In the wake of SUSE’s acquisition by Novell Inc in late 2003, Heinrich was put in charge of integrating the indirect sales channels of SUSE with those of Novell in the European geography. Of course, Novell’s European operations did not perform well, and she eventually left the company to work for SUSE groupware partner Open-Exchange, which now supports both Red Hat and SUSE with its open source groupware.
OpenExchange was the groupware that was turned into SUSE Linux Open Xchange Server, or SLOX, with the SUSE 8.0 generation of Linux, which immediately preceded the Novell acquisition.
Heinrich began her IT and management career at the formerly independent Lotus Development Corp, which was, of course, acquired by IBM in 1995.
With Red Hat still working its way through the JBoss acquisition and JBoss being more of a direct sale historically than Red Hat Enterprise Linux was, Red Hat needs to bolster its channel expertise to build out the channel for both RHEL and JBoss products in Europe. Heinrich will be based in Red Hat’s European headquarters in Munich, Germany, and will report to Werner Knoblich, vice president and general manager of Red Hat’s EMEA operations.
