Purple Hat veteran will head up SUSE from Could as Di Donato steps down

Out with the SAPper, in with a Hatter: Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen will take over at SUSE Could 1st. Chief monetary officer Andy Myers is interim CEO till the tip of April.

New boss van Leeuwen is an ex-Purple Hatter. He joined the then-independent biz in 2004 and ended up as senior Vice President and Common Supervisor of North America, weathering the IBM acquisition that created Large Purple 4 years in the past. Maybe getting his personal interview in CEO Journal gave him a style for the job title.

When he takes over as head chameleon-wrangler originally of April, he’ll change the outgoing – in each senses of the phrase – Melissa di Donato, a former SAP government who took over in 2019.

Di Donato led SUSE for some 4 years after changing Nils Brauckmann, who oversaw SUSE breaking away from mother or father firm MicroFocus in 2018. Her keep was notable for 2 important strikes: the 2020 acquisition of Rancher Labs, and an profitable, if lower than stellar IPO on the Frankfurt inventory alternate. SUSE additionally acquired container safety startup NeuVector and open sourced it, releasing model 5.0 final yr, though that was a quite smaller deal.

Dutchman van Leeuwen appears to be a long-term Unix sort. From 1996 to 2000, he ran gross sales in Benelux and the Nordic international locations for the Santa Cruz Operation. Do not get scared – that was the good SCO. Van Leeuwen left in September 2000, only a month after Caldera acquired the corporate. This was a few years earlier than Caldera modified its identify to SCO and started its legendary sue-stravaganza in a future of Unix-linked disputes.

He then moved to Berkeley Software program Design Inc, higher referred to as BSDI, quickly after its merger with Walnut Creek, the place he headed gross sales in central Europe, a area he’d be taking care of once more for Purple Hat a couple of years later. The merger and tried IPO did not work out, and shortly afterwards BSDI jettisoned its server enterprise as iXsystems, now most likely higher identified for its TrueNAS product vary.

Van Leeuwen left BSDI quickly afterwards. So, he appears to have some expertise of bailing out of Unixy companies earlier than they hit stormy waters. It is nearly sufficient to make us fear in regards to the Large Purple Hat.

Within the hole between Di Donato’s departure and Van Leeuwen choosing up the reins, the present chief monetary officer, Andrew Myers, would be the interim CEO. ®