The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is deluged by nearly 500,000 new patent applications every year. In the late 1990s, it became clear that the agency was struggling to handle this massive workload. People’s ideas — and the business opportunities they represented — were getting caught in a swelling bottleneck. Consequently, Congress and the American public mandated that the USPTO find ways to dramatically increase efficiency. The USPTO decided to address this situation by improving technology throughout the organization. But there was a sizable problem. Its legacy systems were not designed for integration and thus could not communicate with one another — not exactly a solid platform on which to build a more dynamic enterprise-wide solution. However, the USPTO could not afford to completely abandon its legacy systems, and a costly re-write was impractical.

Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) — a prime contractor working on the USPTO initiative — chose a reliable ally to help face this enormous challenge, bringing in QAT Global as a subcontractor in September 2001.

QAT Global’s Approach

QAT Global’s industry-leading expertise in software integration helped CSC make an immediate impact. After carefully assessing USPTO’s goals and existing infrastructure, QAT Global helped develop and prove the USPTO’s enterprise application integration architecture, delivering critical skills and guidance in:

• WebSphere Application Server, Websphere MQ and MQSI
• Java (J2SE and J2EE)
• AllFusion Gen and AllFusion Gen Java Proxies
• XML

QAT Global played an instrumental role in creating a repeatable prototype and seamless bridge between the more than 100 stovepipe systems at USPTO and the new J2EE-based solutions. As a result, an extremely complex integration was completed quickly, cost-effectively, and without loss of data. This breakthrough also helped IBM — CSC’s strategic product partner — to demonstrate that its products were the right choice to support USPTO’s goals. To complement these high-level integration efforts, QAT Global’s engineers facilitated the migration of over 150 in-house and COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) applications to the Windows XP environment, equipping USPTO employees with time-saving tools on their desktops. And unlike many subcontractors with narrowly defined skill sets, QAT Global is providing USPTO and CSC decision-makers with ongoing guidance as the new technology evolves.

USPTO now processes patent and trademark applications more quickly and efficiently than ever before and is well on its way to meeting its annual processing quotas. QAT Global is enabling USPTO to achieve these goals by providing cutting-edge skills and technology while simultaneously extending the life of legacy systems — a combination that has saved the USPTO significant time, money, and effort. Today, the integration task is considered the most stable portion of the entire USPTO enterprise architecture. Buoyed by this remarkable success, USPTO executives are now accelerating the rate of IT change, putting CSC and IBM in an excellent position to further strengthen a valuable long-term client relationship.