The path forward

Independence

Article from ADMIN 51/2019

By Brian Osborn

We took time out at two SUSE conferences to talk with Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo, SUSE's President of Engineering, Product, and Innovation.

The past 12 months have been a whirlwind of change for SUSE. Former parent company Micro Focus announced last July that it was spinning off SUSE as an independent company [1]; since then, the leading European enterprise Linux vendor has been in a flurry of reinvention. In addition to embracing a new emphasis on growth, SUSE is also finding its way through the changes in the Linux space after IBM's acquisition of Red Hat.

SUSE's life as an independent company got off to a roaring start as the annual SUSECON kicked off in Nashville, Tennessee, just days after SUSE legally split from Micro Focus. We used this opportunity, as well as the openSUSE Conference in Nuremberg, Germany, to speak extensively with Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo, President of Engineering, Product, and Innovation for SUSE (Dr. T).

Linux Magazine: The new buzzword is "application delivery"; everything is streamlined into that. What does that mean for your company?

Dr. T: It means that, while, like our customers, we are modernizing the way we do software developments, it's not all or nothing. It's not like we're shifting from waterfall to full DevOps. We still have some SUSE engine that's been done for the last 25 years to raise SUSE Linux Enterprise – that's still the basics of the engine – and then we add some more agility with smaller teams that are moving faster, so we try to balance the stability with the innovation and then combine that in a hybrid type of model.

LM: This new organization of the teams is different. It used to be you had the development team, you had engineering, you had QA, you had documentation – they were organized more by their task and not by the product that they were working on.

Dr. T: That's correct.

LM: So now you have

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