The deal is Microsoft’s second in as many months, following April’s ground-breaking agreement with Sun Microsystems Inc granting access to the others’ intellectual property (IP).
Terms of yesterday’s agreement were not revealed, although Microsoft said it demonstrated the company’s commitment to increasing alliances with others while making patents available for licensing on commercially reasonable terms.
Currently, Siemens holds 45,000 patents worldwide, with another 40,000 filed and due to be granted. The company spends $6.3bn annually on R&D. Microsoft, meanwhile, holds more than 10,000 patents and is this year spending $6.9bn on R&D.
Siemens said the deal would leverage the company’s own inventions with software from Microsoft, making products from both stronger for respective customers.
Siemens and Microsoft already worked together on HiPath OpenScale from Siemens Information and Communications Networks (ICN). HiPath OpenScale provides real-time routing for Microsoft’s Live Communications Server 2003 to different devices and applications, such as e-mail, PDA and mobile phones.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
