Congratulations to SUSE's CRN Women of the Channel!

As a passionate supporter of women in technology, I am so proud to share that today, CRN? has named five of our SUSE executives to its esteemed 2020 Women of the Channel list. Congratulations to Julie Baldwin, Rachel Cassidy, Christine Cox, Jamie Rahbany, and Marlen von Roth on receiving this honor.

In just one year, SUSE’s presence on this list has grown from one executive to five executives. What an incredible accomplishment! While each of these leaders is being recognized for their outstanding contributions to the channel business, what has impressed me the most, is their shared passion and dedication to the success of our customers and partners around the world.

To celebrate this recognition, I want to highlight each winner by sharing their own words, on what their keys to success and goals are for the channel in 2020. I am cheering them on and here to support every step of the way! You can read about each winner in greater detail on CRN.

Julie Baldwin, Head of Cloud – What’s the key to success for your channel partners in 2020?

The cloud market is burgeoning and maturing as companies look for ways to be more agile. As there are more entrants to the market, and pricing and differentiation become ever more competitive, I work and collaborate with SUSE's partners to understand their strategic objectives to uncover the sweet spots where SUSE can help them meet and even exceed their objectives to achieve customer success.

Rachel Cassidy, Senior Vice President, Global Channel & Cloud– What are your goals for your company’s channel and cloud business in the next year?

My goals are to simplify, automate, and accelerate our partners' growth and success with impactful solutions that drive change and creates a better world for all of us, by leveraging the power and innovation provided with open source. At the same time, I want to foster the right environment for our partners so they can work collaboratively with other organizations from across our partner ecosystem to create impactful solutions with the right support, enablement and tools. We have recently combined our channel and cloud organization to help foster and support the transformation our partners are going through as we support our mutual customer’s digital transformation. Our goal is to double our business over the next few years and our end-end channel and cloud ecosystems will be a major contributor to this accelerated growth for us all.

Christine Cox, Regional Vice President, Public Sector – What are your goals for your company’s channel business in the next year?

I want to ensure our channel partners can simplify, modernize and accelerate our joint offerings with hyper-focused campaigns, streamline the unsolicited proposals process to eliminate wasteful spend for our customers, and target verticals for pipeline growth that match our partners’ go-to-market strategies.

Jamie Rahbany, Director, Americas Marketing – What’s the key to success for your channel partners in 2020?

Dare to be different! "Be the Difference" is the theme for our annual customer conference – SUSECON Digital '20. This is key to what drives the SUSE Mission to enable better futures and deliver measurable value for our customers, employees, partners and communities. We encourage partners to join us. As a vendor, we want to help create those open source solutions and share your stories, while providing marketing support to build pipeline together. Illustrating and promoting customer successes through storytelling will help drive vision and confidence for channel partners with customers.

Marlen von Roth, Sales Director Channel, Cloud Service Providers in EMEA and APJ – What’s the key to success for your channel partners in 2020?

Technology continues to evolve at breakneck speed and creating, supporting and maintaining long term relationships will drive success in this competitive landscape. At SUSE we understand and work with our partners to identify the markets or solutions where they may have a niche or where they can capitalize on customer needs in which to specialize. From there, it's a matter of ensuring that they are taking full advantage of SUSE’s vendor program benefits such as easy-to-access enablement; support; co-selling and marketing; to ensure that they are winning new business not just this quarter but for the quarters ahead.

Congratulations, Julie, Rachel, Christine, Jamie, and Marlen; I am thrilled you are part of our SUSE family. You embody the Power of Many – that when we work together, we can drive incredible change and do incredible things. I cannot wait to see what the future holds for each of you – this is just the start!