Today, Apple software guru Avie Tevanian received a promotion to Chief Software Technology Officer. Taking his old position as Senior Vice President of Software Engineering will be Bertrand Serlet.

Tevanianis new position will allow him to set company-wide software technology direction and also enable him to get personally involved in more technical aspects. Apple CEO Steve Jobs stated that "This will be a seamless handoff," also noting that "Panther, the next major release of Mac OS X, is in great shape and everything is on track to ship it later this year, making this a good time to let Avie return to a more hands-on technical role and to promote Bertrand to lead our entire OS software engineering team."

"This is something Iive wanted to do for some time," said Tevanian. "Iim incredibly proud of the products the software engineering team has delivered over the past few years, and I am 100% confident that their success will continue under Bertrandis leadership."

Bertrand Serlet moves from his position as Appleis vice president of Platform Technology. His responsibility there included the management of the largest part of the Mac OS software engineering group and he also played a key role in the the development and creation of OS X, Appleis advanced new operating system.

Both Tevanian and Serlet came to Apple from NeXT in 1997.