Novell Inc. said Wednesday it has canceled its 2009 BrainShare, the annual conference that this year drew 5,500 to the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City.

The Waltham, Mass.- based company, whose largest operation is in Provo with about 1,200 employees, said many of its customers were saying economic conditions would keep them from traveling to Utah in March of next year.

"It was really our customers that drove the decision," said spokesman Ian Bruce.

Bruce said Novell remains committed to BrainShare, which has been staged regularly for more than 20 years. "As we go through the year we'll re-evaluate and make a decision on 2010."

Novell was founded in Utah in 1983 and for years was best known for its computer network operating software. The company has used BrainShare to introduce products, discuss strategies and provide technical information to customers and developers.

Scott Beck, president and CEO of the Salt Lake Convention and Visitors Bureau, said Novell's BrainShare is the only scheduled convention that has been canceled so far. But his counterparts around the nation have reported corporate cancellations.

"Every sense we have is this is happening to a lot of names tied to corporate America," Beck said, adding that Salt Lake City traditionally hosts conventions of associations and trade shows rather than corporations, with bookings of the former normally remaining steady even in a downturn.

Richard Bliss, vice president of marketing at GWAVA, a Canadian company with an office in Provo and the largest outside sponsor of BrainShare, said the move made sense for a couple of reasons. One, is the state of the economy and the other is that Novell has moved in new directions with Linux, the software operating system created and expanded by a community of developers and available for free, but around which companies create products and services.

"BrainShare as a conference still had a role … but it kind of started to lose a little bit of focus because Novell has so many other things they're doing," Bliss said. "So in this economy, in this environment, by stepping back for a year … they're going to be able to really focus on where the market's going."

But he admitted there is a downside to the decision.

"This announcement by Novell, some people will take as an indicator Novell is dead," Bliss said. But he pointed to Apple's decision that CEO Steve Jobs will not address the annual MacWorld conference next month in San Francisco and that Apple will no longer be part of the annual conference hosted by IDG World Expo.

"Apple is making the same types of decision Novell is making," Bliss said. "This is about sound business decisions."

Bliss said his company will proceed as scheduled in January and stage its annual GWAVACon, an event similar to but smaller than BrainShare that is scheduled for Las Vegas.

GWAVA is getting more queries about attending because of the BrainShare cancellation, he said.

tharvey@sltrib.com