DETAILED ACTION
Status of Claims
This action is in reply to the application filed on 04/21/2026.
Claims 1, 11, and 16 have been amended.
Claims 1-20 are currently pending and have been examined.
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 .
Response to Arguments
Applicant’s arguments and amendments filed 04/21/2026 with respect to the double patenting rejections have been considered. In view of the amendments to the claims of the instant application and amendments made to the claims of the identified copending applications, the claims cannot, at this point of prosecution, be reasonably characterized as a patentably indistinct variation of the copending applications and/or the patented claims identified in the prior office action, and the rejections are accordingly withdrawn.
Applicant’s arguments filed 04/21/2026 with respect to the rejections under 35 USC § 102/103 to have been considered but are moot in view of the new grounds of rejection.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
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.
Claims 1-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Milojicic et al. (US 2013/0111027 A1, cited in 04/11/2024 IDS) in view of Kominos et al. (“Bare-metal, Virtual Machines and Containers in OpenStack”, 2017).
Claims 1 and 11:
Milojicic discloses the limitations as shown in the following rejections:
using a first portion of cloud service provider (CSP)-provided infrastructure in a first region (e.g. geographically collocated partition) to provide one or more CSP-offered cloud services to one or more customers of the CSP (¶0007, 0010-0011), “cloud service providers may offer the computing resources enabled by their cloud computing environments to customers in the general public in exchange for payments” (¶0007).
creating a first virtual private label cloud (vPLC) for a first reseller (Value Added Reseller (VAR)) based upon the CSP-provided infrastructure, wherein creating the first vPLC comprises allocating a second portion (reservation) of the CSP-provided infrastructure to the first vPLC (¶0008, 0016-0019, 0037-0039), “the VAR purchases the right to use physical resources in the partition for a temporary period of time. As a result, the VAR acquires the physical resources in the partition” (¶0019).
using the first vPLC to provide one or more first reseller-offered cloud services to one or more customers of the first reseller (¶0022-0026, 0040-0043), “The VAR can resell use of the pool of physical resources to customers or end-users as value added features” (¶0022).
wherein the first portion comprises a first set of resources from the CSP-provided infrastructure and the second portion comprises a second set of resources from the CSP-provided infrastructure, wherein the first set of resources is different from the second set of resources (¶0012-0014, 0018, 0038 , 0049, FIG. 2).
[Claim 11] one or more processors; and one or more non-transitory computer readable media storing computer-executable instructions that, when executed by the one or more processors of a computing system, cause the system to…(¶0010-0011, 0035).
Milojicic further discloses ¶0036 (emphasis added): “the physical resources in a cloud computing environment are searched by a user, wherein the user is an entity other than a provider of the cloud computing environment. For example, a VAR searches for desired physical resources 112 (e.g., a desired server rack, number and/or type of CPU, storage resources such as computer memory of a specified size, networking capabilities, interconnects, etc.) in cloud 101 which is provided by an original cloud provider” which in view of ¶0013: “CCP 120 exposes internally owned physical resources (e.g., servers, server racks, CPUs, memory, etc.) to external entitie …which effectively surrenders control and management of the part of the cloud” at least suggests a VAR could obtain a rack while another obtains a server (segmented at a...level that is different). But Milojicic does not explicitly disclose wherein the first set of resources is partitioned at a first level and the second set of resources is segmented at a second level that is different than the first level
Kominos, however, discloses (pg. 36-37, sect. I; pg. 38, FIG. 1) analogous interface for acquiring cloud resources which facilitates different sets (first/second) of resources where a first set of resources is partitioned at a first level (e.g. bare metal) and the second set of resources is segmented at a second level (e.g. VM level) that is different than the first level.
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It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art at the time the claimed invention was filed to modify Milojicic to provide offerings partitioned/segmented at different levels as taught by Kominos because each option offers exploitable tradeoffs to different users in different contexts (“As expected, bare-metal outperforms all other options in our tests. As such it is recommended for high intensity workloads. Deploying bare-metal via Ironic introduces no overhead and applications can run native on the hardware. However, the absence of overhead also means a lack of flexibility” (pg. 42, sect. V) and generally present opportunities for increased revenue from service providers (“Overall, we observe a considerable pressure to move away from pure VM based clouds to more flexible computing environments that make better use of available hardware resources, and improve the revenues/server ratio for cloud providers” pg. 43, sect. VI).
Claims 2 and 12:
The combination of Milojicic/Kominos discloses the limitations as shown in the rejections above. Milojicic further discloses (¶0008, 0062, 0063) multiple VARs, and accordingly discloses the limitations under the same essential rationale as described for the first vPLC above: creating a second vPLC for a second reseller based upon the CSP-provided infrastructure, wherein creating the second vPLC comprises allocating a third portion of the CSP-provided infrastructure to the second vPLC (¶0008, 0016-0019, 0037-0039); and using the second vPLC to provide one or more second reseller-offered cloud services to one or more customers of the second reseller (¶0022-0026, 0040-0043).
Claims 3, 4 and 13:
The combination of Milojicic/Kominos discloses the limitations as shown in the rejections above. Milojicic further discloses wherein the CSP-provided infrastructure is organized as a plurality of data centers of the CSP in the first region…wherein the CSP-provided infrastructure is organized as a single data center of the CSP in the first region (¶0010-0011).
