“As exciting as SUSE’s growth and innovation has been over the past several years, we are just getting started,” SUSE chief executive Nils Brauckmann said in a statement issued at the company's annual conference, SUSECON, which is taking place in Nashville, Tennessee, this week.

“SUSE is better positioned to bring more innovation to customers and partners faster through both organic growth and acquisitions, keeping us on track to provide them with the open solutions that keep them ahead with their own customers in their own markets. We continue to adapt so our customers and partners can succeed."

The company said it had experienced growth in all regions where it operations and had taken about 300 staff in the last 12 months, bringing the total to about 1750. SUSE has employees in 34 countries representing 75 nationalities.

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.

At its first national conference, in 2012, SUSE said its revenue was at about the $225 million mark. At that time, it had 780 employees in 43 countries.

Following the sale of Red Hat to IBM, SUSE is now the biggest independent open source company globally, though there are not that many well-known names in the field.

The company also mentioned its other achievements to date:

• SUSE Cloud Application Platform 1.4 will be available this month, and it is the first software distribution to introduce a Cloud Foundry Application Runtime in an entirely Kubernetes-native architecture.
• SUSE is now a Kubernetes Certified Service Provider to provide exceptional support and service to enterprises using SUSE Cloud Application Platform and SUSE CaaS Platform application delivery solutions.
• SUSE announced the availability of the first enterprise Linux image for SAP HANA Large Instances on Microsoft Azure.
• SUSE’s latest enterprise-ready OpenStack Cloud platform will also be available in April as SUSE OpenStack Cloud 9. Based on OpenStack Rocky, it is the first release to integrate the best of SUSE OpenStack Cloud and HPE OpenStack technology into one, single-branded release.
• SUSE unveiled support for 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, formerly codenamed “Cascade Lake,” following on the heels of becoming the first enterprise Linux optimised for Intel Optane DC persistent memory with SAP HANA workloads earlier this year.