Melissa Di Donato

Early in her career, Melissa Di Donato became one of the few female software developers working on enterprise resource planning system, R3, being developed by SAP at the time. Since then, she has had various positions at IBM (and PwC), Salesforce, Oracle and eventually became the Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Operating Officer of SAP for its ERP and cloud division.

In mid 2019, Di Donato was appointed as the CEO of SUSE. She is noted to have led a major change in the corporate culture including starting mentoring, ESG and diversity programs.

Under her leadership, in May of 2021, SUSE successfully listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. At the time, SUSE’s IPO marked Europe's largest software IPO of 2021, and Melissa became the first woman to take a multibillion-euro company public on the Deutsche Börse.

Melissa was named 2021 Woman of the Year by the Women in IT Awards UK, and was also the 2018 recipient of the Digital Masters Award by the Up Group.  She has been named as "The Personality of the Year UK for Cloud Computing", ranked among "Top 10 most influential women in UK technology" for many years and was awarded the "Technology Woman of Achievement" award by Women in the City.  

She has been awarded the "Women in Tech forum" award and the "Decision Maker in Digitalization" award by KPMG and Wirtschaftswoche in 2021. Melissa is a passionate advocate focusing on STEM initiatives and mentoring women in business and young girls by being a Stemettes Godmother and mentor.

Di Donato is an iNED at JPMorgan Chase, acts as an Advisory Member of Capri Ventures and an executive in residence at Notion Capital. She is also the founder of the Inner Wings Charitable Foundation, and the author of three children's books.