Wednesday, April 21, 2021 Imagine for a moment you are a bank owner looking for new software to support your international banking customers. Could you even consider for a moment buying software that wasn’t interoperable with the international banking network? Would you consider buying this software if the vendor insisted any outsourced back-office operations had to be done using the vendor’s off-shore team? Of course you couldn’t and wouldn’t. Yet, this is where the IP industry finds itself in 2021 – many large installations of legacy IP management systems are not interoperable with the online IP ecosystem such as patent offices around the world, law firm IP systems, and cloud services. Even worse, some existing vendors who regard themselves as leaders in the industry not only don’t offer serviceable APIs for interoperability, these vendors refuse to allow their customers to connect their systems to cloud services provided by what they regard as competitors.