Shaw adds: "We have customers at the conference who have said they came for ILM 2.0 and are now saying they wouldn't have come if they'd have known it would have been delayed and will not come back next year if it isn't released by TEC. They stated they were tired of hearing the same presentations on ILM2."

He notes that vendors who are building tools for ILM also are disappointed in the delay.

"In this day and age I have limited resources and I have made a bet on ILM 2.0 and I am delayed in being able to monetize that bet."

The excitement around ILM 2.0 is an outgrowth of Microsoft's own hype. The company has not been shy about trumpeting the importance of ILM, but without shipping software, competitors like IBM, Sun and Oracle are alone in garnering customers.

Microsoft has said it built ILM to function as a Web service so developers can build applications on top of it such as enhanced smart card management. And the company has touted ILM's policy-based management that gives users workflow to build identity-based policies, using ILM 2.0 or Visual Studio tools, that can be enforced, logged and audited. The certificate capabilities support management of third-party certificates, and the new user management features let IT automate and reuse provisioning tasks. Improvements in group management provide the ability to create and manage membership and approval processes.