"According to customer support, they have thousands and thousands of [software upgrade] invitations being held because the merger of Veritas licensing with their own has been such a disaster. It seems to be a huge fiasco," said Scott Ladewig, manager of networking and operations for the John M. Olin School of Business at Washington University.

Ladewig said he's waiting to upgrade his Veritas Backup Exec software from version 10.1 to version 11d, which was launched earlier this month (see "").

"I've just seen online that people have been having a difficult time getting support. Yesterday, I was on hold for an hour," he said.

Thompson told Computerworld that the licensing slowdown is being caused by a new ERP system and online licensing system, the rollout of which was just completed few weeks ago. The new online licensing system is slowly combining Symantec's existing process for registering customers and assigning them identity keys with recently acquired Veritas customers.

He said the licensing system is necessary in order to ensure that pirated copies of Backup Exec and some other Symantec software products he would not identify are not being used by customers.