Dr. Gerald Pfeifer

Professionally I am the Vice President of Products & Technology Programs at SUSE, responsible for • pricing strategy • the SUSE portfolio including the SUSE Linux Enterprise family (SLES, SAP offerings, High Availability, HPC,...), Ceph-based SUSE Enterprise Storage, SUSE OpenStack Cloud, and management products (SUSE Manager, Customer Center, Studio) with hundreds of millions of revenue • leading teams of product managers, technical account managers, and certification, ISV, and CSP engineers, spread globally • working with a development team of ~400.

Before that I led product management for the SUSE portfolio at Novell and earlier 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, created 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 project. 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 student projects and theses 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, FreeBSD, where I am a ports committer, and openSUSE. As time permits I also enjoy scuba diving as a certified rescue diver and seeing places.

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