Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
DETAILED ACTION
This action is responsive to RCE filed August 7, 2026. The RCE was filed after Patent Board decisions on 3/27/26 and 6/9/26.
Status of Claims
Applicant amended the claims on 8/7/26.
Claims 1-20 remain pending.
Response to Arguments
Applicant’s arguments, filed 8/7/26, with respect to the previous rejections have been fully considered but are not persuasive. The claims are rejected under Brandwine in view of Hiebert in further view of Subramanyam. Applicant is reminded that the claims are given their broadest reasonable interpretation. In this case, the claimed template and marketplace are broadly worded limitations which fail to give technical and functional details sufficient to overcome the references. Accordingly, the limitations are found to be encompassed by the functionality presented by Brandwine in view of Hiebert in further view of Subramanyam, and as shown in the rejection below.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claim 1,2,4-9,11-16,18-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Brandwine et al (US Patent 9614737) in view of Hiebert et al (US Publication 20150355925) in further view of Subramanyam et al (US Publication 20160094627).
In reference to claim 1, Brandwine teaches a method implemented by a cloud services platform, comprising:
receiving a template associated with an appliance that has been published online by a vendor and that has been selected therefrom by a customer, the template specifying resources to be allocated to deploy the appliance (see at least column 1 lines 24-28, column 2 lines 24-39 & 45-55, which teaches customers selecting appliance/resources for deployment within a customer cloud, where the appliances are cloud resources and are provided by third-party vendors via an online cloud environment, and column 5 lines 51-53, which teaches a marketplace environment providing services);
the specified resources including an appliance management resource comprising an application programming interface (API) that is configured to expose control features of the appliance to the customer (see at least column 3 line 49 – column 4 line 2 and column 7 lines 7-15, the self-service functionality provided via a set of APIs for controlling and deploying resource features according to user configurations);
deploying the appliance to a customer account associated with the customer within the cloud services platform in accordance with the template, the customer account associated with the customer, the deploying including allocating the specified resources to the customer account as part of an appliance resource group in the customer account (column 2 lines 3-11 & 24-44 and column 16 lines 38-47, which teaches provisioning a customer cloud account and implementing/deploying appliances and resources within the customer cloud);
providing, to the vendor via a vendor account associated with the vendor in the cloud services platform, access to a first allocated resource in the appliance resource group in the customer account via a projection of the appliance resource group to the vendor account, to the vendor via a namespace of the vendor account, the first allocated resource in the appliance resource group in the customer account (see at least Figure 3b and column 3 lines 1-30, which teaches providing third-party/vendor access to allocated appliances/resources within the customer cloud account, and the access is via a backnet namespace; At least column 10 lines 26-29, which teaches a user or vendor can interact with the appliance/resource instances directly through the data plane/customer cloud; And at least column 12 lines 35-44, which teaches the dedicated addresses that provide the namespace for both customer and vendor to access appliances/resources within the customer cloud).
Brandwine fails to explicitly teach the template in a marketplace. However, Hiebert teaches an online self-service web-portal/marketplace of resource templates (see Hiebert, at least Abstract & Background). Hiebert discloses a customer accesses the web-portal and selects a template from an image catalog, and the templates deploy resource specifications (see Hiebert, at least paragraphs 62,64,67,68). It would have been obvious for one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the invention to modify Brandwine based on the teachings of Hiebert for the purpose of enabling customers to access a self-service web-portal in order to browse through a list of appliances/resources that they can select for deployment.
Brandwine fails to explicitly teach wherein the projections “makes visible”. However, Subramanyam teaches application and resource deployment in a cloud environment (see Subramanyam, at least paragraph 4), and discloses an administrator/vendor migrating an appliance resource group from a source to target account effectively making it “visible” to the target account (see Subramanyam, at least paragraphs 92,94). It would have been obvious for one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the invention to modify the namespace access of Brandwine to access source resources as based on the teachings of Subramanyam for the purpose of managing a resource group in a manner that ensures proper operation and maintenance of the resource group.
In reference to claim 2, Hiebert teaches PaaS and SaaS, see at least paragraphs 24,25. It would have been obvious for one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the invention to modify Brandwine based on the teachings of Hiebert for the reason given for claim 1 above.
In reference to claim 4, Brandwine teaches a backnet where apliances/resources are accessible to the vendor, see at least column 3 lines 1-30 and column 13 lines 3-30.
In reference to claim 5, Brandwine teaches an appliance provider for resource management, providing third-part/vendor control plane access, and further teaches APIs, see at least column 7 lines 8-18 and column 10 lines 35-43. Brandwine also teaches vendor access to the customer cloud account, see at least column 17 line 52 – column 18 line 20.
In reference to claim 6, Brandwine teaches APIs on the same API server space and accessible to the users, see at least column 7 lines 8-30.
In reference to claim 7, Brandwine teaches billing features within the customer cloud, see at least column 11 line 64 – column 12 line 5.
Claims 8,9,11-16,18-20 correspond to claims 1,2,4-7 and are slight variations thereof. Therefore claims 8,9,11-16,18-20 are rejected based upon the same rationale as given for claims 1,2,4-7.
Claims 3,10,17 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Brandwine et al (US Patent 9614737) in view of Hiebert et al (US Publication 20150355925) in further view of Subramanyam et al (US Publication 20160094627) in further view of Roth et al (US Patent 9418213).
In reference to claim 3, Brandwine teaches the vendor has backnet network access to the customers cloud space but is also inaccessible to the customer (see at least column 2 lines 10-18, and column 13 lines 15-25 & 33-40,).
Brandwine fails to explicitly teach the at least one of the allocated resources being designated as read-only to the customer by the vendor account. However, Roth teaches an application and service environment, and teaches ensuring that a providers resource infrastructure is secure and protected (see Roth, at least column 1 lines 10-15 & 22-25). Roth discloses a provider determining an amount of access to resources that will be given to end user/customers (see Roth, at least column 8 lines 1-11), and further discloses granting read-only access (see Roth, at least column 8 lines 13-16). It would have been obvious for one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the invention to modify Brandwine based on the teachings of Roth for the purpose of ensuring that a providers resource infrastructure is secure and protected so that end user/customers do not cause any undesirable errors or conditions.
Claims 10,17 correspond to claim 3 and are slight variations thereof. Therefore claims 10,17 are rejected based upon the same rationale as given for claim 3.
Conclusion
For any subsequent response that contains new/amended claims, Applicant is required to cite its corresponding support in the specification. (See MPEP chapter 2163.03 section (I.) and chapter 2163.04 section (I.) and chapter 2163.06) Applicant may not introduce any new matter to the claims or to the specification.
In formulating a response/amendment, Applicant is encouraged to take into consideration the prior art made of record but not relied upon, as it is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure. See attached Form 892.
Contact & Status
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to RAMY M OSMAN whose telephone number is (571)272-4008. The examiner can normally be reached on Mon-Fri, 9AM-5PM.
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/Ramy M Osman/
Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2457
September 4, 2026
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