Executive interview: Melissa Di Donato, CEO, SUSE
Summary
Just as Di Donato began her new role at the open source operating system company, SUSE’s nearest rival, Red Hat, was acquired by IBM for $34bn. She also held senior executive positions at Salesforce and was recognised for her contribution to growing global organisations by winning the 2018 Digital Masters Award for Excellence in Commercial Management. Having visited 97 organisations, Di Donato says she hopes SUSE can provide a technology environment to make applications work in a way that has so far been too difficult to achieve. As Computer Weekly has previously reported, the hyperscale cloud providers represent both an opportunity and a threat for open source businesses. “The operating system I dream of is one that will run modern computing applications that AWS [Amazon Web Services] simply cannot handle,” says Di Donato.