Dr. Gerald Pfeifer

In my professional life I am a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at SUSE, the world's largest independent Open Source company, and serve as chair of the openSUSE Board.

Before that I served as Vice President of Products & Technology Programs • creating and progressing SUSE's broad portfolio of infrastructure and application delivery Open Source enterprise software, including the SUSE Linux Enterprise family (incl. SAP offerings, High Availability, HPC,...), Ceph-based SUSE Enterprise Storage, SUSE OpenStack Cloud, and management products (SUSE Manager, Customer Center,...), Kubernetes-based CaaS Platform, and Cloud Foundry based Cloud Application Platform with hundreds of millions of revenue • driving pricing strategy • leading teams of product managers, technical account managers, and certification, ISV, and CSP engineers, spread globally • working with a development team of ~700.

Leading up to that I ran product management for the SUSE portfolio at Novell and was project lead for Enterprise Linux, coordinating dozens of teams in an engineering organization matrixed all over the world. In addition I was responsible for specific aspects of the SUSE Linux platform such as the Itanium version, RAS and scalability, bootstrapped the Software Development Kit, and served as release manager.

Most of 2003, I was on a research contract at C.I.E.S./University of Calabria, working on the DLV system. Before that, I spent several years in academia, mostly as assistant professor at the Database and Artificial Intelligence Group at Vienna University of Technology. Apart from research in databases and artificial intelligence (deductive databases, non-monotonic reasoning, knowledge representation & reasoning) and teaching, I supervised theses and projects and managed the sysadmin team.

Outside of work I contribute to GCC, where I maintain the web presence and documentation, do the occasional hack and serve on the Steering Committee, openSUSE, and FreeBSD, where I am a ports committer (ramping down recently after maintaining the GCC and Wine ports for two decades).

I practice and teach Yoga, enjoy scuba diving as a certified divemaster, and love seeing places and connecting with other humans.

My doctorate in technical sciences (Dr.techn.) is from Vienna University of Technology.