Melissa Di Donato
Biography
Melissa Di Donato was appointed as a Non-Executive Director at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology in April 2023.
Melissa was CEO of SUSE from 2019 to 2023 and was the driving force behind its successful listing on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in May 2021. She has spent more than 25 years in technology as a leader delivering innovative and cloud solutions and enterprise software technologies for customers around the world.
Early in her career, Melissa became one of the few female software developers who were working on enterprise resource planning system, R3, being developed by SAP at the time. Since then, she 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.
Melissa was appointed to the Supervisory Board of Porsche AG, post-IPO in September 2022. She is also a Senior Advisor at Hg Capital and a Non-Executive Director at JP Morgan Europe Limited.
Melissa is also the founder of the Inner Wings Charitable Foundation, and the author of 3 children’s books.
Non-executive board member
The main responsibilities of non-executive board members are to:
- attend meetings of the departmental board, chaired by the Secretary of State
- provide over-arching strategic guidance and insight to the department