>> Announcer: From around the globe,
it's theCUBE,
with coverage of SUSECON Digital,
brought to you by SUSE.
>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman,
and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of SUSECON Digital '20.
Rather than gathering together in Dublin,
we actually have a larger audience
online watching everything digitally.
Really happy to have on the program,
back to the program,
one of our CUBE alumni,
she is fresh off the keynote stage,
Melissa Di Donato, she is the CEO of SUSE.
Melissa, so good to see you,
wish it could all be in person,
but thanks for having theCUBE at SUSECON.
>> Thank you very much for joining us as well.
My third time on the show,
I'm really, really pleased
to have you be an important part of our digital experience
with SUSECON Digital.
So Stu, nice to see you.
>> Alright, so last time you were on the program,
you spoke to Dave Vellante
about how you're keeping your employees safe
and keeping them productive.
The note I heard clearly from you
in your keynote presentation is really a sense of optimism.
So I'd like, if you could,
bring us a little bit inside,
I'm sure you're talking to a lot of your customers,
what is it, even in these unprecedented times,
that are giving you that sense of optimism.
>> Yeah, there's no denying where we are in the world,
with COVID-19, we have a whole different way
of looking at the world.
Every business in every industry has been impacted,
and not just the working life, but our family life,
the way we communicate, the way we run our homes,
our environments at work has been very much integrated now.
It's a very different way of adding a whole different level
of stress that we didn't have in our business life
just a couple of months ago.
And I think, as I told Dave,
the most important thing for me,
is number one,
to make sure that our employees remain safe and healthy,
that's number one.
And I think that as we experience negativity
across the world with news and social media, etcetera,
that my hope is that the community
and the SUSE family remain optimistic.
And why do we have the ability
to remain optimistic when everyone else
is experiencing a lot of doom and gloom, one might ask,
as you rightly so said.
Let me talk about SUSE
and how we're rooted in our community.
Our thesis is the power of many.
This power of many in a virtual community
really drives innovation.
We're not like proprietary software
and many other tech companies,
where you have to reside in a building
to make sure that we maintain and evangelize innovation
that you live and deliver to your customers.
For us, it's very different.
Our community is the basis for innovation,
it's the pillar of our community, of our company,
our ethos, and our value.
So at SUSE, the spirit of collaboration and integration
is live today more than ever before,
with 99% of our employees working from home,
being engaged in a very different way
than maybe they're used to.
But not so unlike engaging the innovation
that we get out of our community.
I think you mentioned something else too
that's really important, and that's productivity.
We've moved away as of the 1st of March
in measuring productivity, in exchange for measuring
the way that we integrate, and elaborate,
and engage with our employees.
So, instead of productivity,
we're measuring engagement.
Our employees are becoming much more engaged
with each other,
with our customers, with our communities,
and of course our partners.
They're giving back to their community,
they're measuring the engagement
and their successful means
of delivering, through how much they can give back
to their communities.
So, we've seen a huge rise in our employees giving back
to their communities around them.
For example, I met an employee who's donating
a very big part of his bonus percentage to a hospital
to pay for lunches for frontline health workers
near his home.
Our Nuremberg, Germany office,
they're giving their lunch vouchers and donating that
to all of the homeless people around their community.
And then we've got employees around Italy,
one in particular, that's created a virtual classroom
for his son's school and the community around him.
So, everyone's really pitching in.
I think, finally,
from a community perspective,
we're also sponsoring numerous amounts of hackathons.
For example, in Germany,
the government has recently held a hackathon
for community-based solutions to combat COVID-19.
Our employees participated
and engaged with their one day off,
we give every employee one day off a year
to engage for charitable cause,
and the results of
this hackathon's a better understanding
of the data per states about COVID-19 across the country.
So, I think all in all,
everything that we're doing is really trying
to utilize the community
as we've always have as open source.
Open source is developing a community
that often times does not sit together.
And now we're really trying to engage with that community
as much as possible to keep innovation alive,
to keep collaboration alive,
and not just for the purpose of innovation,
but for the purpose of combating the virus,
and giving hope, and of course gratitude to this community,
and across all of our population across the world.
I really do believe that
in challenging times like today
it's the best way to realize the innovation
that we can put together, triggering innovation for good,
but also bringing out the best in humanity.
It's amazing to see what thousands and thousands of people
in the open source world are giving, and delivering,
and collaborating in which to solve the world's problems,
COVID-19, but also innovation problems
for today and tomorrow.
>> Yeah, Melissa,
some great stories that you have there.
We, of course,
are huge supporters of communities in general.
I've had a great pleasure, not only recently,
but over the last 20 years, watching the Linux communities,
and what's happening in open source.
