Anaqua Press Release

For Immediate Release

 

CONTACTS:
Ian Reid                                                                                                                 Keith Watson
Anaqua                                                                                                                 fama PR
617-375-5808                                                                                                       617-758-4142
ireid@anaqua.com                                                                                               anaqua@famapr.com

 

Microsoft and Kimberly-Clark Select ANAQUA5; Intellectual Property Leaders Implement and Automate Best Practices with a Single System to Strategically Manage and Maximize IP Portfolio Value Across the Extended Enterprise

Proven Enterprise Software Solution for Intellectual Asset Management Immediately Available from Anaqua

Boston, June 26, 2006 — Anaqua, a provider of intellectual asset management (IAM) software solutions, today announced the general availability of ANAQUA5.  The company also disclosed that industry leaders Microsoft Corp. and Kimberly-Clark Corp. have selected the Anaqua IAM solution to gain an enterprise view of all intellectual assets – patents, trademarks, trade secrets, copyrights, license agreements and invention disclosures – to maximize the value of their IP portfolios and strategically align this to larger corporate goals.

“IP is a critical strategic asset for Microsoft”, said Marshall Phelps, Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, Intellectual Property and Licensing at Microsoft. “We have deployed the Anaqua IAM system to manage our worldwide IP portfolio and we are very pleased with the results. Our partnership with Anaqua is enabling Microsoft to move to the next level in strategic IP management.”

“The teamwork between our IT and business groups and Anaqua’s Client Services team was as good as I’ve seen in major enterprise infrastructure projects like this”, said B.J. Moore, GM Administration IT at Microsoft. “We particularly liked the flexibility of the Anaqua deployment model that allowed us to implement many of Microsoft’s IP best practices.” ANAQUA, which is built entirely on the Microsoft platform, takes advantage of Microsoft SQL Server’s scalability and enhanced business intelligence capabilities.

Anaqua’s IAM system helps companies achieve competitive advantage from their intellectual assets by providing a single system to store and manage all types of intellectual property.  Developed in conjunction with two of the largest IP-owning enterprises in the world, Ford and British American Tobacco (BAT), ANAQUA5 enables enterprises to align intellectual assets with strategic business goals, resulting in improved revenues, profits and risk management.

“Intellectual assets make up more than 75 percent of the total value of publicly traded companies in America today, yet until now there has not been an enterprise software solution to help these companies manage their IP and benefit from best practices,” said Paul DiGiammarino, CEO of Anaqua.    “Ask an executive what their company’s top-selling product is and they can access that data instantly, but that same executive today cannot tell you what its most valuable intellectual assets are and how they’re aligned to the strategic drivers of the business.  It was this glaring market need, combined with working closely with our first customers, Ford and BAT, that led to ANAQUA5, the first enterprise IAM solution for managing IP as a business matter, not just a legal matter.”

Kimberly-Clark, the $16 billion global health and hygiene company, has an internal Corporate Intellectual Asset Management team to align all IP activities with corporate strategy. The company is integrating its intellectual assets into this application, ANAQUA5, to focus on and maximize strategic IP value extraction.  In addition to better strategic IP alignment, Kimberly-Clark expects to realize substantial efficiencies by leveraging intellectual asset management best practices across its global extended enterprise.

“Prior to partnering with Anaqua, we didn’t have the capability to readily see a comprehensive enterprise view of our intellectual assets, in particular, knowing the relative business and technical value of our assets,” said Cheryl Perkins, Senior Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer for Kimberly-Clark.   “By ranking and categorizing assets across multiple categories to align them to our business goals, and easily making changes to these categorizations as our business changes, we are transforming from an individual unit based IP company to an integrated enterprise based IP company focused on generating and maintaining intellectual assets that will deliver significant competitive advantage.  The most exciting thing, thanks to Anaqua, is all functions within the organization can now access the same single source of information related to our intellectual assets from anywhere in the world.”

The ANAQUA5 Intellectual Asset Management system is architected to be the central repository and the hub for all intellectual asset management requirements within an organization. It provides secure, online collaboration on any IP matter with all parties involved, internally and externally, from any location.

ANAQUA5 Key Features and Benefits:
The ANAQUA5 IAM solution is a central data repository of all IP types with links to all elements of the IP (drawings, images, documents etc) and to all aspects of the business (brands, product lines, business units) and full information about the IP (status, owner(s), costs, licensing revenues etc). ANAQUA5 provides highly-configurable business process automation for all IP-related tasks, not just filing, registration and renewals, but conflicts, licensing, royalty collections and invoicing, based on a rules engine which understands IP laws in 170+ countries. All functions are globally accessible from a browser with fine-grained security and access controls, allowing access by inventors, external law firms and business managers as well as IP professionals.

The bottom line business benefit is to align IP with business goals and be much better positioned to exploit that IP for competitive advantage and increased revenues. At the same time, ANAQUA delivers increased efficiencies and cost savings in IP operations.

 

About Anaqua
Anaqua provides Intellectual Asset Management software and services proven to help companies gain competitive advantage from their intellectual property (IP) portfolios. Anaqua’s clients, including BAT, Ford, Kimberly-Clark and Microsoft, proactively manage IP as a strategic asset aligned with corporate business goals to help drive revenue and profit.  These forward-looking organizations have successfully transitioned this traditional back-office cost center into a key component of the business, using industry best practices to gain significant revenues and savings from repeatable, measurable IP business process improvements. Anaqua is headquartered in Boston, Mass, with its European head office in London. For additional information please visit http://www.anaqua.com   

Anaqua is a registered trademark of Anaqua, Inc. All other trademarks are recognized as proprietary to their owners.