SUSE to triple business in Asia Pacific & Japan by 2023

September 9, 2020


• Asia Pacific & Japan set up as an independently-focused geography
• Former SAP APJ COO Phillip Miltiades named SUSE APJ President to drive customer centricity and business growth

Sydney, Australia

Sydney – September 9, 2020 - SUSE, the world's largest independent open source company, has carved out the Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) region and is set to triple its business across the region in next three years. This is following the company’s positive performance in 1H FY2020 which saw an increase of 22 percent in annual contract value (ACV) bookings as compared to the first half of the previous fiscal year. SUSE’s cloud business also saw massive gains of 75 percent in 1H FY2020.

To support this success and reach the next phase of growth, SUSE has appointed Phillip Miltiades as president for APJ. Based in Sydney, Miltiades is responsible for leading and transforming the SUSE organization with laser focus on driving customer and partner business outcomes and success.

“Miltiades’ appointment will extend our capabilities to serve the evolving needs of customers looking to simplify their IT infrastructure, modernize applications and accelerate their business through digital transformation,” said Paul Devlin, chief customer officer at SUSE. “His extensive selling and delivery experience with solid, lasting business relationships with customers are going to help us intensify our focus on customer engagement and deliver the values customers are looking for. He is a great addition to our leadership team and will further strengthen our market position as a leading open source software partner for our customers in the region.”

“This is a wonderful time for me to join SUSE, and I couldn’t be more thrilled,” Miltiades said. “Open source is becoming the backbone for driving digital innovation, according to Gartner*. Increasingly, open source is being adopted for leading edge innovation like mobile, big data, AI and machine learning, and we see great potential for growth across APJ. We provide simplified, innovative and adaptable open source solutions for our customers’ mission-critical business applications to help them achieve the outcomes they desire.”

“We will accomplish this by bringing the power of the open source community and credibility of our engineering team to provide highly scalable, secure and high performing solutions that can be deployed anywhere, across any environment and maintained easily on any platform regardless of application or solution deployed. We simply want to be the easiest company to work with by bringing true open source, flexible software technologies with no vendor lock-in to support sustainable and meaningful business outcomes of our customers,” Miltiades added.

As part of a phased multi-faceted investment and growth plan, SUSE aims to drive broader and deeper adoption of innovative open source technologies in key verticals including financial services, automotive, public sector, high-tech and manufacturing. SUSE will heavily invest in people to service key focus markets, and further enhance its engineering, services and support presence across the region.

SUSE customers in the region include Air India, JK Tyre & Industries, Mahindra, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, Tokyo Institute of Technology, New South Wales Fire Brigades and Swinburne University of Technology.

Miltiades brings over 25 years of experience in enterprise leadership roles. Previously, he was the chief operating officer at SAP Digital Core, where he was responsible for running and growing SAP’s S/4HANA Cloud Technologies business across Asia Pacific & Japan. Prior to SAP, Miltiades also held several management positions in other tech-related companies.

*Source: Gartner, "What Innovation Leaders Must Know About Open Source Software," August 26, 2019

 

About SUSE

SUSE, the world’s largest independent open source company, provides unparalleled customer choice and powers digital transformation for the enterprise by simplifying, modernizing and accelerating traditional, cloud and edge solutions. SUSE collaborates with partners, communities and customers to deliver and support solutions that enable mission-critical business outcomes. SUSE’s container and cloud platforms, software-defined infrastructure, artificial intelligence and edge computing solutions allow customers to create, deploy and manage workloads anywhere – on premises, multi-cloud and edge. For more information, visit www.suse.com.