Solarweb-powered Westcoast tidies up MS-licensing act

Westcoast has signed up to distribute Microsoft software through an automated licensing tool called licenseme. Its developer, UK-based Solarweb, says the technology cuts the "high error rates facing many in the channel".

In some cases, it claims, 25 per cent of licence orders from the channel are "rejected by vendors due to errors introduced during the sales process. These are...costly to rectify and can damage customer relations".

Andy Dow, Westcoast commercial director, said: “Our purchase of licenseme means Westcoast can offer resellers a simple, more profitable way to sell Microsoft licenses. No more manual keying in of product codes, no more assigning customers to the wrong licensing programme, and no more reliance on having a licensing specialist.”

Barney Light, Solarweb technical director, said: “Selling software licenses has been a long-standing complex affair which shows no sign of imminent simplification; the advent of software-as-a-service, multi-core processing and so on are changing the way software usage is licensed. This puts pressure on resellers in what is already a low-margin transaction. Because we have automated the licensing sales process, licenseme empowers software sales teams by providing them with all the information and updates they need to sell the right Microsoft licensing products and programmes to their customers.”

Microsoft annointed Westcoast earlier this year as an authorised licensing distributor, with a brief to target SME and independent retail sectors. ®