 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante with theCUBE and welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. I've been running a CEO series for the last several weeks talking to leaders about how they're dealing with the COVID-19 crisis and really trying to understand how they've been navigating through and communicating to their employees and their customers. I'm really excited to have Melissa Di Donato here. She's the CEO of SUSE. Melissa, great to see you again. Great to see you. Thank you for having me. You're very welcome. You and I met last September and one of the reasons I've been looking forward to this interview, look, I'm a fanboy, self-mentioned. I threw the kitchen sink at you last year and you batted everything out of the park. We were talking about digital transformation, digital business and you were really one of my favorite guests of the year. So talk about kitchen sink. I mean, this COVID-19 thing came out of nowhere. When did you see it coming and what was your first move as a leader? Well, so for us, you know, we had a really unique position, Dave, because we have a number of people sitting in China. So we've got more than 250 employees sitting in China. So for us, COVID-19 is not new. We've been dealing with this for quite a long time since December when first part of the becoming ill in China and realizing that there was an issue. As of the 7th of January, we had to move very quickly. When China went on to lockdown, we had to find a way to get our employees to be able to work from home very quickly. And taking a couple of hundred employees that are sitting in China and being able to empower them and to enable them to work from home very quickly, nearly overnight was no short tasks. So we took all of that learning back in January and then we were able to respond as the countries fell ill and the government requirements went into place around the world since then. So for us, this is nothing new and we're really fortunate that we had the mechanisms in place to handle the pandemic first in China. And now as it came across Europe and then of course into the U.S. Yes, so you had the Canary in the coal mine, so to speak, well before you really had to start. Kind of something like that. Yeah, well before you had to start making decisions about Susa Khan and Dublin, which was scheduled to be in March. So that was your other big decision point, wasn't it? Yeah, it was really difficult for us because obviously we had customers, we had partners all wanting to come to Dublin. In fact, we were scheduled to be together there as well. And we had to give them enough time to be able to make alternate arrangements. But at the same time, we had to wait to see what the government was going to do in Ireland, because obviously that has a very big impact on the structure and the cost, et cetera. But we made an early decision as early as we could, not with the beginning part of March, to make the decision to unfortunately move it to a digital event, which was not an easy solution. The first time in our history, bringing a big annual conference that's physical and in person to a virtual event that's sitting digital, it wasn't an easy over the night kind of process and decision to make. So it was a hard one, but we're really confident. And May 20th is the announcement in the start of our SuzyCon digital event. So not too long away from where we are now. Melissa, how have you altered, enhanced your communications to your employees, your team, and ultimately your customers and partners? Have you increased the cadence? How have you altered? Yeah, so much so. So we do, I do a video with my team that I announce and push out every Monday. So every Monday, I give them a business update. I tell them what's happening in the industry, what's happening with Suza, what's happening with our customers. That happens every week, once a week. That's for every employee. And it's a video call, something like this almost. Then what we do is weekly updates on what the great things that are happening around Suza. You know, we've got a lot of amazing employees here in the open source community, but also employees as well. We've had employees in Italy who created virtual classrooms for their employees. We had an employee in the U.S. who dedicated 30% of his bonus to give back to his local school. He's bought lunches for all the people in his hospital locally. We've had our entire Nuremberg, Germany office give all of their lunch vouchers to the homeless in Germany. So we also like to publicize all the good work that all of our employees are doing to give back to their local communities and globally. So the cadence has definitely been increased. We just ran a survey, Dave, this last week that closed yesterday. We got very, very favorable results. And that was definitely geared toward communication. No more so than now. Do the employees and the customers need to be aware of what's going on? You probably feel the same thing and through me and probably loads of other interviews know that, I mean, we're not a magician. We're not a scientist here that could predict necessarily the future. I think the scientists themselves don't even know what's going to happen. But we're doing our best to take outlook and to take a lot of concern and approach to educate our employees and our customers of what they can expect. Now for us, I'm in the very fortunate position that before COVID-19, 38% of our employees work remotely. So working from home for us is quite easy. It's quite natural for our community and our open source community as well as a whole. So for us to make that transition, we were uninterrupted in the way of dealing with our customers. I've been communicating with them as well through emails and phone calls and other means pretty much at least once a month if not every other week or so to communicate what we're doing for them. Again, you said it, being proactive and being communicative right now it's never been more important. So you, it sounds like maintaining productivity. A lot of organizations are actually seeing a productivity hit and they're having trouble getting work from home infrastructure up and spun up a people joke on Twitter that's the sort of new tissue paper. You can't know what it's like in London but you can't get toilet paper on the shelves here. And so work from home, infrastructure, laptops, VDI, et cetera, but it sounds like you really haven't taken a productivity hit it's sort of a natural progression for you. Yeah, I mean, you know, when we met last September we talked about the importance of open source and we've been in business for nearly 30 years and we've always run our business in open source community. And that is a community that's obviously geographically dispersed all over the world. So people have been working from home working in their community being transparent and collaborative regardless of where they sit. So from an innovation perspective we've had no impact to our business. So being able to work from anywhere across any boundary has been uninterrupted. So that's been great. 