The Year in Patents 2017
Fun fact: did you know that the Salesforce AppExchange pre-dates Apple’s App Store? With the patent “Systems and methods for exporting, publishing, browsing and installing on-demand applications in a multi-tenant database environment,” filed on September 8, 2006, we kickstarted this tool that is now up to over five million installs of Salesforce-related applications.
Innovation is one of our core values as a company, and with every release we add useful and cutting-edge technology to the field. Our Technology and Products organization has submitted over 750 potentially patentable ideas so far in 2017, blowing past our goal of 700 submissions. But why do we count patent submissions? Aren’t patents boring, and maybe even the antithesis of innovation?
No way! At Salesforce, we use patents to protect our intellectual property defensively. We want to best our competitors in the marketplace, not the courtroom. Patents help us make sure that the products and services we offer our customers are safe.
We’ve come a long way since that early AppExchange patent. This summer, we celebrated the issuance of the 1,000th Salesforce patent! Every inventor at Salesforce gets a monetary bonus upon filing their patent, and another when it is issued (which can unfortunately take awhile), but we made #1,000 extra fun by presenting Alex Warshavsky, Samarpan Jain, Aakash Pradeep, and Adam Torman with giant checks and balloons to commemorate their innovation.
Celebrating inventors internally helps makes the potentially tedious process of protecting innovations a little more palatable. Salesforce engineers enjoy seeing their work recognized both within the company and by the U.S. Patent Office.
There are many reasons to file a patent: protecting the company, being recognized for innovative ideas, and being able to explain your ideas and design to others are among the top. ~Alex Warshavsky
[Filing a patent] enables us to change the daily conversation around ideas. Normally, we discuss ideas as market value, use cases, and implementation details. But when you file a patent application, it forces all parties whether product manager, engineer, designer, or anyone else to express their ideas in a way that makes sense to people outside of the organization. ~Adam Torman
Want to see what our engineers were working on this year? Here’s a snapshot in legalese of some of the awesome innovations that were issued as patents in 2017:
- “Mechanism for Facilitating User-Controlled Management of Webpage Elements for Dynamic Customization of Information” by Phil Calvin, Sonali Agrawal, Beril Maples, Eric Dorgelo, and Shelby Hubick
- “System and method for phrase matching with arbitrary text” by Matthew Fuchs, Zandro Gonzalez, and Craig Howland
- “Systems, methods, and apparatuses for fixing logical or physical corruption in databases using immutable LSM trees” by Mark Wilding
- “Online chats without displaying confidential information” by Jon Aniano, Andy Lintner, Rachel Wang, Anuresh Banjeree, Tim Schmidt, and Ryan Smith
What all of those translate to are dynamic new features or updates that make our products even stronger, for our customers’ benefit, not to mention some cool ways of solving problems using technology. We’re proud of all of our inventors and look forward to seeing what new innovations 2018 brings!
Follow us on Twitter at @SalesforceEng for the scoop on what’s happening in our Tech & Products org, and stay up-to-date on news, announcements, and innovation on our company’s main handle, @Salesforce!
