Big Data, Cloud Security Tops the List of IBM Patents in 2012

The number of patents registered in the U.S. hit a record last year, with the giant blue once again at the forefront of technological giants, who maintain a war on intellectual property.

The Patent and Trademark Office issued 253,155 patents in 2012, of which 6478 were recorded by IBM, according to the annual tally published by IFI Claims Patent Services.

The list of the main groups that deposited in the U.S. patent includes 17 U.S. companies and 27 based in Asia. IBM is at the head of the list patent recipients for the twentieth consecutive year, while the South Korean manufacturer Samsung technology is second with 5081 U.S. patent, Canon placed third with 3174. Meanwhile, the Japanese Sony (3032) and Panasonic (2769), and U.S. giant Microsoft (2613) occupied the fourth, fifth and sixth position respectively.

Among the thousands of patents, IBM has mentioned some of the most significant inventions that laid the foundations for the new era of cognitive systems. These include patents in area such as analytics, big data, cyber-security, cloud, mobile, social networking, and software-defined environments, as well as industry solutions for retail, banking, health care and transportation.

IBM said the company’s main focus will be on the areas of big data, analytics and cognitive computing. IBM already holds more than 300 patented inventions from 2012 that support emerging big data and analytics innovations and technologies like the Watson system. Around 200 patents are related to security, showing that the company is looking toward technology’s growing emphasis on security and privacy.

Big-data-harnessing analytics solutions are increasingly becoming not only a competitive differentiator but also a key ingredient to identifying hidden insights that can help companies improve their bottom line and move into new markets, IBM said.

For example, the patent no. 8275803 applied to the IBM Watson system and describes a technique that provides answers to natural language questions that has been integrated into the Watson supercomputer. Patent no. 8200501 describes a technique that enables healthcare providers to more efficiently evaluate and analyze medical data and records stored in multiple disparate sources, improving the ability to perform research, diagnose and treat disease.

Another patent 8332873 inventions describe software-defined environments created from modeling platform to define the requirements and characteristics of the application components and intelligent system for dynamic loading, updating of workload management. These inventions allow the family of IBM PureSystems products using repeatable models to speed deployment and optimize the management of the lifecycle of the workload.