With stints at Red Hat, Apptio, and Chronosphere, Margaret Dawson brings plenty of tech cred to her new CMO post at SUSE.
This morning, the German cloud native–focused Linux company SUSE announced that Margaret Dawson is taking over as the company’s chief marketing officer. She automatically brings familiarity with the job to the table, since she spent the last year-and-a-half as the chief marketing officer at Chronosphere, a company that markets an observability platform for data control in cloud native infrastructures.
Before that she spent nearly a year-and-a-half at IBM-owned Apptio, where she simultaneously held a number of positions, among them — and maybe the most notable — Chief of Staff to the CEO. I mention that last position, because just as her new role at SUSE is something of a repeat performance, the same was true of that role at Apptio.
That story starts at Red Hat, where Dawson worked her way up the ladder for more than six years.
“I’m excited to return to the world of open source to deepen our relationships with customers and partners, amplify our voice in the market and drive measurable business impact,” Dawson said in a statement about her new gig at SUSE. “SUSE’s market opportunity is massive. As it hits 33 years as a leader in enterprise open source software, I’m bullish about SUSE’s future.”
Dawson had been working at Red Hat for a little over three years in portfolio product marketing when it was announced that the company was being purchased by IBM. Shortly after the sale, she was bumped up the ladder to become chief digital officer at about the same time that Paul Cormier replaced Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat’s CEO.
Less than a year later she got another bump, this time to become chief of staff at the office of the CEO, as well as VP of diversity and inclusion. However, her time at Red Hat ended a year later, about four months ahead of Cormier stepping down as Red Hat’s CEO.
Interestingly, her next job after leaving IBM’s Red Hat was at Apptio, which was also acquired by IBM after she was hired. Also interesting: she ended up as Chief of Staff to the CEO, the same position he held at Red Hat when she left.
Looking at the number of jobs she’s had with multiple titles, it would seem that multi tasking is Dawson’s forte. Even her chief marketing officer job at Chronosphere wasn’t single-focused, because she was also the company’s official open source evangelist.
What SUSE Needs
At SUSE, Dawson has the potential to bring much to the table. Her time at Chronosphere likely connected her with many enterprise executives—exactly the audience SUSE needs to reach. Since becoming independent of proprietary entanglements after nearly two decades of lackluster and misguided management by Novell/Attachmate/Micro Focus from 2004-2019, the company has struggled for visibility. This is despite having a highly regarded integrated cloud native stack that offers something of a one-two punch: SUSE Enterprise Linux and Rancher’s Kubernetes expertise.
The company has also been making huge inroads into AI with its SUSE AI platform, which it’s advertising as an enterprise-grade, cloud-native solution for generative AI and other AI workloads, with an emphasis on security, observability, flexibility, and freedom from vendor lock-in. Adding oomph to that, last week it announced a partnership with AI-focused Avesha, with a blueprint for melding SUSE’s AI stack with Avesha’s elastic GPU service.
Dawson-SUSE Energy Syncs
The fact that Dawson is established in the Puget Sound area and will likely insist on working out of that market is also a plus. SUSE is already well established in Seattle, which is not only the home to countless cloud-native startups, but also to a host of large enterprises that could play an important role in SUSE’s future. This includes some important giants, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (Google has a major campus in the region), and others.
Also, these days Seattle is in many ways a more important connector to Asian markets than San Francisco — America’s traditional Asian gateway.
Finally, there’s the potential synergy between Dawson and SUSE CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, who took the reins a couple of years back. Both spent a considerable amount of time at Red Hat — van Leeuwen was a Red Hatter for nearly 19 years, ending as SVP and GM of Red Hat North America — and both were around to watch the company go from being open source’s enterprise miracle to IBM’s child on a leash.
“As the demand for choice among enterprise customers grows, SUSE has never been better poised to lead,” van Leeuwen said in a statement. “With a proven track record of scaling technology brands and turning marketing into a true growth engine, I’m confident in Margaret’s expertise to accelerate our global leadership and capitalize on this moment.”
Dawson will apparently be replacing Ivo Totev, who has been the Chief Marketing Office at SUSE for a little more than two years. There’s no indication yet on how this affects him. As of Sunday night, Totev was still listing himself as Chief Marketing Officer on LinkedIn.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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