AST Celebrates 10 Years of Providing Innovative Patent Risk Solutions to Some of the World’s Largest Companies

Milestone Celebrates The Success of the Organization’s Unique and Collaborative Member-Driven Model

AST, the leading provider of proactive patent defense solutions, is celebrating its 10-year anniversary, a significant milestone for the unique not-for-profit Member-driven collaborative. AST was founded in 2007 on the groundbreaking principle that companies who use innovative technologies could work together to mitigate the risk of patent assertions and litigation by securing rights from patents available on the open market.

The organization began with only a handful of Member companies including Hewlett Packard, Kodak, Motorola and Sun Microsystems. Today AST proudly includes dozens of the world’s most successful companies across multiple industries, including information technology, software, semiconductors, communications, automotive, health tech, and social media.

“We’re very excited to be celebrating our 10-year anniversary this year and proud of all that our organization has achieved,” said Russell W. Binns, Jr., CEO of AST. “Since our inception, AST has sought to help our Members find innovative ways to work together to mitigate patent risk by acquiring patents on the open market. What’s remarkable is that so much of what AST set out to do 10 years ago – in terms of offering creative, cost-effective patent solutions in a collaborative not-for-profit framework – remains just as relevant in today’s patent marketplace as we believe it will in tomorrow’s. As one of our founders observed, ‘the AST model was built to last.’”

Throughout its tenure, AST has consistently developed and provided innovative solutions to further benefit its Members. Its comprehensive analysis on litigation and reassignments, bankruptcy services, and new iterations of fAST IP, its Member-analytics platform, are all examples of AST’s commitment to keeping with its innovative origins. Additionally, AST launched its Industry Patent Purchase Program (IP3) last year, a program designed to give sellers an easy way to access the secondary market by streamlining the patent purchase process. IP3, a true industry first, attracted strong interest from buyers and sellers, and results indicated a desire for more innovative solutions like IP3 in the future.

“We couldn’t be more pleased about what’s in store for AST in the future. Looking ahead, we will continue to focus on growing our Membership base, increasing the number of high quality transactions we execute and finding new ways for our Members to collaborate. We are proud of our Members and all that we accomplish together, and look forward to continuing to innovate and add value for our Members in years to come,” Binns added.

To learn more about AST’s 10-year history, please visit our “About Us” page by clicking here.

About AST
AST is the leading provider of proactive patent defense solutions. We offer a highly efficient, cost-effective and proven method of mitigating the risk of patent assertions and litigation by enabling our Members to collectively purchase assets available on the open market. Because we are an independent, not-for-profit cooperative, we provide a trusted and fully transparent way for Members to analyze patent purchase opportunities including triage, evaluation and acquisition services. AST’s Members currently include top global companies from a wide-range of industries including Avaya, Ford, Google, Honda, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Philips, and Sony. For more information on AST please visit http://www.ast.com.

Press Contact:
Cindy Stoller
FeverPress
cindy@feverpress.com
917-331-0418

Source: AST

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