Microsoft OEM Licensing
About the Client
MS Licensing, based in Reno, Nevada, is the Licensing arm of Microsoft, where the bulk of Microsoft’s product revenue is booked. The Licensing business is essentially split between retail and Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). When a computer maker such as Dell sells a PC, it comes with a license for Windows and other preinstalled software. This is validated by a COA (Certificate of Authenticity) issued by MS Licensing, attesting that the product is a genuine MS software license.
The Working Challenge
The COA stickers were produced by 85 Authorized Replicators, and distributed to OEMs worldwide. The challenge was to ensure that the systems that validated the authenticity of Microsoft software installations had the right information based on valid COAs issued.
This was done utilizing the world’s largest Biztalk implementation, handling the queuing of updates to an extremely large SQL-server based cluster in Redmond.
Implementing the solution
WebConsult designed and implemented an enhancement to the network infrastructure, introducing an improved firewall, monitoring and VPN network topology, which was deployed remotely to 87 sites worldwide.
We redesigned the application to allow for business rule changes by making the logic table driven in SQL, rather than in the front end code.
After implementation, our efforts enabled Microsoft to improve its revenue recognition for a multibillion dollar worldwide business.