Chief Marketing Officer John Dragoon (pictured) clarified the status of Novell’s channel organization this morning, and disclosed former F5 Networks Channel Chief and Microsoft veteran Steve Hale has joined the company. Going forward, the following three people will be the key names driving Novell’s partner program.

For starters, CMO Dragoon will take on the added responsibility of channel chief. (Check out this Jan. 7 podcast with Dragoon.) Reporting to Dragoon will be Hale and Mark Taylor. Hale will oversee Novell’s data center partner efforts while Taylor will oversee Novell’s end user computing partner efforts.

The channel organization will transition to Dragoon from Javier Colado (promoted to president of EMEA) over the next two months. When Novell announced Colado’s promotion on  Jan. 7, some folks speculated Novell would search for a new channel chief. But to TheVARGuy.com’s team, it sounded all along like Dragoon would be the channel chief going forward.

Here Comes Steve

Meanwhile, former F5 channel chief Steve Hale is joining Novell’s channel team. The VAR Guy broke news about Hale leaving F5 back in December, and our resident blogger has been waiting for Hale to disclose his next move. (Don’t be shy, Steve: You’ve actually got The VAR Guy’s number.)

For Novell, Hale delivers enterprise application experience mixed with channel experience — a rare combo that Novell has lacked in recent years. F5 Networks has been one of the fastest-growing providers of enterprise application acceleration technology (though sales have recently slowed), and the company has quietly built a well-respected channel program.

And what about Mark Taylor, the person charged with leading Novell’s end user computing partner efforts forward? The VAR Guy has to do a little more research there.

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