Licensing Logjam Holds Back Veritas Customer

As we've seen, many of my readers harbor some resentment for what Symantec has done with the Norton product line over the years. But now one reader is wondering if the same won't someday be the case with Symantec's acquisition of Veritas, particularly after the licensing fiasco he's just experienced with Backup Exec. "It all started in early 2006 when I first purchased the Backup Exec products and was sent their

"Well, this morning I received my emails with the paperwork and was actually surprised it only took 4 days to get it," the reader continued. "But, then the real problems started. After 2-1/2 hours on the phone, I am now told that Symantec salespeople will tell you that you can use an 11d CPS Agent license with a 10d CPS server, but tech support knows that it won't work. The tech support rep told me that I needed to contact sales and get a license for 10d. I told him that sales already told me that I can't buy a license for the 10d CPS agent. The support rep said he would fix this and call a salesman. When he got back on the phone with me, he said that I was right, you can't buy 10d and that the sales guy said to use 11d because it was backward compatible. Note, we're not talking about the software actually working with different versions, we're just talking about licenses. So, here I sit now, with no backup on my server for the last four days because Symantec can't get me a license that I've already purchased to work with the software. Their solution is to upgrade everything to 11d which I really don't mind except that an 11d install requires restarts on all the servers -- production file servers, of course -- and that means another weekend at the office."

A week later the reader wrote me back that he had finally gotten the problem straightened out. "After talking with tech support for about an hour and a half on Monday, I was told there was nothing more he could do. I needed to upgrade to 11d. But of course, that meant I needed 11d 'upgrade' keys. I looked through everything I had with the support guy and we agreed that I indeed had purchased 11d, but didn't have the keys to install it. He couldn't find anything I had that would give me the 11d upgrade keys. Keep in mind also, that I've had my CDW rep working on this since last Monday. I give him credit for trying, but he wasn't any help at all. Once the support guy couldn't get me any 11d keys that worked, he recommended that I call licensing again. I did so. Once I explained the initial problem to her, she said that it would be no problem and promptly gave me the Continuous Protection Server Agent 10d key that I started asking for last Monday. I typed in the key and everything started working just fine."