SUSE and Red Hat: Gerald Pfeifer, SUSE Selling SAP, Red Hat on Sysadmins

Gerald Pfeifer, a seasoned open source developer and CTO of SUSE EMEA, has been appointed the new chair of the openSUSE board. We talked to Pfeifer to better understand the role of the openSUSE board, the relationship between the company and the community, and the status of the openSUSE Foundation.

The concept of the intelligent enterprise has arrived in SAP user companies. Now, they need intelligent infrastructures. Linux and Kubernetes can help.
SAP has been focusing a lot of its efforts on introducing the intelligent enterprise to its customers – and it has succeeded. Many user companies are currently trying to become intelligent.

The concept of the intelligent enterprise serves as an aspiration, a favorable goal on their digitalization path. Various SAP solutions promise to get them there: S/4, in-memory database Hana, SAP Cloud Platform (SCP), C/4 Hana, SAP Cloud Analytics, SAP Data Hub, cloud solutions like Qualtrics or SuccessFactors, or Leonardo.

Not too long ago, I spoke at a tech event in the Netherlands to an audience mostly made up of sysadmins. One of my topics was how sysadmins can increase the value they deliver to the organization they work for. I believe that among the most important factors for delivering value is for everyone to know the overall organization's priorities and goals, as well as the priorities and goals of the organization's development teams.

This all sounds obvious, but in many organizations, silos almost completely block the inter-team communication needed to understand each other's priorities. Even in large organizations that pat themselves on the back for having gone full DevOps (or aspire to go full DevOps), knowledge of the priorities and goals of other teams is not ubiquitous. When I asked the couple hundred people in my audience whether they knew their development teams and what drives those teams, very few hands came up.