Licensing was the only sore point noted by enterprise IT officials Monday evening during a panel session held for attendees of the Microsoft TechEd 2005 conference in Orlando. Microsoft received mostly rave reviews during the event, which was held at the nearby SeaWorld amusement park famous for its whale and dolphin shows. The subject of Microsoft licensing, though, elicited some sharp comments. “It’s a completely different relationship that you have with Microsoft at [that] stage than at any other stage,” said Robert Fort, director of information technology at Virgin Megastore. “It was a tough group,” he said, and “concessions were tough to pull out.” Tim Kelly, director of distributed technologies at TSYS, said that when going into negotiations on multimillion-dollar contracts, “there wasn’t a lot of smiles around the table.” But TSYS did get some good concessions from Microsoft, Kelly said. TSYS processes credit card transactions.“It’s kind of like you can’t afford to be on the Microsoft treadmill,” Kelly said in response to a question about which panelists were on Microsoft’s Software Assurance program and which would be renewing. Nissan North America’s Larry Berger, manager of computer services, said he found Microsoft pretty flexible with licensing but that a user has to look at what technologies will be changing. Ross McKenzie, director of information systems at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said, “I’m from higher ed and I know when to keep my mouth shut,” in recognition of the educational discounts that Microsoft provides. The rest of the discussion was primarily a Microsoft love-fest. At the university, Microsoft Exchange was selected as the school’s fifth e-mail system in 10 years, for example. “The best part of it was the migration. It took 40 hours. We were done in a weekend,” McKenzie said. The school has implemented an e-mail and calendaring system for 5,000 users, according to a press statement on the panel. Nissan, meanwhile, has adopted Windows Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2003 for collaboration. Virgin is using Windows Server System and the .Net Framework for a business intelligence solution, while TSYS is using SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services and Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition to develop a real-time data warehouse. The only time the subject of Linux came up during the discussion was when McKenzie noted that some Linux desktops were being replaced by Macintoshes by one group at the school. The group found that Linux required too much maintenance, he said.Why not Windows instead of Macs, I asked. Well, it seems this particular department required high-end statistical analysis functions of Unix, McKenzie said. — Written By Paul Krill, who is attending TechEd Software Development