Novell has announced the appointment of Dr Jeffrey Jaffe
as its new chief technology officer.
Jaffe, 51, brings 25 years' experience with IBM and Lucent
Technologies to the job. As well as being responsible for Novell’s
technology direction, he will lead Novell’s product business
units.
Jaffe will report to new president and chief operating officer
Ron Hovsepian. He replaces former CTO Alan Nugent, who left Novell
this spring on the eve of the company’s annual Novell Brainshare
user conference.
After receiving a PhD in computer science from MIT in 1979,
Jaffe joined IBM’s Thomas J Watson Research Centre, before taking
on a variety of positions at Big Blue.
In the past five years, Jaffe has been at Lucent Technologies.
As president of Bell Labs Research and Advanced Technologies, he
established new facilities in Ireland and India.
Jaffe has also lectured on the importance of open source
solutions for the telecommunications industry at MIT and
Bangalore's Indian Institute of Science.
In 1997 Jaffe was appointed by president Bill Clinton to serve
on the advisory committee for the Presidential Commission for
Critical Infrastructure Protection.
“Novell is well positioned to be the leader in open source and
open standards-based technologies,” said Jaffe. “We will work to
make the open enterprise a reality for organisations, delivering
higher productivity, lower costs and a new way of serving the needs
of business.”
Novell reports its annual financial results next month. The
industry is bracing itself for a poor set of results if they are
anything like the third quarter, when Novell reported a 91% profits
slump.
Novell has struggled to win a high enough number of new Linux
software customers, despite its open source strategy of replacing
its ageing Netware server operating system customer base.