By announcing plans to maintain its current per-processor server software licensing, Microsoft Corp. has pleased customers and, in the process, put serious pressure on competing software developers to do the same. The Redmond, Wash., company announced last week that it will keep licensing products in the Windows Server System family—including SQL Server, BizTalk Server and others—on a per-processor basis. There had been concern among some customers that Microsoft would adopt a per-core licensing plan that based fees on the number of cores running within a single processor, effectively doubling or quadrupling the fees. Now the licensing spotlight is shining on other software makers, namely Oracle Corp., which views dual-core chips as two separate CPUs.