99% of our workforce are now working remotely from home versus up from 38% pre COVID. It doesn't change the fact that things like hardware and software and the means that they need to actually operate from home is difficult. So we've made the concerted effort for example, to make sure our employees in Germany had the capability to bring home their desk chairs to bring home their monitors to bring home their machine to set them up with the ability to be able to work from home. Building on the experience from China we learned we needed to provision early. So what we did in the beginning part of February was to begin to procure software and hardware that enabled us to have a bench of technology that we could utilize in case we have this pandemic run wild to support our employees to work from home. So I'm very happy to say we were well prepared. In our survey we asked the question how prepared are you to be able to work from home? And it was extremely high. It was the best practice and way of benchmarking for any employee survey to be able to provide them the productivity tools necessary to be able to work from home. So we're very, very proud of that. Well, I want to ask you about sort of the recovery. Nobody knows. I mean, we've never seen this poor shutdown of the economy before. So Bill Gates this morning on TV saying, he thinks it's really through June that we're going to have to live with this. I know the president of the United States is saying we'd like to happen before that. But assuming there is a comeback, let's say June, start to bring back the economy and waves. Well, how do you see open source in a downturn? Some prolonged downturn months, maybe as much as a year or even more. How do you see open source playing there? Yeah, that's a good question. I'm glad you asked it. I think that as the pandemic continues in any crisis for that matter, open source adoption is going to accelerate. There's no doubt. There's a huge pressure we're all going to face. Even though successful businesses like us here at SUSE, we're going to have to go under some crunch and consideration around costs. Open source adoption will accelerate digital transformation efforts and will definitely speed up organizations to respond to the crisis because they're able to utilize all of the technology innovation and standardization of Linux and other open source technologies from anywhere, whether it's on-premise and the cloud utilizing edge. They're going to look for innovations and constant uptick whilst gaining cost savings at the same time. There's no better place to achieve that besides being in an open source community. So we're very fortunate. I would have never predicted a pandemic if I had, I'd be a multimillionaire even if I had the Lotto by now. Nonetheless, I think that there's no place I'd rather be for sure. And I wouldn't want to run any other company besides an open source business right now because we're seeing an uptick rather than having it decline. You know, I want to ask you about culture because you've been in SUSE as the CEO less than a year inside of a year and you really have always focused on culture. You know, CEOs, obviously you got to worry about growth. You got to worry about profitability, productivity and the like, but I want to actually pull up something that I found on LinkedIn. It was from one of your newer employees. You just knew the SUSE. You said my first month here, amazing colleagues, high amount of trust, lots of collaboration, willing to help each other succeed, giving back to the less fortunate in the community, high amount of respect for diversity, amazing values. Leadership is open, honest, trend-setting, industry-defining, really smart and generally super caring. Wow. I mean, he said in short, best organization I've ever contributed my efforts to and been a part of. And that, I think, starts at the top. Your leadership, whether it's diversity, openness, transparency, you really have set from day one a cultural foundation, which I think is playing out well for you right now. But I wonder if you could talk about the culture that you're trying to drive, SUSE. Yeah, I mean, wow, I mean, I did read that post and I was, I mean, that's life-changing, I think, for leaders like myself. When you have employees that feel the sense of urgency around the criticality that they play and the role they play in the company, you can't ask for more than that really genuinely. And I think that when I came, I took it personal to make sure that we led the company leading with people first for probably one of the very few companies in the world that have one trademark. And our trademark is our SUSE, a chameleon. We don't have any other trademark marks or patents on any of our technology because it is open. So the only thing I have is the people. The link to the world and this business being successful is our people and there inevitably lies the importance that's pertaining to their culture. And I think that this is, because we're community-based and open source, it's really important that we continually collaborate. They're constantly giving back and giving insight and giving support to community. And that needs to transcend the community and be living every single day in our company. You mentioned something in that post, which is the philanthropic side of who I am. I believe very wholeheartedly in the responsibility we carry as CEOs, executives, as companies to give back to our community. When I started nearly a year ago, I instituted the month of giving, which happens to be May in conjunction with one day off every year for every single employee to give back to their local communities or a charity of their choice. Now that's proven very well, particularly now. Folks are taking time off. They're donating their time at local hospitals. They're creating that sense of community giving and care that again, bleeds itself into the fibric of what this culture is. On top of that, recently you may have read the press, I'm sure you have, about us giving any medical device supplier or any medical device and not just manufacturer, but institution for research of COVID-19. We're giving them free software and support to run and develop technologies associated with solving this pandemic. And that is truly a gift. I feel incredibly privileged to be able to give back as you, again, well know, we supply all the operating systems to many of our really important medical devices like CAT scan machines and mammogram machines. In fact, probably most of the machines being used in the US today to combat many diseases are running on a SUSE operating system. We want to offer that back again to the community. The employees went wild over the fact that we were able to give back on a big scale to solve a problem like this. So I think, when it comes down to who we are and what our culture is, Dave, people are the most important thing to me. I did an interview recently and they said, going from a CEO that's very focused on sales, and like you said earlier, very focused on outcome and deliverables and forecasts and budgets and EBITDA, is that still the case? I have to say confidently, no, that's not the thing that keeps me up at night now. What keeps me up at night now and how I wake up every morning is wondering about the health of my employees. We had a couple of employees, one that was quite ill in Italy. We were phoning him and calling and emailing him from his hospital bed, and that's what's really keeping me going and what's inspiring me to lead this incredible company is the people and the culture that they've built that I'm honoring and taking forward as part of the open source value system. Well, I think those metrics, those performance, business performance metrics, what I've learned is they're actually a symptom of a great culture. And so I'm really excited and amazed at what you're building there. And thank you. Well, you know, in this day and age, you hear, at least prior to COVID, you heard a lot of attacks on technology companies and big tech on billionaires. And it's really refreshing to see technology companies stepping up. You mentioned the example of medical device. There are many, many examples. And so thank you for that. We really appreciate it. Thank you too. All right, Melissa, great having you. I hope we can talk again, leading up to SUSECON virtual slash digital. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Great to see you again. Stay safe. It's been great to see you. Thank you very much for having me again as well and inviting me back. I look forward to seeing you next month. All right, Ditto. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time.