One of the key constituencies, obviously,
to your audience, our developers,
there are quite a few announcements
that got talked about on the keynote stage,
was wondering if you could help walk through,
for our audience,
the primary announcements, and especially the impact
that it will have on the developer community.
>> Yeah, that's right.
So, the developers are entrenched
are obviously as a part of SUSE.
We're deep open source roots and they're ingrained
in our culture so we've just recently focused
on a new developer community
with contents specifically targeted
to developer use cases for application platform offering.
So, over the next couple of months,
we're going to roll out content for Linux, open source,
DevOps, all these things
that I'm sure love, Stu.
Microservices, containers,
Kubernetes, edge,
and the likes.
So, a lot of innovative technologies as our content.
Now, what we are offering in the developer community,
is the SUSE Cloud Application Platform Developer Sandbox.
We wanted to make it easy for these developers
you just spoke of to benefit from the best practices,
that evolved from the cloud native application delivery
that we offer every day, of course,
to customers and now for free to our developers.
We want them to be able to easily apply their skills
to create applications, that can run anywhere,
anywhere from on-prem,
private, public cloud.
And the developers to get access and hands-on experience
to the SUSE Cloud Application Platform without having
to spin up their own environment,
is a big test to our commitment to the developer community.
They can explore, test,
and develop without having any hardware services themselves.
I've signed up myself, hopefully you will too.
And join the community and give some feedback,
get engaged in this open source community for developers.
It's really important for everybody.
You can find it at developer.suse.com.
In addition to the sandbox I just mentioned,
you'll also find there, our developer forms.
It's got Getting Started guides and other useful examples
of how to accelerate the adoption
of the Cloud Application Platform
and all of the demo tools you can use.
I can't express the importance enough,
that we put in place in our developers.
Our developer community is a really important part
to reach the innovation that we so hope
and live for every day.
So, we need to provide them the tools to be successful.
So, I think what you're going to see, Stu,
is a lot more engagement with our developer community,
and a lot more integration with them,
and collaboration with them as time goes on.
It's a big part of our focus coming in now to 2020,
and of course the second half of the year.
>> So Melissa, one of the other points that you made
in your keynote is that SUSE is now fully independent.
It's always been an open source company, long history there.
But what does this one year of independence mean
for your customers and that partner ecosystem?
>> Yeah, it's a big deal for us, Stu.
It's a really big deal.
We spun away from Micro Focus a year ago in March,
so we just now passed our one year.
We're now in control of our destiny
and the future is very, very bright.
I think going forward in the next year,
what you can expect from SUSE is continued focus
and support on our customers.
Of course, the digital transformation efforts
that we need to put into helping them
go through this transformation.
I saw a cartoon the other day, everyone probably saw it,
"Who's leading your digital transformation efforts?
"Your CEO, your CIO, or Coronavirus?"
And I think we all agree that Coronavirus
has put a new effort and focus
on the digital transformation in our companies,
and our customers need to go through.
So, I think we need to be sure
that with this new independence,
that we focus on that digital transformation effort.
Couple that with our open source innovation
and no matter where our customers are in their journey,
that we give them the enabling tools to get there.
We start with simplifying, modernizing,
and accelerating our customers' journey.
And you're going to hear a lot about that in the keynote
that I just did.
Simplifying first, so simplifying
and optimizing our customers' applications and the data
to exist in an IT environment
that's going to help them go on the journey to modernize.
Modernizing everything about the IT infrastructure
as well as their legacy applications
to utilize modernized technologies, like containers,
or edge, or cloud,
or the like.
By simplifying and modernizing,
our customers can then begin to accelerate.
They can accelerate innovation, they can accelerate growth,
they can accelerate delivery of whatever services
and applications they want to deliver.
For example, capabilities around AI and edge
and they can scale their companies to bring product
to market faster and even at a lower cost.
So I think, when you think about SUSE and our independence,
I want our customers to know and understand
that our focus will always be to simplify, modernize
and accelerate, but also to remain nimble.
Help our customers, our partners,
our community innovate faster based
on customer business requirements.
And to solve problems of today and tomorrow,
not just what we knew before.
So, we're much more connected
with our customers than ever before.
And we want to be able to offer them the flexibility
that they learn to love it and enjoy from SUSE
more so now than ever.
Our customers' agenda, Stu,
is our only agenda.
In a world where everyone wants
to be the best at everything,
the only thing we want to be number one with
is customer satisfaction.
We will stay number one in the market
because we love servicing our customers.
We love being maniacally focused on our customers' needs,
their business problems, and creating solutions
that are tailored with services
that make them more successful.
