NPE Buys Patents From IBM, Turns Them Against Oracle
After paying a reported $9 million for part of Big Blue's portfolio last fall, NPE Daedalus Blue has now enlisted Bunsow De Mory to assert five of the patents against the database giant.
May 27, 2020 at 07:26 PM
3 minute read
If IBM Corp. ever sued Oracle Corp. for patent infringement, it would pit two monumental names in the software business.
We got the next closest thing Tuesday when Daedalus Blue LLC—a nonpracticing entity that acquired 500 patent assets from Big Blue last fall—asserted five of them against Oracle in the Western District of Texas.
The patents relate to networking, storage and security in a cloud-based environment. The complaint, signed by a team of Bunsow De Mory attorneys headlined by Denise De Mory, reads at times as if IBM were the plaintiff.
"The five patents asserted in this case are the result of the work from 15 different IBM researchers, spanning a period of nearly a decade," they write in Daedalus Blue v. Oracle. "Over the years, IBM has licensed its inventions—including those claimed in the Asserted Patents—to many companies, including Amazon Web Services."
Daedalus Blue is not IBM, however. As reported by IAM last fall, IBM sold a slug of its portfolio to Daedalus Group LLC for a hefty $9 million. Daedalus Group listed Ed Gomez, formerly of Altitude Capital and Walker Innovation, as its managing principal. Virtually all of the patents were subsequently reassigned to Daedalus Blue.
So far, Daedalus Blue has filed one other lawsuit, asserting a different set of IBM patents involving drone navigation against SZ DJI Technology Co. Ltd., also in the Western District of Texas. The NPE is represented by Dunlap Bennett & Ludwig in that case.
In the Oracle case, Daedalus Blue is asserting patents on monitoring networks and their topology; providing fail-safe data replication in a distributed database system; autonomic scaling of virtual machines in a cloud computing environment; an improved policy-based data management system; and access control systems based on the assignment of roles and "super roles" to groups of users.
Among the accused products are Oracle's FS1-2 Flash Storage Systems; Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control; Oracle Data Guard; Oracle Golden Gate; Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Hierarchical Storage Manger, among others.
Some of the accused technology has its roots in products developed by Sun Microsystems, which Oracle acquired in 2009. Sun engaged in protracted intellectual property litigation with IBM in the 1980s. When Oracle acquired Sun, CEO Larry Ellison challenged IBM to "make our day."
Also signing onto Daedalus' complaint are Bunsow De Mory partners Robin Curtis, Jennifer Gilbert, Corey Johanningmeier, senior associate Brenda Entzminger, associates Jenna Fuller and Nicholas Mancuso, and attorney Gail Jefferson, along with B. Russell Horton of Austin, Texas-based George Brothers Kincaid & Horton.
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