Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo has joined SUSE in the new role of chief technology officer, the latest addition to SUSE's executive leadership team. Di Giacomo will report directly to SUSE CEO Nils Brauckmann. This new executive role further bolsters the rapid innovation, growth and momentum of SUSE's business and expanding solution portfolio from the enterprise Linux operating system to the OpenStack cloud infrastructure and Ceph storage solutions.
"Thomas brings a wealth of industry insight and experience that will help SUSE more rapidly advance as our solution portfolio grows to meet increasing global demand," Brauckmann said. "As CTO, he will engage in active, strategic dialog with our customers, our partners and our many important open source communities as we continuously adapt to help our customers succeed."
Di Giacomo's industry and community engagement will extend well beyond Linux to include NFV, PaaS, IaaS, containers and orchestration, where the open source development model is driving continuous and rapid innovation. SUSE is ideally positioned to help customers and partners benefit from the emergence of new open source innovations such as software-defined computing, storage and networking and to help them embrace new IT paradigms such as DevOps. As SUSE CTO, Di Giacomo's vision is a software-defined and cloud-based, IT-powered future for the enterprise.
"IT leaders around the world face the challenge of ensuring business continuity and reducing costs while constantly improving business agility and innovating to create a competitive edge," Di Giacomo said. "We're now in the middle of a software-defined IT revolution powered by open source innovation that will deliver the enterprise technology paired with the economic scalability they need to meet that challenge. At SUSE, our proven ability to adapt open source innovation for the enterprise and our focus on strategic partnerships across the industry makes this new CTO role very exciting for me."
Matt Eastwood, senior vice president of Enterprise Infrastructure and Datacenter at IDC, said, "Most organisations are evolving into third-platform businesses that value innovation as a means of achieving digital market leadership. Customers are looking for technology providers with effective and imaginative leadership, and SUSE's executive addition to support and expand growth makes the company that much stronger in the growing open source software market."
Prior to joining SUSE, Di Giacomo served as CTO and vice president of innovation at Swisscom Hospitality Services, as well as CTO of the Hoist Group, a global provider of IT services to the hospitality and health care industries. He has expertise in open source platforms, development and support of global information systems and technologies. Di Giacomo holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Geneva, where he was a senior researcher involved in both academic work and joint corporate projects with partners such as LG, Samsung, France Telecom, Siemens, Deutsche Telekom, T-Systems, Telecom Italia, Sony and Microsoft.
