Apple today announced that Avadis “Avie” Tevanian will become the company’s chief software technology officer and Bertrand Serlet will be promoted to senior vice president of software engineering. In his new role, Tevanian will focus on “setting company-wide software technology directions.” Serlet will now report directly to Apple CEO Steve Jobs and lead the company’s OS Software Engineering group. “This will be a seamless handoff,” said Jobs. “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.”