs was acquired by SUSE in December 2020. The sale was prompted by fears of Covid-19 and some of the world’s largest software vendors piling into the Kubernetes Management space. SUSE was seen as both a safe harbour and the provider of the engineering and GTM resources required to ensure Rancher could compete with OpenShift, Tanzu and Anthos. Rancher Labs still exceeded its 2020 target anyway!

The Rancher Labs acquisition enabled SUSE to IPO on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in 2021.

Although I joined SUSE as an individual contributor, by 2022 I had been promoted to VP Product Marketing responsible for a 20-person team covering Product Marketing, Technical Marketing, Community Marketing, Analyst Relations and Customer Marketing.

Since joining SUSE I have co-authored two books - Zero Trust Container Security for Dummies and Enterprise Container Management for Dummies.