Some years ago Sungard AS made the strategic decision to protect our intellectual property through filing patent applications and maintaining trade secrets. To this end, we created a formal patent process to encourage employee creativity and reward our people for their inventions and innovations.
“Our customers want us to bring our heritage and capability of running highly available systems with them as they move into the new world of applications running in the cloud. We want to do it in a way that represents best practice and our in-depth knowledge of how to run critical systems,” explains Josh Crowe, Chief Technology Officer for Sungard AS.
“This is about more than gaining a piece of paper from a government entity but capturing something we are really good at and turning it into a protectable innovation that allows us to differentiate our offerings in the marketplace.”
As a result of our patent programme, 11 patents have so far been awarded to Sungard AS for new methods and concepts developed by employees that help solve customers’ business problems in various ways. These include an RPO analysis tool for our Recover2Cloud service, a system to automate infrastructure workflows as atomic transactions and discovering the boot order sequence of servers belonging to an application.