Novell Taps Alan Nugent as Chief Technology Officer

Novell, Inc., the leading provider of Net business solutions, today announced the appointment of Alan F. Nugent as chief technology officer. Moving from Palladian Partners, where he was a managing partner and chief technology officer, Nugent will promote Novell's open-standards, cross-platform technologies, helping evangelize Novell's security, provisioning and networking solutions with customers. Having managed several practice areas at Palladian Partners, including business process engineering for eBusiness, knowledge management, and enterprise business, Nugent brings the combination of consulting know-how and technology expertise critical for Novell as it completes its transition to a solutions company. Nugent takes over the chief technology officer responsibilities from Carl Ledbetter, who was recently promoted to senior vice president of engineering/research and development and is now responsible for oversight of Novell software engineering and product management.

"Novell's customers look to us to solve their business challenges," said Jack Messman, chairman and CEO of Novell. "This requires both having great technology and knowing how to apply that technology to solve specific business problems. Alan Nugent understands this. As a partner at Palladian, Alan was a client executive sponsor, so he knows first hand the critical need to focus on the customer. He'll help drive that customer focus into our solutions going forward."

Prior to Palladian, Nugent held leadership positions in a series of technology organizations. He was executive vice president, chief information officer, and chief technology officer for Vectant, Inc. a telecommunication and xSP in New York City and Tokyo, Japan. He was senior vice president and chief information officer for American Re-Insurance Company, where he led the Information Technology Division. Nugent was vice president and chief technology officer for Xerox' Global Process and Information Management organization. He was a founder and vice president of technology for Soft Machine, Inc., a firm specializing in distributed object computing, open systems, and technology migration. Before Soft Machine, Nugent held various engineering and marketing positions at Groupe Bull, Stellar Computer, MASSCOMP and Hewlett-Packard.

"Alan's leadership as a CTO and CIO at major corporations illustrates his high regard in the industry," said Chris Stone, vice chairman, office of the CEO, Novell. "His experiences in distributed computing and real life IT management will be invaluable to Novell as we move aggressively into the Web services space. With Alan assisting in our high-level technology plans and Carl Ledbetter leading our engineering and product management group, we've got an incredibly strong technical team to ensure that the Net business solutions we offer our customers are the most secure, most reliable, most powerful the industry can offer".

Nugent will report to vice chairman Stone and work out of Novell's Cambridge office.