UK firm crosses pond to sell preowned Microsoft licenses
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(InfoWorld) - A U.K. company that has made a business out of selling preowned licenses for Microsoft Corp. products has brought its products to the U.S. for the first time. Disclic recently closed its first deal selling licenses it procured from companies going out of business in the U.K. to a company in the U.S., said Noel Unwin, a director of Discount-licensing.com, the Web site and trading arm of the company that sells the licenses. Discount-licensing.com sold licenses for Microsoft Office it obtained from two companies that divested their property in the U.K. -- Food Brokers and Quidnunc -- to WaferTech LLC, a U.S. semiconductor manufacturer, he said. Discount-licensing.com also recently made its first deal selling licenses it procured from a U.S. company to companies in the U.K., Unwin added. Discount-Licensing.com sold preowned licenses from an insolvent U.S.company, Cornell Trading Inc., to U.K. businesses in September and October. The U.K. businesses that purchased former Cornell Trading licenses were Benefit 2 Business, which purchase licenses for Exchange 2003; Abnormal Loads, which purchased licenses for Terminal Server 2003 CALs; 3D Computer Systems, which purchased licenses for Exchange, Windows and Terminal Server 2003 CALs; and Orange IS, which purchased Office 2003 Professional licenses. Unwin said his company did not sell preowned licenses in the U.S. until recently because it believed there would be license restrictions in reselling licenses from one region to another. Discount-licensing.com worked with Microsoft to ensure this was not the case before selling its licenses, he said. Microsoft could not be reached for comment through its public relations firm on Wednesday. But the company has acknowledged in the past it is legal to transfer product licenses for software owned by companies that are divesting. Disclic has built its Discount-licensing.com business since November 2005, gathering up Microsoft product licenses from insolvent companies and distributing them through its Web site. The company recently updated its site with comprehensive product search and ordering features, so customers can do their entire transactions online. Customers can access Discount-licensing.com's product search feature here Unwin said prices for U.S. customers are generally 15 percent less expensive than prices for U.K. customers. The company sells preowned licenses for about 35 percent to 40 percent cheaper than the original cost of the license. Because of these discounts, software resellers have been purchasing software from Discount-licensing.com to sell to their customers so they can make higher margins, Unwin added. Discount-licensing.com has added several hundred new customers so far in 2006, in addition to repeat customers. The most popular licenses the company sells are for Office XP, Unwin said. Other product licenses that do well include the SQL Server database and Exchange 2003 messaging server.
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Microsoft Corp. has signed up the first licensee for the workgroup server protocols the European Commission ordered it to open up to competitors in a 2004 antitrust ruling, it said Thursday.
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LONDON -- Owners of pirated copies of Microsoft Corp.&#39;s Windows XP operating system can trade them in for the real thing as part of a bid by the software giant to fight counterfeiting.
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Microsoft begins a legal bid to have a European Commission anti-monopoly ruling temporarily suspended.
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Microsoft signed a rare deal with an open source software group, taking a step towards meeting sanctions imposed by the European Commission for antitrust violations.
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By AOIFE WHITE BRUSSELS, Belgium - Under threat of new multimillion fines, Microsoft Corp. said Thursday that it had signed up its first licensee for a scheme EU regulators told it to set up three years ago to share code that helps servers work with the Windows operating platform.
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Microsoft has confirmed that it is to start selling its cut-down, wallet-friendly, version of Windows in India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Russia.
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Move should open the way for the Linux seller to buy other companies.
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Microsoft (Quote, Chart) will swap out phony copies of Windows XP for the real thing, but only in the UK, the company said on Wednesday.
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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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Computer giant Microsoft has launched a pilot scheme to replace counterfeit versions of Windows XP with legal ones. The first-time initiative is restricted to the UK and to users with pre-installed copies
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Microsoft and Turbolinux, a Tokyo-based Linux distributor, are cozying up with a patent cross-licensing deal and agreement to work more closely together, the companies said Tuesday.For users, one of the most significant elements to the deal is a pledge to work on a single sign-on system that will allow log-on to Windows-based and Turbolinux-based machines with one set of credentials.At present Windows and Turbolinux machines on a mixed network can&#39;t access a common authentication database, but their deal should change this, said Noriko Otake, a spokeswoman for Turbolinux in Tokyo.To further this work and other cross-platform projects, the two companies have also entered into a patent cross-licensing deal, specific details of which were not disclosed.Interoperability testing of single sign-on and other future projects will take place at Microsoft&#39;s offices in Beijing. Turbolinux is active worldwide but has its strongest footprint in Japan and China.Turbolinux will also add&#160;Microsoft&#39;s Live Search&#160;service to its desktop operating system.The deal expands cooperation between the two companies that is intended to remove some of the hassles of using Linux, said Otake. Earlier this year Turbolinux added Windows Media Player to its platform, allowing users access to the large amount of content online encoded in that format, and the company has also been working on support for the Open XML document format.Turbolinux also said it will participate in the Interoperability Vendor Alliance, a Microsoft-sponsored community of software and hardware vendors.For Microsoft the deal is the latest in a string of over 200 patent-licensing agreements signed since it launched an intellectual property licensing program in late 2003. Last week the company announced a similar deal with Japanese digital imaging vendor Olympus Corp., and previous agreements have included Novell,&#160;Fuji Xerox, Linspire, Kenwood, LG Electronics, Nortel Networks,&#160;and Samsung Electronics.&#160;
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InfoWorld - Microsoft Corp. on Monday said it has agreed to buy a Thai software vendor that specializes in hospital administration applications, and plans to sell the software in emerging markets.
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SANTA CLARA, CALIF. -- Noting two evolving areas of software licensing, Microsoft is pondering how to license when multiple instances of an application are run on a single computer, but is not eyeing a plan for utility-based computing, in which charges are based on individual usage.
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Microsoft agrees to comply with the European Commission's anti-monopoly ruling against it.
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ello âello âello, save some money In an interesting twist in the battle against software piracy, Microsoft UK is promoting the benefits of Software Asset Management (SAM) under a scheme which rewards honesty - richly. It says the voluntary self-start SAM programme it introduced last November can save businesses a significant sum on licensing fees - in addition to giving them peace of mind.â¦
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Redmond fights Google, one grid at a time Global OS leviathan Microsoft has continued buying trendy stuff, announcing that it had bought UK ad-driven mapping service Multimap today.â¦