Middle East customers harvest benefits of IBM's innovative technology

With 2,941 granted patents in total, IBM earned more patents than any other company for the thirteenth consecutive year. Breaking the record for the number of patents granted in a single year, IBM remains the world's most innovative company offering advanced technologies and solutions that meet continuous revolutionized demands in the global market.

"Once more, IBM has maintained its leadership position by focusing on creation, innovation and valuable commitment,"

said Takreem El-Tohamy, General Manager, IBM Middle East, Egypt and Pakistan. "Investing heavily in research and development, we constantly provide advanced value-added IT solutions to our customers' businesses worldwide. We have seen how our customers in the Middle East are successfully implementing new technologies and IT services as a result of IBM's IT solutions derived from these patents."

IBM also announced an initiative it is undertaking with the USPTO, Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), members of the open source software community and academia that is focused on improving U.S. patent quality. The unprecedented partnership between these parties to improve patent quality will help accelerate innovation around the world.

The initiative has three elements:
• Open Patent Review - a program that seeks to establish an open, collaborative community review within the patenting process to improve the quality of patent examination.
• Open Source Software as Prior Art - a project that will establish open source software - with its millions of lines of publicly available computer source code contributed by thousands of programmers - as potential prior art against patent applications.
• Patent Quality Index - an initiative that will create a unified, numeric index to assess the quality of patents and patent applications.

Efforts devoted to improving patent quality will decrease potential legal threats to open source developers and businesses. IBM believes that patents should be granted only for ideas that embody genuine scientific progress and technological innovations. "IT leadership is not only about the number of patents granted, it's also about implementing continuously global innovation to benefit customers ,businesses, and therefore society", added Takreem El-Tohamy. "Enhancing patent quality will encourage continued investment in research and development by both individual vendors and larger businesses."

In 2005, IBM received 1,100 more patents than any other company. This is the eighth consecutive year IBM has received more than 2,000 U.S. patents.

The 2005 patent results were reported today by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. An agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, the USPTO issues patents, administers the patent and trademark laws of the U.S. and advises the Administration on intellectual property policy.

Results and ranking also were reported today by IFI CLAIMS Patent Services, which compiles the CLAIMS© patent database and annually reports the number of U.S. patents issued to companies.
According to IFI CLAIMS, IBM inventors were listed on 31 additional patents awarded to other primary assignees for a total of 2,972 patents.