 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of SousaCon Digital, brought to you by Sousa. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of SousaCon Digital 20, rather than gathering together in Dublin. We actually have a larger audience online, watching everything digitally, really helping to have happy to have on the program. Back to the program, one of our CUBE alumni, she is fresh off the keynote stage. Melissa DiDonato, she is the CEO of Sousa. Melissa, so good to see you, wish it could all be in person, but thanks for having theCUBE and at SousaCon. Thank you very much for joining us as well. By third time on the show, I'm really, really pleased to have you be an important part of our digital experience with SousaCon Digital. So Stu, nice to see you. All right, so last time you were on the program, you spoke to Dave Vellante about how you're keeping your employees safe and keeping them productive. The note I heard clearly from you in your keynote presentation is really a sense of optimism. So like if you could bring us a little bit inside, I'm sure you're talking to a lot of your customers. What is it even in these unprecedented times that are giving you that sense of optimism? Yeah, there's no denying where we are in the world. With COVID-19, we have a whole different way of looking at the world. Every business in every industry has been impacted. And not just the working life, but our family life, the way we communicate, the way we run our homes, our environments at work, it's been very much integrated now. It's a very different way of adding a whole different level of stress that we didn't have in our business life just a couple of months ago. And I think as I told Dave, the most important thing for me is number one to make sure that our employees remain self safe and healthy, that's number one. And I think that as we experience negativity across the world with news and social media, et cetera, that my hope is that the community and the SUSE family remain optimistic. And why do we have the ability to remain optimistic when everyone else is experiencing a lot of doom and gloom one might ask, as you rightly so said. Let me talk about SUSE and how we're rooted in our community. Our thesis is the power of many. This power of many in a virtual community really drives innovation. We're not like proprietary software and many other tech companies where you have to reside in the building to make sure that we maintain and evangelize the innovation that you live and deliver to your customers. For us, it's very different. Our community is the basis for innovation. It's the pillar of our community, of our company, our ethos and our value. So it's SUSE, the spirit of collaboration and integration is live today more than ever before with 99% of our employees working from home being engaged in a very different way than maybe they're used to, but not so unlike engaging the innovation that we get out of our community. I think you mentioned something else too that's really important and that's productivity. We've moved away as of the 1st of March in measuring productivity in exchange for measuring the way that we integrate and elaborate and engage with our employees. So instead of productivity or measuring engagement, our employees are becoming much more engaged with each other, with our customers, with our communities and of course our partners. They're giving back to their community. They're measuring the engagement and their successful means of delivering through how much they can give back to their communities. So we've seen a huge rise in our employees giving back to their communities around them. For example, I met an employee who's donating a very big part of his bonus percentage to a hospital to pay for lunches for frontline health workers near his home. Our Nuremberg, Germany office, they're giving their lunch vouchers and donating that to all of the homeless people around their community. And then we've got employees around Italy, one in particular that's created a virtual classroom for his son's school and the community around him. So, you know, everyone's really pitching in. I think finally, from a community perspective, we're also sponsoring a numerous amounts of hackathons. For example, in Germany, the government has recently held a hackathon for community-based solutions to combat COVID-19. Our employees participated and engaged with their one day off. We give every employee one day off a year to engage for charitable cause. And the results of this hackathon is a better understanding of the data per states about COVID-19 across the country. So I think all in all, everything that we're doing is really trying to utilize the community as we've always have as open source. Open source is developed in a community that oftentimes does not sit together. And now we're trying to really engage with that community as much as possible to keep innovation alive, to keep collaboration alive, and not just for the purpose of innovation, but for the purpose of combating the virus and giving hope and of course, gratitude to this community and across all of our population across the world. I really do believe that in challenging times like today, it's the best way to realize the innovation that we can put together, triggering innovation for good, but also bringing out the best in humanity. It's amazing to see what, you know, thousands and thousands of people in the open source world are giving and delivering and collaborating in which to solve the world's problems, COVID-19, but also innovation problems for today and tomorrow. Yeah, Melissa said some great stories that you have there. You know, we of course, are huge supporters of communities in general. I've had a great pleasure, not