SUSE® today announced the appointment of three senior executives as the company continues to evolve and 
expand its leadership structure to support rapid growth and momentum in both its core Linux operating system business and more recent cloud infrastructure and storage solutions. Ronald de Jong, previously vice president of EMEA sales for SUSE, has been named president of sales. Michael Miller, previously SUSE vice president of global alliances and marketing, is now president of strategy, alliances and marketing. And Ralf Flaxa is now president of global engineering for SUSE, promoted from vice president of engineering. The appointments were effective 01 Feb’16.
“These senior executive roles are critical to the global expansion of our business,” said Nils Brauckmann, CEO of SUSE. “As we continue to grow both our organization and our solution portfolio to meet the increasing demand from customers around the world, we also need to increase the depth and breadth of our executive leadership team.”
Responsibilities of these new SUSE executive roles include:
President of sales: In this role, de Jong carries global responsibility for development and execution of SUSE’s sales strategy and leads SUSE sales activities and rapidly expanding sales teams worldwide.
President of strategy, alliances and marketing: In this role, Miller is instrumental in developing SUSE business strategy. He carries responsibility for business development and strategic alliance relationships, and he also leads the product management and marketing functions, including sales enablement and training.
President of global engineering: Flaxa, a long-time open source pioneer and technologist, leads SUSE’s continued growth in product development and carries worldwide responsibility for all SUSE product engineering teams.
Al Gillen, Group Vice President for Enterprise Infrastructure at IDC, said, “The Linux market continues to grow as the foundation for a much larger open source deployment ecosystem within enterprise data centers and at service providers offering public cloud services. Customers need to have strong infrastructure software providers, and SUSE’s continued investment in staff and executive resources is a positive indicator of the company’s dedication to supporting its clients and growing the open source software market.”
The three executives report to Brauckmann, who was promoted to CEO of SUSE in December 2015 and joined the board of directors of Micro Focus International plc on Feb. 1, 2016.
