Our Patents

Our Patents

In April, 2002, EMC announced Centera to help securities broker/dealers comply with SEC regulation 17a-4. Prior to this, the only media that satisfied this regulation was microfilm, microfiche, or optical disks. The reason for this limitation is that the regulators wanted to ensure that the client records could not be altered or erased while the client had an account open, AND for six years after their account was closed. When EMC introduced Centera, the regulation was updated to include electronic storage media. The regulation then stated:

240.17a-4(f)(2)(ii) The electronic storage media must: 
     (A) Preserve the records exclusively in a non-rewriteable, non-erasable format;
We were asked to lead the IBM team to develop a response to EMC’s Centera. We did and we introduced the IBM Data Retention 450, 550, and the IBM Information Archive. In doing so, we realized that in EMC’s rush to market, their device only provided chronological retention. That is, you could only preserve a record for a specific period of time. However, in our research, we realized that this did not even meet the SEC’s retention requirements, let alone the requirements of many other financial, insurance, and many other products. We came up with the idea of event based retention as well as legal holds for these kinds of records and received the patents for these concepts. It answers the question, how would you know how long a client of a broker was going to keep their account open? What retention period would you put on those records? With our patented technology, you could set a retention period for an event of an indeterminate period of time and then also request a fixed retention period after that event occurred. In addition, we received the patents on the concept of Legal Hold on for record retention. This capability further prevents records from being deleted even after all of their retention rules have been satisfied.

Below are the Patents that are in Alan Stuart’s name via, originally, IBM. Since then, Google has bought some of the IBM patents.

US Patent #
Date Issued
April 15, 2014
Title of Patent
Method, system and program for archiving file
US Patent #
Date Issued
November 12, 2013
Title of Patent
Method, system and program for implementing retention policies to archive records
US Patent #
Date Issued
October 2, 2012
Title of Patent
Method, system and program implementing retention policies to archive records
US Patent #
Date Issued
October 18, 2011
Title of Patent
Method, system and program for archiving files
US Patent #
Date Issued
July 27, 2010
Title of Patent
Method, system and program for archiving files 
US Patent #
Date Issued
October 6, 2009
Title of Patent
Method, system, and program for retention management and protection of stored objects
US Patent #
Date Issued
April 28, 2009
Title of Patent
Method for implementing retention policies to archive records
US Patent #
Date Issued
August 28, 2007
Title of Patent
On demand, non-capacity based process, apparatus and computer program to determine maintenance fees for disk data storage system
US Patent #
Date Issued
December 5, 2006
Title of Patent
Method, system, and program for archiving files
US Patent #
Date Issued
September 12, 2006
Title of Patent
Method, system, and program for implementing retention policies to archive records
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