only recently, but you know, over the last 20 years, watching the Linux communities and what's happening in the open source. One of the key constituencies obviously to your audience are developers. There are quite a few announcements that got talked about on the keynote stage. I was wondering if you could help walk through for our audience, you know, the primary announcements and especially, you know, the impact that it will have on the developer community. Yeah, that's right. So the developers are entrenched obviously as part of SUSE. We're deep open source roots and they're ingrained in our culture. So we've just recently focused on a new developer community with content specifically targeted to developer use cases for application platform offerings. So over the next couple of months, we're going to roll out content for Linux, open source DevOps, all these things that you I'm sure loves to microservices, containers, Kubernetes, Edge and the like. So a lot of innovative technologies as our content. Now what we are offering in the developer community is the SUSE Cloud Application Platform Developer Sandbox. We wanted to make it easy for these developers you just spoke of to benefit from the best practices that evolved from the cloud-native application delivery that we offer every day of course to customers and now for free to our developers. We want them to be able to easily apply their skills to create applications that can run anywhere. Anywhere from on-prem, private, public cloud and the accessors and the developers to get access and hands-on experience the SUSE Cloud Application Platform without having to spin up their own environment is a big test to our commitment to the developer community. They can explore, test and develop without having any hardware services themselves. It's a really, I've signed up myself, hopefully you will too and join the community and give some feedback and engage in this open source community for developers. It's really important for everybody. You can find it at developer.susa.com. In addition to the sandbox as I just mentioned you'll also find there our developer forums. It's got getting started guides and other useful examples of how to accelerate the adoption of the cloud application platform and all of the demo tools you can use. I can't express the importance enough that we put in place on our developers. Our developer community is a really important part to reach the innovation that we so hope and live for every day. So we need to provide them the tools to be successful. So I think what you're going to see is a lot more engagement with our developer community and a lot more integration with them and collaboration with them as time goes on. It's a big part of our focus coming in now to 2020 and of course the second half of the year. So Melissa, one of the other points that you made in your keynote is that Sousa is now fully independent. It's always been an open source company, long history there. But what does this one year of independence mean for your customers and that partner ecosystem? Yeah, it's a big deal for us too. It's a really big deal. We spun away from Micro Focus a year ago in March so we've just now passed our one year. We're now in control of our destiny and the future is very, very bright. I think going forward in the next year what you can expect from Sousa is continued focus and support on our customers. Of course, the digital transformation efforts that we need to put into helping them go through this transformation. I saw a cartoon the other day, everyone probably saw it. Who's leading your digital transformation efforts? Your CEO, your CIO or coronavirus. And I think we all agree that coronavirus has put a new effort and focus on the digital transformation that our companies and our customers need to go through. So I think we need to be sure that with this new independence that we focus on that digital transformation effort, couple that with our open source innovation and no matter where our customers are in their journey that we give them the enabling tools to get there. We start with simplifying, modernizing and accelerating our customers journey. And you're going to hear a lot about that in the keynote that I just did. Simplifying first. So simplifying and optimizing our customers' applications and the data to exist in an IT environment that's going to help them go on the journey to modernize. Modernizing everything about the IT infrastructure as well as their legacy applications to utilize modernized technologies like containers or Edge or cloud or the like. By simplifying and modernizing our customers can then begin to accelerate. They can accelerate innovation. They can accelerate growth. They can accelerate delivery of whatever services and applications they want to deliver. For example, capabilities around AI and Edge and they can scale their companies to bring products to market faster and even at a lower cost. So I think when you think about Susan, our independence I want our customers to know and understand that our focus will always be to simplify, modernize and accelerate but also to remain nimble. Help our customers, our partners, our community innovate faster based on customer business requirements and to solve problems of today and tomorrow not just what we knew before. So we're much more connected with our customers than ever before and we want to be able to offer them the flexibility that they learned to love and enjoy from Susan more so now than ever. Our customers' agendas too is our only agenda. In a world where everyone wants to be the best at everything, the only thing we want to be number one with is customer satisfaction. We will say number one in the market because we love servicing our customers. We