Our Performance
ACV
$490.6M
+26% growth
ACV in core
$406.1M
+18% growth
ACV in emerging
$84.5M
+85% growth
Adjusted revenue
$575.9M
+15% growth
Adjusted EBITDA
$212.1M
+22% growth
37% margin
Adjusted Cash EBITDA
$278.2M
+55% growth
Adjusted Cash EBITDA Margin
48% vs 36% prior year
Leverage
2.6X
vs 5.0X prior year
Adjusted unlevered free cash flow
$200.2M
+54% growth and 94% cash conversion
Acquisitions
2
Rancher Group and NeuVector
Message from our CEO
”Amid a challenging macro environment, FY21 turned out to be a remarkable year for SUSE. We made two acquisitions and went public on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange — all while delivering strong financial results, giving back to the community and adding immeasurable value to our customers. None of this would have been possible without the trust and partnership with of our stakeholders.”
Melissa Di Donato
Chief Executive Officer
Download CEO's letter (305kb)
Purpose, values & culture
Our visionary people
To achieve our purpose, we stay true to our ambitious vision: powering open source innovation everywhere. At SUSE we are on a continuing strategic mission to make this vision a reality and enable a better future for the world. By daring to be different, SUSE can deliver more meaningful solutions for our customers, employees, partners and communities. We do this by harnessing the power of open collaboration to fuel long-term value creation for our stakeholders.
Our community-inspired culture
We believe SUSE is a great place to work.
Here are our top three reasons:
01 Our unique and vibrant culture
SUSE‘s culture is deeply rooted in the ethos of the open source community, valuing collaboration, openness, inclusivity and ensuring we have fun along the way. We are intensely focused on the success of our customers and our partners. Our team is always striving to solve all the business challenges of tomorrow, today.
02Our commitment to open innovation
A key SUSE differentiator is our commitment to open source and open innovation. We contribute, participate and drive meaningful innovation with various open source communities. Innovation that we democratize and make available to the world without any barrier to entry, all driven by a strong, inclusive business model that values diverse opinions. And we ensure our solutions work with our partners' and our competitors' technologies, so our customers have as many options to succeed as possible. Our customers choose open source because it means access to cutting-edge innovations, flexibility to move at the pace they need, and choice to shape their success the way they want. And they choose SUSE because we are the most open, and we have their best interests at heart. Our culture doesn't just enable us to optimize workflows, it helps SUSE create optimal solutions that are hugely powerful, yet extremely reliable, helping our customers and collaborators address global challenges such as enhancing cyber security, protecting human rights and tackling climate change.
03Our passion for driving impact and doing good in the world
At SUSE we believe open source, and being open, breaks down barriers. It extends across geographies, gender and political affiliations. We are an inclusive organization, ensuring all our people feel supported so they can do their best work. Our employees can join networks like our Women in Tech network, our Pride at SUSE network and our sustainability at SUSE network, called GoGreen. We also believe in giving back to our community. Every employee has the opportunity to provide financial donations on SUSE's behalf to charities all around the world through our philanthropic giving program, SUSECares. Employees are also given one full day a year to volunteer for a charity of their choice. On a company-wide scale, we are planting one tree in Madagascar for every employee at SUSE. We chose Madagascar because it is home to our company mascot.
Powered by our values
Everything we do at SUSE is driven fully by the Power of Open. This is built into our values, which were defined more clearly in 2019 by our employees, for our employees. Our values guide us to always work on things that really matter to our employees and our stakeholders, and they keep our management team accountable to SUSE. By empowering our employees, we ultimately drive value creation within our business, benefiting our customers, partners and communities. This is achieved by welcoming diverse opinions that enable customers to make better decisions.
Our accountable leaders
Our leadership team is laser-focused on creating a culture inspired by openness and diversity, where we collaborate without boundaries, and we learn from each other and give back to our communities. At SUSE, our customers are truly partners in cocreating innovation with SUSE. With every solution, our leadership team learns more about how we can adapt our products for various industries, continually building long-term trust and value, creating customers for life.
Our vision
By harnessing the Power of Open we are able to offer our customers possibilities with no limits from the data center, to the cloud, to the Edge and beyond. And when we say beyond, we mean it. In FY21, SUSE worked with customer Hypergiant to deploy in the most hostile environment of all, putting Kubernetes clusters to work in orbit on satellites for the first time. At SUSE, we really do empower customers to innovate everywhere.
Business model & strategy
How open source powers innovation
SUSE leverages code and software that comes from the upstream community, which its engineers further develop and refine to make more efficient and ready for deployment to enterprise customers.
This open source ethos creates a virtuous circle. SUSE leverages valuable contributions from the community which, in turn, allows it to build better, more stable, and more resilient products that benefit both SUSE's customers and the open source community.
Download business model (72kb)Our Strategy
At SUSE, we are on a mission to be the most innovative, trusted leader in providing open source solutions and technologies.
To ensure SUSE’s future is even brighter, we have charted a strategic path to become the global leader in open source software infrastructure. Our long-term strategy, strengthened by our core differentiators, will help us capitalize on ongoing digital transformation, supporting substantial growth.
Pillar 1
Organic growth acceleration
We will grow our core enterprise-grade Linux solutions and emerging technologies by focusing on five growth levers:
- Commercial excellence
- Underserved markets
- Accelerators
- Cross-selling
- New solutions including Edge initiatives
Progress in 2021:
We achieved significant growth in underserved markets, and the Rancher growth story continued with extremely successful cross-selling. We also set up dedicated teams to support the launch of our Edge offering and improve our pricing approach to better meet customer needs.
Outlook:
Our near-term focus is on continuing to grow in Business-critical Linux and Enterprise Container Management, plus capturing market share in Edge and winning in other ecosystems with the goal to extend our excellent support towards new customers and partners as they pursue digital transformation.
Pillar 2
Platform for inorganic expansion
In pursuing strategic acquisitions:
We seek to expand our existing product suite and add additional functionalities to increase the strength of our current offerings. We also seek acquisitions that are in line with
our culture. If an acquired product is not open source, we would aim to turn it into an open source project and product.
Progress in 2021:
SUSE has 15 to 20 acquisition targets under review at any one time. The Rancher Group and NeuVector acquisitions were two successful acquisitions in FY21. As a result of the Rancher Group acquisition, we saw emerging growth increase in multi-year deals. Rancher‘s people have provided contributions to overall culture.
Outlook:
In the near term, we are particularly focused on security solutions for applications deployed at the Edge or in cloud-native environments. We are seeking tuck-in or bolt-on acquisitions which can be quickly integrated with SUSE‘s existing business.
Delivery on our strategy is enabled by
Our people
Our highly skilled workforce collaborates to innovate and ensures we are able to help our customers succeed.
Our core differentiators
We are unique in the market place for a number of reasons. One key differentiator is our open approach. Unlike our competitors we provide truly open and interoperable solutions, giving our customers the flexibility to leverage best-in-class solutions and technology.
Managing responsibly
Our ESG vision
Our vision is to drive real impact around societal and environmental topics of importance to our stakeholders. In order to execute our vision, we are focused on a combination of strong leadership, employee engagement and strategic partnerships.
Read more - ESG
Risk Management
The internal control system and the risk management system that the Management Board oversees are designed to identify potential events that could negatively impact SUSE, its reputation and its financial performance.
Download risk management (117kb)
Corporate governance
Corporate governance is the system for managing and supervising a company. SUSE considers good corporate governance to be of utmost importance, an essential part of SUSE's culture and crucial to SUSE's long-term success.
Download governance (138kb)