Reger Levy will become general manager of the Open Platform Solutions business unit, reporting to Jeff Jaffe, executive vice-president and chief technology officer, the company said Thursday. Most recently a Lucent vice president in charge of delivering products from four internal start-up companies, Levy replaces David Patrick, who according to Lucent will 'be pursuing interests outside of Novell.'

In first-quarter revenue announced last week, Waltham, Mass.-based Novell reported a disappointing 41 percent drop in new-license revenue from its Open Enterprise Server (OES) bundle from the fourth quarter of 2005. OES includes SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Novell's formerly dominant NetWare operating system.

With OES, the company is trying to transition its NetWare users to SUSE Linux by providing them with familiar tools and services on a Linux kernel.

OES 1.0 was released in March 2005, so year-over-year comparisons for OES are difficult to make.

The next version of OES, formerly code-named Cypress, merges a planned update of NetWare with Version 10 of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Aimed at attracting Windows users, it was initially expected to be out by the middle of this year. It is due by the middle of 2007.