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Logistix buys into Microsoft licensing

The supply chain management company has snagged a division of Softbank Content Services, acquiring lucrative Microsoft licensing rights.

Kim Girard
Kim Girard has written about business and technology for more than a decade, as an editor at CNET News.com, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine and online writer at Red Herring. As a freelancer, she's written for publications including Fast Company, CIO and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She also assisted Business Week's Peter Burrows with his 2003 book Backfire, which covered the travails of controversial Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. An avid cook, she's blogged about the joy of cheap wine and thinks about food most days in ways some find obsessive.
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Kim Girard
Supply chain management services company Logistix has snagged a division of Softbank Content Services, acquiring lucrative Microsoft licensing rights.

On Friday, Fremont, California-based Logistix paid an undisclosed amount for Softbank's Supply Chain Management unit of the company's Content Services Division.

The supply chain unit provides software integration and channel management services to PC makers. Softbank's Marketing Services division was not acquired.

Through the deal, privately held Logistix will take over Softbank Content Service's license as a worldwide authorized replicator of Microsoft products for the PC industry. The division has held that license for eight years.

Logistix will also assume operation of Softbank's Supply Chain Management offices in the United States, Mexico, Brazil and Asia. CEO Murrali Rangarajan said the acquisition "will enable the company to serve Microsoft in virtually any regional market around the world."

Logistix, which reports annual revenues of $400 million, competes in an increasingly crowded market, offering services to a wide range of clients who outsource services such as supply management, disk duplication, hardware testing and repair, configuration, call center services, e-commerce, distribution, and life-cycle management.