Jo asked us to quote to replace forty PCs, supplying the new PCs with Microsoft Office 2003. She'd started a new job, as IT Manager, but the previous IT Manager hadn't left any details of the licences already purchased for Microsoft Office. The old PCs had Office 2000. She wanted to make sure the new PCs were properly licenced, but didn't want to buy new licences for Office 2003 unnecessarily. She knew she'd have to unless she could prove she already had the licences. And they had to be the transferrable licences: Dell's OEM licences aren't transferrable. Buying new licences would add £15,000 to the cost.
Her existing IT support company were useless. When asked they provided details for server licences. I contacted Microsoft for a full consumption report. There's a fairly simple form to fill in, email it back to Microsoft and Microsoft will return the results within 72 hours. Understanding what Microsoft sends back is another matter, but that's why our customers use us: we remove all that hassle.
Microsoft's consumption report gave me the details to reveal that the existing IT support company had already provided 150 "open" licences. Amazingly they kept supplying additional new licences (and charging for them) with each new PC they supplied!
The end result was a happy customer. We saved them £15,000 on this order for the licences alone, and the report we provided identified the "lost" software assets with a replacement value of more than £100,000.
