Pulliam said Salt Lake Community College was one of the few institutions of higher learning in Utah's tight-knit education community that for the most part ran software from Microsoft Corp. rather than Novell Inc.'s products. The school uses Windows Server, Active Directory, Outlook and Exchange.

But outside of the education market, Utah IT operations are beginning to abandon Novell. Indeed, several IT managers said that they have recently migrated from Novell software to Microsoft offerings or are considering such a move.

Novell had few answers for users moving to Microsoft until it released Open Enterprise Server, the Linux-based successor to NetWare, last year. In addition, during its annual BrainShare user conference in Salt Lake City last month, Novell said it plans to bundle its disparate products into a SUSE Linux-based suite.

Some say such moves may be too little, too late for Novell, since it's losing customers even in Utah, where the company was founded in 1983 by four Brigham Young University classmates in Provo, where it was based until 2004.

Over the past couple of years, Novell has shifted away from its Utah roots, moving its core development team to Nuremberg, Germany, following the 2003 acquisition of SUSE Linux AG. The company relocated its headquarters to Waltham, Mass., a year later.