The answer to this question is properly no why should I ask the Audi manufacturer?

I have, over the last months met Microsoft Customers that are so scared of Microsoft’s reaction and what Microsoft might say and do if they sell their old Microsoft licenses, that they feel they need to get permission from Microsoft to do so. Despite the fact that they have paid for, and own, the software. Furthermore it is stated in the Microsoft EA agreement under section 4) transferring and assigning licenses paragraph C. “Exhaustion nothing in this agreement prohibit the transferring of Software to the extend allowed under applicable laws if the distribution rights has been exhausted”.  The applicable laws are three European Court of Justice rulings against different Software Publishers that clearly determine that you are allowed to sell you software, once you have paid for it!

What would the Audi manufacturer say if you were asking permission to sell your old Audi? Buy a new Audi and use the money you get from the old car as part of the funding for a new Audi. The same is actually the case when it comes to second hand Software. If you sell your old perpetual licenses you can use the money to buy new Microsoft Cloud technology if this is the technology, you want to use in the future.  Hopefully even Microsoft can see the business in this.

The second-hand Software market is around 2% of the total software spend in Europe. If you look at the Piracy rate in Europe of Microsoft Software this is over +25%. So while we secure customers genuine Microsoft second hand software, others are just selling / using piracy versions. Isn’t this a much bigger challenge for Microsoft?

If you are a CFO or CTO at and Enterprise Customer, you might actually just have found some extra funding for your budget – we call this IT cost disruption!  Do you want to be part of this trend as well?

If you are a SAM Manager, at an Enterprise Customer why not save some money if you are missing some licenses as part of your inventory scan?  Buy your next SQL server as a second-hand license and save more than 50% of the cost – we call this IT cost disruption!