Novell Taps New Chief Tech Officer for Linux

Published: March 14, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Commercial Linux distributor Novell said late last week that David Patrick, the Linux expert and development manager that the company appointed two years ago to run its SUSE Linux and open source project development, has left the company "to pursue other interests." He has been replaced by Roger Levy, a development manager for network equipment provider Lucent Technologies.

Patrick came to Novell as part of the acquisition of Ximian, the creators of the open source Gnome graphical user interface and the Mono project, an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET runtime environment. It is hard to read much between the lines in a press release, but it seems odd that Jack Messman, Novell's chairman and CEO, and Ron Hovsepian, Novell's president and chief operating officer, did not give Patrick the obligatory and polite "we thank David for his years of service" plug in the announcement of Levy's appointment as his replacement.

Levy has been in the IT business is management and development roles for three decades, and was most recently vice president of product realization at Lucent. (What a wonderful title that is. . . .) In that job, Levy ran four internal startups inside Lucent, working on routing, mobile, enterprise security, and service provider security products. Levy was also vice president of Lucent's Software Technology Center, which is where Lucent does the development and testing necessary for it to make use of open source technologies in its network products. Levy has a Bachelor of Science in physics from Lafayette College and a Master of Science in computer science from Georgia Tech. Levy reports to Jeffrey Jaffe, who was named Novell's overall CTO last November and who used to run Bell Labs at Lucent as well as work for IBM's TJ Watson Research Center.

Novell has also rearranged some other executives. Bill Hewitt, who was named as senior vice president and chief marketing officer at the company a year ago after being in charge of global marketing and lead generation at the former PeopleSoft, now part of the Oracle collective, has been named president of Novell's Asia/Pacific unit. Rhonda O'Donnell, who has been running Novell's Asia/Pacific operations since Novell acquired Cambridge Technology Partners in 2001, is now non-executive chairman of that unit. John Dragoon, who was vice president of global field marketing at Novell, has been promoted to fill Hewitt's role as chief marketing officer. Dragoon was most recently in charge of marketing at Art Technology Group, a maker of Web development tools, and spent 16 years in marketing jobs at IBM.