Licensing Plan Makes Microsoft a Utility Player
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Opinion: A decision to continue charging for server software based on CPUs and not cores will make Microsoft server software a much more attractive alternative to utility computing providers.
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Computer Associates Thursday introduced a usage-based pricing and licensing option for its mainframe management products, aligning its offerings with IBM&#39;s On Demand model.
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LicenseWise and Windows Vista Hardware Assessment help users navigate Microsoft offerings.
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Software giant Microsoft is casting its sights on the digital media marketplace by positioning itself as pro-consumer-choice.
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The company plans to making available free software that connects its Windows operating system to software services delivered on the Internet.
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The British National Health Service (NHS) has signed a massive software licensing deal with Microsoft. The deal will ultimately save the NHS $625 million in licensing fees, as well as requiring that Microsoft
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Microsoft says it's working to fix a glitch that stopped some customers from taking advantage of offer to get additional licenses for less.
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That's Systems Management Server to you Microsoft is beefing up policing for Windows licensing after going back to the drawing board on its asset management strategy.â¦
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Microsoft Corp. continues to tweak its volume licensing programs to make it easier for business customers to purchase the company&#39;s software in bulk.
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U.K. company examining alternatives to Microsoft because of what it sees as software giant's "aggressive" licensing policies.
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Microsoft has entered into a licensing agreement with the nonprofit Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF) under which the software giant will be providing developers working on the Samba file and printing system with the information they need to ensure interoperability between their open-source software and Windows.
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I have no problem with Microsoft operating in a market environment. Given a choice, I am sure many of us would gladly pay for Windows and Office rather than use Linux and Open Office.
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A pilot program at the Microsoft Download Center will require users to validate their Windows license in exchange for access to file downloads. Users with counterfeit software may find themselves locked out altogether.
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Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O on  Tuesday agreed to require only a single license for server  software that runs on computers powered by a new generation of  chips that squeeze multiple processors into a single package.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft continues to tweak its volume licensing programs to make it easier for business customers to purchase the company&#39;s software in bulk.
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Opinion: The company&#39;s decision to keep per-processor licensing for upcoming multicore technology is a win for customers, but of more immediate licensing concern are grid, partitioning and utility computing.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft released its first software designed specifically to manage virtual machines on a network ThursdayÂ and tweaked licensing for its system-management products to take into account virtualization. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007, which has been in the works for about a year and a half, has been released to manufacturing and will be generally available in October as part of Microsoft's System Server Management Center suite of products, the company said. The new product is built on the same architecture as other products in the enterprise version of the suite -- which include Data Protection Manager, Operations Manager, and Configuration Manager -- and is aimed specifically at managing virtual machines in a data center that runs Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, the current version of Microsoft's server virtualization technology, said Patrick O'Rourke, group manager, Windows Infrastructure. "Customers now can use the same tools to manage both virtual and physical assets [on the network]," he said. Microsoft also has changed the licensing model for its for its System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise, making it available for $860 per host server -- which means the actual server that hosts any instances of virtual software -- plus two years of Microsoft's Software Assurance plan. Previously, System Center software was licensed per device being managed in the data center, O'Rourke said. The new licensing should make managing virtualized environments with Microsoft's software more cost-effective for customers, he said. Microsoft has been developing and fine-tuning its virtualization strategy over the past several years to keep up with virtualization leader VMWare and others, as well as to serve the needs of large customers who increasingly are using virtualization in their data centers. However, the company's strategy has predictably hit some road bumps. Microsoft is developing next-generation virtualization technology, code-named Viridian, that takes advantage of virtualization-optimized processors from Intel and AMD and will help keep the company up to speed with competitors. However, though Viridian will be a component of Windows Server 2008, it won't be available until six months after that new OS is released. And because Microsoft recently pushed back the release of Windows Server 2008 to the first quarter of next year, Viridian's release is nearly a year away. The company also decided earlier this year to pull out some originally planned features of Viridian due to timing concerns. In the meantime, customers can use a combination of Microsoft's stand-alone Virtual Server and its System Center products to install and manage both virtual and physical machines in the data center. Microsoft also is planning a mid-market version of Virtual Machine Manager, called Workgroup edition, for release in January. The software will cost $499 per host server. Microsoft also plans to extend the capabilities of the next version of Virtual Machine Manager so that it not only supports Windows Server virtualization technologies but also third-party virtualization from VMware and XenSource Inc., O'Rourke said. A beta of that software is expected to be available around the same time as Windows Server 2008, and Microsoft plans to update its roadmap then as well.