IBM Breaks U.S. Patent Record, Tops Patent List for 19th Consecutive Year

At this point, IBM’s annual patent leadership is almost a bit of a yawner.

IBM announced today it set a new U.S. patent record in 2011, marking the 19th consecutive year that the company has led the annual list of patent recipients. IBM inventors earned a record 6,180 U.S. patents in 2011, more than quadrupling Hewlett-Packard’s issuances and exceeding by six times those of Oracle/Sun.

You know, the awe-inspiring, intellectual property-excited kind of yawn.

I say that, because IBM announced it set a new U.S. patent record in 2011, marketing the 19^th consecutive year the company has led the annual list of patent recipients.

IBM inventors earned a record 6,180 U.S. patents in 2011, more than quadrupling Hewlett-Packard’s issuances and exceeding by six times those of Oracle/Sun.

Averaged out, that’s 16.93 patents per day!

In 2011, more than 8,000 IBMers residing in 46 different U.S. States and 36 countries were responsible for the company’s record-breaking 2011 patent tally.

IBM inventors who reside outside the U.S. contributed to more than 26% of the company’s 2011 patents.

The more than 6,000 patents IBMers received in 2011 represent a range of inventions that enable new innovations and add significant value to the company’s products, services, including smarter solutions for retail, banking, healthcare, transportation and other industries.

These patented inventions also span a wide range of computing technologies poised to support a new generation of more cognitive, intelligent and insight-driven systems, processes and infrastructures for smarter commerce, shopping, medicine, transportation, and more.

Migrating From Oracle To IBM

Last Friday was Friday the 13th, but IBM announced some news that day that I didn’t want to let slip completely underneath the radar.

At risk of summoning Jason and his hockey mask, the news aptly had to do with IBM offering some assistance to help clients migrate off Oracle and into an IBM platform.

The new resources include no-charge financial and technology assessments, skills training courses, and proofs of concepts to support clients ready to convert their Oracle investments to the latest in IBM software.

IBM also announced that its lending arm, IBM Global Financing, would be offering zero percent financing to help Oracle clients speed up their move to IBM software.

Financing includes:

• Fast approvals on zero percent financing for 12 months to better manage cash flow.
• No interest for 12 months and flexible payment options and terms including competitive 24 and 36-month rates with options that let clients match payments to anticipated cash flow.
• No hardware purchase required.

At a time when businesses are looking for stability and technology innovation from IT vendors, more clients are moving to IBM software to drive growth opportunities and reduce costs.

In 2010, more than 1,000 Oracle Database clients chose DB2 instead, and more than 400 Oracle WebLogic clients chose WebSphere.

If you’re interested in getting more information on how IBM technologies compare to Oracle and other vendors, visit here.  And here for more on the IBM Global Financing Zero Percent Offer.

IBM, Oracle, And Java

Oracle and IBM today announced that the companies will collaborate to allow developers and customers to build and innovate based on existing Java investments and the OpenJDK reference implementation.

Specifically, the companies will collaborate in the OpenJDK community to develop the leading open source Java environment.

With today’s news, the two companies will make the OpenJDK community the primary location for open source Java SE development.

The Java Community Process (JCP) will continue to be the primary standards body for Java specification work and both companies will work to continue to enhance the JCP.

The collaboration will center on the OpenJDK project, the open source implementation of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) specification, the Java Language, the Java Development Kit (JDK), and Java Runtime Environment (JRE).

Oracle and IBM will support the recently announced OpenJDK development roadmap, which accelerates the availability of Java SE across the open source community.

“IBM, Oracle and other members of the Java community working collaboratively in OpenJDK will accelerate the innovation in the Java platform,” said Rod Smith, vice president, emerging technologies, IBM.

“Oracle and IBM’s collaboration also signals to enterprise customers that they can continue to rely on the Java community to deliver more open, flexible and innovative new technologies to help grow their business.”

Java is a general-purpose software development platform that is specifically designed to be open and enable application developers to “write once, run anywhere.” The platform is most widely used in business software, web and mobile applications.