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The Transformation of IP Technology

By Erik Reeves, CTO of Anaqua

The accelerating pace of technological advancement is both unmistakable and inexorable today. All companies, high-tech or not, need to constantly innovate and push themselves in order to maintain a competitive advantage in an age where product features and capabilities are no longer enough to differentiate a company and create lasting value. At Anaqua, our client success business model compels us to provide the highest quality IP software and consulting services available. To accomplish this mission, we carefully and intelligently integrate new technologies that leverage the core strengths of our infrastructure, stability, security, and world-class workflow configuration, and layer in new tools to improve UI/UX, performance, and drive modernization.

As the Anaqua family grows, we cultivate and harvest a wealth of new talent, technical expertise, and legal business experience. With the additions of IdeaPoint, AcclaimIP, PatentRiver, Beacon Innovation Group, Lecorpio, and launch of AQX, we’re leading the IPM space with a fresh new set of product and technology perspectives that embrace big data, analytics, advanced search, and new technology frameworks that continue to enrich our ecosystem.

These assets are bringing about exciting things in several areas: infrastructure and automation, new technologies, and improved integration of actionable data, analytics, and decision support.

Operational Infrastructure

In 2017 and 2018 we invested in substantive infrastructure upgrades paving the way for accelerated product development and continuous improvement in quality and performance. We made a big investment in test and deployment automation to improve the reliability and efficiency of engineering and QA operations, which gives us much better control of development, quality, and product delivery.

New Technologies

Modern technologies increase our ability to easily develop and deploy new products and features. As we partner with our clients in defining our direction and product strategy, agile development enables us to complete these important strategic investment initiatives in a timely manner. For example, while we’re maintaining our core back-end infrastructure to ensure seamless transitions and upgrades, we’re concurrently retooling our UI/UX with more modern technologies such as Angular, ag-Grid, SpreadJS, and enhancing our application API with GraphQL. In 2019, we’ll continue to improve our service layer architecture to drive performance improvement further.

Additionally, we consistently look at ways to improve performance on core functions that our clients value most. With AQX, we are providing a dramatically enhanced search performance through improvements to record-level security (the most “costly” part of search) and bulk operations (making the process asynchronous, more resilient, and supporting XSLX and XML). As a result, we’re able to significantly load more records without timeout or affecting system performance for other users, and our new workspace designer is also a dramatic innovation that will turbo-charge decision support in Anaqua.

Data, Analytics, and Decision Support

The growth of the Anaqua family brought complementary new data assets and skills. Our rich data processing and analytics platform enables access to over a 100 million assets as well as billions of associated data points, transactions, and other extracted elements such as images, citations, and even rejections. With over a decade’s experience aggregating, processing, augmenting, and serving the data, PDF’s, and powerful search capabilities to the world-wide IP community through FreePatentsOnline and AcclaimIP, we now have scalable tools that no one else in the IP industry can match. For example, our “extended family” feature is now indexed and integrated directly into our full system, so our clients can quickly assess the true extent of any asset’s shared priorities. We also continue to invest in truly integrated data analytics and decision support in the AQX workflow to provide the right data, at the right time, delivered in a way that is consumable, clear, and actionable.

At Anaqua, we’re firmly committed to being the market leader in solving the evolving challenges of the IP community for the next decade and beyond, and that means “leading through data.”

Our strategic approach to innovation, and in parallel deployment of next generation core components, positions us for continued rapid growth in 2019 and beyond with a relentless commitment to meeting the challenges and opportunities our clients face in managing their intellectual assets while also taking care of the basics of quality, UI/UX improvement, and intelligent core workflow solutions.