As a result of COVID-19 we expect IT budgets to come under closer scrutiny to reduce costs despite increasing maintenance costs either due to Vendor price increases or where the price is based on the US$ exchange rate with regular fluctuations.
At The SAM Club, one of our main objectives has always been to help our clients reduce software licensing costs. One of the ways we have succeeded in doing this is through the 2nd Hand License Market. The best way to explain this is through the purchase of a new car. After a while you decide to purchase a different car. The car you previously owned is still of use to another person and has a value, so you sell it on. You can also do this with Microsoft licenses whether this is due to moving from perpetual licenses to subscription-based Office 365 or M365, or through upgrading perpetual licenses for example.
Is this legal? Yes! The sale of pre-owned software licenses has been legal in the EU for many years following EU Software Directive 2009/24/EC1 and subsequent landmark rulings by the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Leading law firm Brodies published the following article regarding the ECJ ruling in 2012: https://bit.ly/3f4CuNX Documentation will be provided to prove legal ownership / transfer in the event of an Audit and Microsoft is notified of every transfer.
The SAM Club has helped clients sell surplus licenses, recovering £25k in 2019 and a further £41k in April 2020, for one client of approx. 780 users.
In this case we identified several Windows Server Standard 2016 licenses that were surplus to requirements recovering £25k in 2019. The firm had an existing Server & Cloud Enterprise Agreement (SCE), which is a firmwide commitment for their Windows Server licensing, and the licenses identified were held outside of this agreement and, therefore, couldn’t be utilised from a compliance perspective either.
The recent additional £41k recovery came from the firm successfully moving to Office 365. We highlighted the possibility of reselling their perpetual Office Pro Plus licenses. After running checks and validating they were no longer installed or in use the sale was agreed recovering £41k for the firm – a pleasant surprise!
Look out for further announcements soon as we are currently assisting two more clients to recover money from licenses no longer in use, plus another client who is awaiting approval to purchase 2nd hand Office Pro Plus 2019 perpetual licenses for a fraction of the cost of new licenses.
So, the 2nd hand license market could help you recover money to ease the pressure on your IT budget or even provide an alternative cheaper option to allow infrastructure upgrades to continue. Note: with SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint for example, SA benefits such as license mobility need to be taken into consideration.
Whereas The SAM Club proactively assists our regular clients with identifying license options, we also work on a project basis. To know more please contact us at [email protected] to arrange an exploratory discussion.
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