Patent Law Practice Center

HP Patents: From Cloud Computing to Electronic Display Dust Removal

A review of Hewlett-Packard’s recently issued patents show a variety of technologies related to cloud computing, including one system that enables those purchasing cloud services to find the most cost-effective option suited to their needs. Another patent protects a method for establishing perceived eye contact among participants of a video conference. Also intriguing is a mechanism for clearing dust from an electronic display screen using ionized air.

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Microsoft Acquires Cloud-Based Customer Service Company, Parature

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) recently announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Parature, a provider of cloud-based customer-engagement solutions. Parature’s social customer service tools, including live chat, are becoming increasingly important due to the shift from laptop and desktop computers to mobile devices, especially tablets. Zach’s Investment Research says that it anticipates that this acquisition will help Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM software to compete more effectively against the likes of Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM). The terms of the agreement are not being disclosed.

Parature’s approach to its solutions enables organizations to take advantage of an extendable knowledge base available through self-service portals on the Web and Facebook, support ticketing, mobile customer care on virtually any device the customer chooses to use, social customer support, and chat for both traditional customer service scenarios and proactive sales engagement to create new, revenue-generating opportunities for the business. These capabilities complement the existing Microsoft Dynamics CRM customer-care solution with core strengths in workflow, extensibility and process-driven user experiences that allow contact center agents to do their best work.

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Cloud Based Versioned File System Patented

Last month, the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued U.S. Patent No. 8,566,362, titled Method and system for versioned file system using structured data representations. As the title implies, this invention purports to provide the ability to create a versioned file system from the object-based storage infrastructure of public cloud storage providers.

When deployed at scale, object storage systems are cost-effective, stable and highly available; therefore, they are well suited to the needs of the large Web companies that operate them. Unfortunately, until now, object storage was not well adapted to handle changes quickly or in a consistent manner, which makes the technology unsuitable for data center infrastructure in its raw form. Thus, it was necessary to bridge the gap by leveraging local snapshots to create a direct mapping between a high-performance file system and a series of immutable versions of the file system that are then committed to the object store.

According to Andres Rodriguez, CEO of Nasuni, which is the owner of the ‘362 patent, the goal when the company set out to develop a versioned cloud based object-based storage system was to “consolidate all of the storage functions into a simple service offering… The era of glorified hardware boxes is coming to an end. It is too expensive to keep up with the sheer growth in data and the need to have that data protected and available everywhere. Enlightened IT organizations are thinning their data centers and leading the charge towards a new era where simple appliances offer direct access to the vast resources that are available in the cloud.”

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Cloud Technology Manages Network Bandwidth

IBM recently issued a press release touting U.S. Patent No. 8,352,953, titled Dynamically provisioning virtual machines, which was actually issued in January 2013. That suggests that the technology at play in this patent application is making its way into the stream of commerce. This gives us an opportunity to take a look at a real world useful innovation in the cloud computing space and wonder whether the claims issued would satisfy the half of the Federal Circuit that seems opposed to software patents.

The invention at issue was developed as a method for dynamically managing network bandwidth within a cloud computing environment. IBM says this innovation could lead to significant improvements in overall system performance, efficiency and economy.

In a typical cloud computing environment, each user is given access to a virtual machine (“VM”) that delivers a host operating system and physical resources such as processor and memory to support the user’s application requirements. To accommodate numerous users, multiple VMs are assigned within the cloud and as demands for system resources increase and multiply, applications can become constrained by limits on networking bandwidth. This IBM invention allows the system to automatically and dynamically reassign work from one system node to another based on networking bandwidth requirements and availability, ensuring that the system and VMs can run efficiently.

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