Ron Hovsepian, Novell's CEO for the past five months and president since November 2005, said in a conference call with analysts that the planned changes stopped short of a full restructuring at Novell, which has undergone several leadership and corporate changes in the last several years.

For its fourth quarter, the Waltham, Mass.-based company reversed its net loss from the prior year. However, its net revenue continued its year-long slide, as Novell continued to struggle with converting corporate customers from its legacy NetWare operating system to SUSE Linux.

And its recent with Microsoft probably won't help much in the short term. That deal is expected eventually to contribute about US$300 million to Novell's bottom line overall, but the company only expects to record about $20 million in revenue from it next year, leaving its net revenue and profits for 2007 basically unchanged from 2006.

For its quarter, which ended Oct. 31, Novell reported revenue of $245 million, down 15 percent from $288 million in the same period a year earlier. The company earned $25 million compared with a net loss of $6 million a year earlier.

For the full year, Novell reported revenue of $967 million and net income available to common stockholders from continuing operations of $21 million. That was down from $1.039 billion in revenue and $373 million in net income available to common stockholders from continuing operations of the previous year, when the company's financial figures were boosted by an earlier $440 million legal settlement with Microsoft.