love being maniacally focused on our customers' needs, their business problems and creating solutions that are tailored with services that make them more successful. I think you can expect Susan to enter new markets like Powering, for example, Autonomous Vehicles with Safety-Certified Linux and other really innovative technologies that we're going to develop every single day in our community with our developers to solve customer business problems. I say to the teams every day, we're big enough for scale and we're small enough to be nimble and to be flexible to service our customers first. So expect that from Susan in our independence but always, of course. Yeah, Melissa, you talk about things like AI and ED and innovation and you just brought up Autonomous Vehicles. So not only is it a cool area but really highlights a lot of these waves coming together. You announced it up on stage, really cool looking company, Electrobit. I noticed they're green, almost matched your company's too. So tell us about this in partnership, why it's important and what others can learn about it. Yeah, sure. So Electrobit, we just partnered with them made the announcement today in the keynote. They're the leading international provider of embedded software solutions for automotive. So it's a whole new area for us. Safety Certified Linux is the first for Susan in this industry. I recently met virtually with Alexander, coach of the CEO of Electrobit to learn more about his company innovation that we're going to drive together. We've got a whole session at Suzacon Digital within the platform to talk about what we're doing with Safety Certified Linux and what we're doing with Electrobit. I can't wait to tell you more about it. And I've got a one-to-one fireside chat with Alex that I think you're going to love to learn more about. Maybe something else we mentioned in the keynote that you may want to know about and that's the artificial intelligence solution that I specifically talked about launching next quarter. This I'm super excited about as well. I mean, it's really easy to be excited here at Susan when you have constant rolling innovation in our community and delivering that to our customers. But this is also an exciting space. The solution that we're launching next quarter is going to benefit both data scientists and IT operations teams by simplifying the integration of key AI building blocks that are going to be required to develop quickly, test and then deploy the next generation of intelligent solutions. So keep your eyes open for that too. We're going to have some game-changing solutions for Susan and all of our customers on this AI solution next quarter. So two big announcements for us here exclusively at SusanCon Digital. I can't wait to share all the details next quarter with AI, but also with Alex in the fireside chat I had with him during the week. All right, so great Melissa. A couple of big announcements that you talked about. Give us a little bit of a look forward. So you talked about what one year of independence means. What should people be looking at? What goals do you have for the community and the company actually look through the rest of 2020? As we look through the rest of 2020, I think it's been a hard year already. And I couldn't have predicted when I took over as CEO of this great company nearly 10 months ago that we'd be having the hard times that we currently have. I can honestly say that there's no place I'd rather be. The fact that we are in the best company, in the best industry with open source at our roots, at our heart, that will never change. What you can expect from us is consistent and constant innovation. You can look for us to be nimble, dependable. You can look for us for growth. If there ever were a recession-proof company that delivers the best solutions to our customers, I think Susan's in. In fact, I know it is. We're going to double in size in three years. So we're going to go from just under a half a billion to a billion in revenue in three years' time. And we've got the constant trajectory and the means of which to do it. We're really looking from a strategic perspective the rest of this year. How can we simplify, modernize, and accelerate the solutions delivered to our customers to ensure we constantly focus on innovative technologies, keeping open source values and ethos to our core, and then also consider how do we ensure a safe, stable, quality environment that's building on tools such as optimizing and automating their environment to get the best out of their technology stack. And that's what you should expect to see from Susan the rest of this year. And as we go obviously into 2021, you're going to want to watch the space too. Stay tuned for the look at Susan. We're growing like a rocket ship and we have still intention of growing through the crisis and of course going into the back half of 2020, but we're accelerating with pace going into 2021. All right, well, Melissa, I'm definitely looking forward to talking to some of your customers, some of your partners and some of your teams. So thanks again for joining us. Definitely looking forward to catching up with you further down the line. I look forward to it. Thank you so much for the time today and obviously the focus on Susan, we're super excited to share where we're going, where we've come from, and what the journey looks like ahead. So thanks for the excitement that you're sharing with us throughout this week. Really appreciate it, Sue, thank you. All right, and be sure to stay with us. We've got wall to wall coverage of SUSICON Digital 20, even if we're not at a physical event, we get to do them all remotely, digitally, that global digital experience. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.