I think you can expect SUSE
to enter new markets like powering, for example,
autonomous vehicles with safety certified Linux,
and other really innovative technologies
that we're going to develop every single day
in our community with our developers
to solve customer business problems.
I say to the teams every day,
"We're big enough for scale and we're small enough
"to be nimble and to be flexible
"to service our customers first."
So, expect that from SUSE in our independence,
but always, of course.
>> Yeah, Melissa, you talk about things like AI,
and edge, and innovation,
and you just brought up autonomous vehicles,
so, not only is it a cool area, but really highlights
a lot of these waves coming together.
You announced up on stage a really cool looking company,
Elektrobit, I noticed their green
almost matched your companies too so tell us about
this new partnership, why it's important
and what others can learn about it.
>> Yeah, sure.
So, Elektrobit, we just partnered with them,
made the announcement today in the keynote.
They're the leading global international provider
of embedded software solutions for automotive.
So, it's a whole new area for us.
Safety certified Linux is the first
for SUSE in this industry.
I recently met, virtually,
with Alexander Kocher, the CEO of Elektrobit,
to learn more about his company
and innovation that we're going to drive together.
We've got a whole session at SUSECON Digital
within the platform to talk about what we're doing
with safety certified Linux
and what we're doing with Elektrobit.
I can't wait to tell you more about it,
I've got a one-to-one fireside chat with Alex
that I think you're going to love to learn more about.
Maybe something else we mentioned in the keynote
that you may want to know about,
and that's the artificial intelligence solution
that I specifically talked about launching next quarter.
This, I'm super excited about as well,
it's really easy to be excited here at SUSE
when you have constant rolling innovation
in our community and delivering that to our customers.
But this is also an exciting space.
The solution that we're launching next quarter
is going to benefit both data scientists
and IT operations teams by simplifying the integration
of key AI building blocks that are going to be required
to develop quickly, test,
and then deploy the next generation
of intelligence solutions.
So, keep your eyes open for that too.
We're going to have some game-changing solutions for SUSE
and all of our customers on this AI solution next quarter.
So, two big announcements for us here,
exclusively at SUSECON Digital,
I can't wait to share all the details next quarter
with AI, but also with Alex in the fireside chat
I had with him during the week.
>> Alright, so, great Melissa.
A couple of big announcements that you talked about.
Give us a little bit of a look forward.
So, you talked about what one year of independence means,
what should people be looking at,
what goals do you have for the community
and the company as we look through the rest of 2020?
>> As we look through the rest of 2020,
I think it's been a hard year already.
I couldn't have predicted, when I took over as CEO
of this great company nearly 10 months ago,
that we'd be having the hard times that we currently have.
I can honestly say there's no place I'd rather be.
The fact that we are in the best company,
in the best industry with open source at our roots,
at our heart,
that will never change.
What you can expect from us is consistent
and constant innovation.
You can look for us to be nimble, dependable.
You can look for us for growth.
If there ever were a recession proof company
that delivers the best solutions to our customers,
I think SUSE's it.
In fact, I know it is.
We're going to double in size in three years,
so we're going to go from just under a half a billion
to a billion in revenue in three years time.
And we've got the constant trajectory
and the means of which to do it,
we're really looking from a strategic perspective
for the rest of the year.
How can we simplify, modernize,
and accelerate the solutions delivered to our customers
to ensure we constantly focus on innovative technologies,
keeping open source values and ethos to our core,
and then also consider how do we ensure a safe, stable,
quality environment that's building on tools
such as optimizing and automating their environment
to get the best out of their technology stack.
And that's what you should expect
to see from SUSE the rest of this year,
and as we go obviously into 2021,
you're going to want to watch the space, Stu.
Stay tuned for the look at SUSE,
we're growing like a rocket ship.
And we still have intention of growing through the crisis
and of course going into the back half of 2020.
But we're accelerating with pace going into 2021.
>> Alright, well, Melissa,
I'm definitely looking forward to talking
to some of your customers, some of your partners,
and some of your team.
So, thanks again for joining us.
Definitely looking forward
to catching up with you further down the line.
>> I look forward to it. Thank you so much for the time today
and obviously the focus on SUSE, we're super excited
to share where we're going, where we've come from,
and what the journey looks like ahead.
So, thanks for the excitement
that you're sharing with us throughout this week.
Really appreciate it, Stu. Thank you.
>> Alright, and be sure to stay with us,
we've got wall to wall coverage of SUSECON Digital '20,
even if we're not at a physical event,
we get to do them all, remotely,
digitally, that global digital experience.
I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE.
(relaxing music)