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SUSE to go private

suse.com

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Re: SUSE to go private

#31

Post by gumby »

skywhopper wrote: post #24
bloopernova wrote: post #8

What are the success stories of private equity firms taking over a corporation? (Where success is the products are still made, quality and staffing is maintained at previous levels)

lol. This does not happen, at least not intentionally. PE takeovers are solely about turning companies with a relatively stable revenue stream into a packageable financial product. Huge cuts will be made to staff, support, and R&D to get expenses to a specific level, and large amounts of debt will be taken on under the company's name, to deliver a specific ROI to the PE investors over a relatively short term window o…

> I was somewhat surprised by how honest they were willing to be with the employees

Since your company had IPOed the SEC required them to be honest with anyone interested in buying in.

Re: SUSE to go private

#32

Post by eric-hu »

shrubble wrote: post #15
bloopernova wrote: post #8

What are the success stories of private equity firms taking over a corporation? (Where success is the products are still made, quality and staffing is maintained at previous levels)

Dell I think would be one? Basically you get rid of the quarterly reporting grind and it lets you focus on the business even if certain initiatives are going to depress shorter term results, but pay off over the long term.

You just educated me on Michael Dell taking Dell private again. I didn’t realize he did so with the backing of PE.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/connieguglielmo/2013/10/30/you-...

Re: SUSE to go private

#33

Post by cyberpunk »

doctoboggan wrote: post #2

Recently I’ve been getting more and more into the Rancher ecosystem as they always have some offering that meets my needs and I can trust it will interop well enough. I really hope that this does not affect the future of Rancher.

RKE is Apache licensed, I think it has a long future.

Re: SUSE to go private

#34

Post by greatNespresso »

Ok naive question but SUSE was the first Linux distro I used 15 years ago and never touched it again. For those of HN that use it today, what's their strength compared to RHEL or Ubuntu in the enterprise world?

Re: SUSE to go private

#35

Post by pclmulqdq »

bloopernova wrote: post #8

What are the success stories of private equity firms taking over a corporation? (Where success is the products are still made, quality and staffing is maintained at previous levels)

Steinway is my go-to example, but it was done on a very specific (hyper-long-term) investment thesis, not a standard "corporate raider" investment. I'm guessing that SUSE is not in the same position.

Re: SUSE to go private

#36

Post by pmontra »

jacooper wrote: post #11
mkl95 wrote: post #7

> SUSE’s Management Board and Supervisory Board support the strategic opportunity from delisting of the company as it will allow SUSE to focus fully on its operational priorities and execution of its long-term strategy What does this mean? Is their current status adding some significant overhead that would go away by going private?

Shareholder pressure? Maybe because of their recent goodwill moves against Red hat?

Shareholder pressure is also the need to make the value of the share grow, with any mean, or shareholders will buy something else and the value of the company will go down, no more deals paid with shares, no bonuses for the CEO, etc. A private company might attract different managers and pursue different goals. However Finance and Industry usually don't go along well. Finance eats industries to make profits.

Re: SUSE to go private

#38

Post by jzb »

jacooper wrote: post #14
bloopernova wrote: post #8

What are the success stories of private equity firms taking over a corporation? (Where success is the products are still made, quality and staffing is maintained at previous levels)

Well, SUSE after Novell was in a woeful state, EQT got them to where they are right now.

To be fair, SUSE before Novell was in a worse state. If I’m not mistaken they were close to missing payroll and has tried to shop themselves to Sun before Novell agreed to buy them.

Evil IBM(TM) threw in $50m to help the deal along and preserve SuSE for its hardware.

Also, it didn’t help that SUSE folks and Ximian folks were like oil and water. Novell tried a combo that made sense on paper but there was culture clash.

Re: SUSE to go private

#39

Post by yawaramin »

So...uh...after all that drama from SuSE about how 'IBM' destroyed RHEL after acquiring Red Hat, they turn around and get acquired by the nearest bidder. That's hilarious. Nowadays I often compare this kind of hypocrisy to the 'Avengers: Age of Ultron' scene where Strucker shouts 'No surrender!' and riles up his henchmen, then immediately turns to his second-in-command and says, 'I am going to surrender'.

Re: SUSE to go private

#40

Post by jzb »

subtextminer wrote: post #30

Yet another reason to move to Debian. While in many ways not comparable to what's happened with Redhat, with Suse turning to the dark side one wonders how much longer Canonical will last before doing something similar. Make no doubt about it, private equity is all about short term shareholder returns. That's not a bad things in principle but if you don't want to wake up yet again with your distro having the rug pulle…

If you consider Red Hat “on the dark side” but not Canonical, I’m curious how you’re defining dark side.
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