Open-source company SUSE has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Rancher Labs. According to SUSE, it wants to use the acquisition to establish the companies as the main open source innovators for Enterprise Linux, Kubernetes, edge computing and AI.

“By combining Rancher and SUSE, we not only gain massive engineering resources to further strengthen our market-leading product, we are also able to preserve our unique 100% open source business model,” said Sheng Liang, the CEO of Rancher. “SUSE’s strong ecosystem will greatly accelerate Rancher’s on-going efforts to transform how organizations adopt cloud native technology.”

Rancher Labs offers a enterprise Kubernetes management platform that addresses the operational and security challenges of managing multiple Kubernetes clusters, while providing DevOps teams with integrated tools for running containerized workloads.

And the trend for Kubernetes management platforms is only growing, the company explained. 

Gartner predicts that growing adoption of cloud-native applications and infrastructure will increase use of container management to over 75% of large enterprises in mature economies by 2024 (up from less than 35% in 2020).

With the acquisition, SUSE also wants to help IT and operations leaders meet the needs of their customers at any stage of their digital transformation – whether that’s from the data center to the cloud of the edge, SUSE stated in a post.

The company went on to explained that SUSE customers will benefit from Rancher’s cloud-native technologies, while Rancher’s customers will gain access to SUSE’s global support network and open-source portfolio.  

SUSE also stated that it is firmly committed to delivering fully open-source technologies with no vendor lock-in, and Rancher will continue its open strategy and support multiple Kubernetes distributions and operating systems. 

“This is an incredible moment for our industry, as two open source leaders are joining forces. The merger of a leader in Enterprise Linux, Edge Computing and AI with a leader in Enterprise Kubernetes Management will disrupt the market to help customers accelerate their digital transformation journeys,” said Melissa Di Donato, the CEO of SUSE.

The deal is expected to close before the end of October 2020.