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The AQX Series: Understanding the Entirety of Your External Market with AcclaimIP Integrations

Matt Troyer, Sr. Director of Patent Analytics
Niki Burke, Product Marketing Manager

In the fourth post of our blog series, we spoke with Matt Troyer, Sr. Director of Patent Analytics at Anaqua to learn more about the benefits of AQX’s latest AcclaimIP integrations.

Niki: To kick it off, can you give an overview of AcclaimIP and how using it via the AQX platform benefits IP professionals?

Matt: AcclaimIP is a patent search and analytics software tool where inventors, attorneys, researchers and executives can leverage public patent information to track competitors, and make more informed filing, licensing and renewal decisions. The AcclaimIP platform includes more than 120 million global patent publications, which is updated with roughly 125,000 new documents every week such as legal events, maintenance events, family data, application statuses, file wrapper documents and assignment events.

Anaqua’s AQX supports the entire IP lifecycle, helping users manage internal IP from invention disclosure to docketing, the prosecution process, and finally portfolio management.

By working closely with our clients, we recognized the need to connect the two. The integration helps AQX users to most effectively and efficiently:

  1. Protect their products and innovation from copycats.
  2. Ensure the freedom to operate.
  3. Generate revenue.

By connecting the two platforms, users can analyze their portfolio in the context of public data. They can assess the strength of their portfolio against known and emerging competitors and build strategies based on facts and data.

Niki: Speaking of the public data layer with AcclaimIP, can you describe three ways AcclaimIP has made a difference for businesses?

Matt: Well, let’s see. The first one that comes to mind is our Alerts feature. When a patent is referenced in a 102 or a 103.1 rejection, users can get alerts and make an appropriate response. We want our clients to have the freedom to operate and be as competitive as possible.

Another differentiator is our Find Similar feature. Typically, an inventor comes up with an idea, submits their idea and creates an invention disclosure for evaluation. We can do a quick knockout search by using the Find Similar functionality to bring up a list of similar patents. Then users can scan the list for any spot-on prior art, which can help determine whether something is patentable or not. Now the portfolio manager can go back to the inventor with these findings without having invested a lot of time and money and say, “Can you explain why yours is different or can we invent around it? Is there something unique that we can claim?” Businesses are not going to file something the examiner can find with a one click search. Businesses want to file patents that are strategically more relevant to their business by better understanding what that landscape looks like.

Lastly, I’d say stronger competitive monitoring really helps portfolio managers. Everybody in business knows their core competitors, right? What’s really important is understanding the emerging competitors. Businesses that look at trends in the technology itself can detect new potential entrants, especially with large companies. Sometimes big companies shift to a new space, and one of the first ways to detect that is via their patent filings. For example, I was able to figure out exactly where one of our clients was going just by looking at their new publications. In a recent meeting, I said, “To me, it looks like you guys are pivoting your business and going over here.“ Their faces went white because, of course, that was not announced. I further explained how the patent data showed us the direction they were headed in, with trends suggesting some changes we could anticipate seeing soon. It was quite revealing for them.

Niki: It sounds like there’s a lot of valuable data in AcclaimIP. Can you talk more about the integrations with AQX and how users can benefit from them?

Matt: Simply put, users now benefit from quicker access to data and therefore better and faster decision-making. The integration makes it possible for users to “connect-the-dots” through a single sign-on to a unified platform. Patent managers are busy people and they don’t always have time for more than one or two steps (such as logging in to different applications) to get an answer. But if the answers are right there, there’s no way they’re not going to use the data to support their decision-making.

Analyzing a specific patent or landscape is now just a couple of clicks away. When IP folks make these big overarching decisions, they’re going to have the data and the actual quantitative metrics they need, that lets them know that this is a smart decision.

Niki: One last question. What is one untapped AcclaimIP feature the industry should be using more of and why?

Matt: The Matrix Landscape tool. From what our clients tell us, once you discover it, you can’t live without it. Matrices let users build patent landscapes, organize data and present the insights in a way that matches their specific requirements.

Every single week as new patents are processed, the matrix landscape evolves, but the actual tool doesn’t need to be updated except when new technologies they want to monitor emerge. I’d like to see more of our clients benefit from matrices so they have a new level of control and understanding of the external patent landscape that impacts their business.

Want to learn more about AQX? Schedule a demo.