SUSE #

Today was a good year at SUSE

I've been saying that, pretty much every day since I joined.

In late May, I packed a suitcase and flew to the United Kingdom.
Days later I would be in Nuremberg at an open source event. I reunited with old friends and met countless new faces. Incredibly talented engineers all.

The company I knew had changed a lot in over a decade, some old products were gone, new exciting ones were being integrated and the level of technical expertise had grown to unmatched levels. Friends who led Ruby were now at the forefont of WASM, others who mastered virtualization were now container native experts.

Despite the overwhelming abundance of skill, my first thought was:

everyone here rightfully deserves more recognition and success

SUSE is one of those companies that is the backbone of technology industry as a whole.
It doesn't matter what kind of software infrastructure you use today, SUSE built substantial parts ot it.

My job was to work with a new team and identify opportunities where SUSE could succeed to the level I knew it performed.

In the early days things have been largely administrative.

• Communicating the CEO's vision, publicly and internally
• Restructuing the organization and install proven leadership
• Protect customer choice with a compelling promise to industry
• Learn about the portfolio and brand with a view to bring it all together

A few months on, things have become clear. SUSE is a challenger, an authentic one with a mix of new energy and credible history. It's humbling and incredible to learn that the awareness of all SUSE does can be largely unrecognised by the wider market.

Thanks to SUSE's countless contributions. The world's vast and diverse technical needs have not been a distraction. From fixing embargoed bugs to tooling what's next. The world continues to passively benefit from SUSE and direct customers manage to gratefully stay ahead with innovation and stability.

The Kubernetes project recently selected Open Build Service as it's defacto packaging and repository toolchain. SUSE itself recently reaffirmed commercial support for major paid linux vendor.

What drives me is the generous and agnostic view SUSE takes. It's truly open and choice-forward. You see SUSE deeply collaborate and co-engineer with Intel, AMD, ARM and more well before the market has caught up to each innovation.

Gerald Pfeifer says it best:

We create one linux, we support many.
We build one Kubernetes, we manage many.

SUSE has the engineers and the foresight to continue a level playing field.

It's my job to meet this potential and accelerate it.
if you know anything about my values, this is doing justice to good work.