Sterling Computers Corporation (commonly "Sterling") is a privately held IT reseller headquartered at 303 Centennial Drive, North Sioux City, South Dakota. It was formed in California on August 12, 1996, and corporate filings list Bradley Moore as CEO and Timothy McCabe as president. Federal contracting records describe it as a certified women-owned small business. Census-style directories place headcount in the low hundreds (ZoomInfo lists 201–500; an older Inc. profile lists 51–200). Revenue is not publicly disclosed.
Sterling is an operating value-added reseller and IT solutions integrator, not a manufacturer. Its stated offerings span digital workspace, modern infrastructure, connectivity, security, cloud, and managed/consulting services. It sells third-party hardware and software — notably Cisco networking gear (Catalyst switches, routers, transceivers), notebooks, monitors, and cybersecurity products — to federal, state and local, education, and commercial customers, largely through government contract vehicles such as NASA SEWP V, GSA 2GIT, CIO-CS, and Army ADMC-3.
Its litigation posture is two-way but lopsided in focus. Per the tracked data, Sterling is plaintiff in Sterling Computers Corporation v. Microsoft Corporation (W.D. Tex., filed 2024-04-17) and defendant in Microsoft's PTAB petition Microsoft Corporation v. Sterling Computers Corporation (IPR2025-00270, filed 2025-01-17). This is an operating company asserting a small acquired patent portfolio rather than a pure NPE.
Context: Sterling acquired four issued U.S. patents from Bluespace Software in September 2014. The W.D. Tex. case asserts U.S. 8,073,911 ("Enforcing Compliance Policies in a Messaging System") against Microsoft Exchange; Microsoft's IPR challenges that patent on obviousness grounds. Stanford's NPE Litigation Database classifies Sterling as a "practicing entity"/product company, not a patent assertion entity. Reporting by Mondaq also describes related May 2024 W.D. Tex. suits against Meta and X over U.S. 7,716,217 (content relevance scoring); those two cases are not in our structured case list. W.D. Tex. is a plaintiff-favorable venue.