SUSE Acquires NeuVector to Strengthen Container Security
October 29, 2021
SUSE announced the acquisition of NeuVector, Inc., a leader in full lifecycle container security that delivers end-to-end security, from DevOps pipeline vulnerability protection to automated security and compliance in production.
NeuVector was founded in 2015 by Fei Huang and Gary Duan. NeuVector is headquartered in San Jose, CA and serves all industries including highly regulated ones such as financial services and the public sector.
The total consideration for the acquisition is $130 million, of which $101 million is in cash from SUSE’s existing cash balances and $29 million is through the issuance of 695,853 new shares. Building off the successful integration of SUSE and Rancher, the company sees the same substantial cross-sell opportunities into SUSE’s customer base as with Rancher and expects that the combined offering will enhance conversion of SUSE’s sales pipeline and open new opportunities. NeuVector is an established and growing business that will be immediately accretive to SUSE’s revenue growth. SUSE will invest in FY22 in the combined go-to-market proposition of NeuVector and SUSE Rancher, with the expectation that this will drive further acceleration in FY23 and beyond.
S&P Global Market Intelligence publication 451 Research considers container security as the most important factor in the adoption of cloud-native platforms in the enterprise, particularly in highly secured and regulated industries. SUSE intends to fully integrate NeuVector into SUSE Rancher, its enterprise container management platform, delivering end-to-end container security covering the building, deploying and running of containerized applications in any mission-critical environment. Staying true to its commitment to deliver open, interoperable solutions, SUSE will open source the NeuVector platform.
This acquisition aligns with the strategy and goals communicated during SUSE’s recent IPO, which is to use access to the equity markets to fund tuck-in acquisitions, adding complementary technologies to create value for SUSE’s customers and partners.
“Our customers have made it clear that security is critical to their cloud-native strategy and their digital transformation,” said Melissa Di Donato, CEO of SUSE. “With this acquisition, we are following through on our promise to deliver the capabilities our customers need, whether organically or through acquisition. The integration of NeuVector into SUSE Rancher will create an unbeatable enterprise container management security platform that delivers the end-to-end container security our customers are asking for. NeuVector, like Rancher, is highly complementary to SUSE’s existing products and extends our reach into high growth markets, capitalizing on the scale and reputation of SUSE’s business.”
“It’s an exciting time to be joining SUSE, which has been going from strength-to-strength in recent years,” said Fei Huang, NeuVector co-founder. “We are seeing an increase in customers operating a zero-trust model and who see SUSE as the natural fit to help customers protect deployments and pipeline. Coupled with SUSE Rancher’s unique strength which offers full management of all Kubernetes distributions across any environment, our joint customers will also be able to secure the development of their containerized applications from core to cloud to edge environments. This will enable automation and agility in the Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery pipeline so SUSE customers can benefit from real-time compliance, visibility and protection for their critical apps and data.”
Impact to SUSE Ecosystem
SUSE’s heritage is in building secure and certified open source software infrastructure to enable its customers and partners to innovate everywhere. NeuVector has been a SUSE partner for several years and NeuVector users today can deploy NeuVector through the SUSE Rancher application catalogue.
NeuVector will further strengthen SUSE’s secure software value proposition to existing and new SUSE Rancher customers who will have access to a fully integrated container security solution, allowing them to protect deployments and pipeline against malicious activity by attackers. This compliance-driven approach will also enable SUSE Rancher to continue to meet risk management requirements in regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare and government.