Claims 5 and 14:
The combination of Milojicic/Kominos discloses the limitations as shown in the rejections above. Milojicic further discloses wherein the first reseller-offered cloud services are based upon at least one of the CSP-offered cloud services (¶0008, 0010, 0012, 0027-0030, 0055-0056).
Claims 6 and 15:
The combination of Milojicic/Kominos discloses the limitations as shown in the rejections above. Milojicic further discloses wherein the second portion of the CSP-provided infrastructure comprises at least one compute resource or a memory resource (¶0011-0013, 0036).
Claim 7:
The combination of Milojicic/Kominos discloses the limitations as shown in the rejections above. Milojicic further discloses wherein the first portion of the CSP-provided infrastructure comprises a first rack, the first rack comprising a first plurality of servers; and the second portion of the CSP-provided infrastructure comprises a second rack separate from the first rack, the second rack comprising a second plurality of servers (¶0011, 0013, 0036, 0042, 0050, 0058) disclosing VAR resources, including server racks, are reserved for their (customer) use and are thus separate from the resources used to provide service to general public users.
Claim 8:
The combination of Milojicic/Kominos discloses the limitations as shown in the rejections above. Milojicic further discloses wherein the first portion of the CSP-provided infrastructure comprises a first server in a first rack; and the second portion of the CSP-provided infrastructure comprises a second server in the first rack (¶0011, 0013, 0036, 0042, 0050, 0058).
Claim 9:
The combination of Milojicic/Kominos discloses the limitations as shown in the rejections above. Milojicic further discloses wherein the first portion of the CSP-provided infrastructure comprises a first hypervisor executed by a server on a rack; and the second portion of the CSP-provided infrastructure comprises a second hypervisor executed by the server on the rack (¶0010, 0013, 0036, 0050, 0055, 0058) disclosing “cloud 101 is configured to enable virtual machines and virtual storage resources to be implemented on top of physical resources such that end users of cloud 101 are able to instantiate and use such virtual machines” (¶0010) implicitly disclosing hypervisors to run the VMs.
Claim 10:
The combination of Milojicic/Kominos discloses the limitations as shown in the rejections above. Milojicic further discloses wherein the first portion comprises a first set of memory resources from the CSP-provided infrastructure and the second portion comprises a second set of memory resources (reserved resources) from the CSP-provided infrastructure, wherein the first set of memory resources is different from the second set of memory resources (¶0007, 0011-0012, 0019, 0036) disclosing VAR resources are reserved for their (customer) use and are thus different from the resources used to provide service to general public users.
Claim 16:
Milojicic discloses the limitations as shown in the following rejections:
using a first portion of cloud service provider (CSP)-provided infrastructure in a first region (e.g. geographically collocated partition) to provide one or more CSP-offered cloud services to one or more customers of the CSP (¶0007, 0010-0011), “cloud service providers may offer the computing resources enabled by their cloud computing environments to customers in the general public in exchange for payments” (¶0007).
creating a first virtual private label cloud (vPLC) for a first reseller (Value Added Reseller (VAR)) based upon a cloud service provider (CSP)-provided infrastructure in a first region (e.g. geographically collocated partition) , wherein creating the first vPLC comprises allocating a first portion (reservation) of the CSP-provided infrastructure to the first vPLC (¶0008-0011, 0016-0019, 0037-0039), “the VAR purchases the right to use physical resources in the partition for a temporary period of time. As a result, the VAR acquires the physical resources in the partition” (¶0019).
using the first vPLC to provide one or more first reseller-offered cloud services to one or more customers of the first reseller (¶0022-0026, 0040-0043), “The VAR can resell use of the pool of physical resources to customers or end-users as value added features” (¶0022).
wherein the first portion comprises a first set of resources from the CSP-provided infrastructure and the second portion comprises a second set of resources from the CSP-provided infrastructure, wherein the first set of resources is different from the second set of resources (¶0012-0014, 0018, 0038 , 0049, FIG. 2).
Milojicic further discloses (¶0008, 0062, 0063) multiple VARs (resellers), and accordingly discloses the limitations under the same essential rationale as described for the first vPLC above: creating a second vPLC for a second reseller based upon the CSP-provided infrastructure, wherein creating the second vPLC comprises allocating a second portion of the CSP-provided infrastructure to the second vPLC (¶0008, 0016-0019, 0037-0039)…using the second vPLC to provide one or more second reseller-offered cloud services to one or more customers of the second reseller (¶0022-0026, 0040-0043).
Milojicic further discloses ¶0036 (emphasis added): “the physical resources in a cloud computing environment are searched by a user, wherein the user is an entity other than a provider of the cloud computing environment. For example, a VAR searches for desired physical resources 112 (e.g., a desired server rack, number and/or type of CPU, storage resources such as computer memory of a specified size, networking capabilities, interconnects, etc.) in cloud 101 which is provided by an original cloud provider” which in view of ¶0013: “CCP 120 exposes internally owned physical resources (e.g., servers, server racks, CPUs, memory, etc.) to external entitie …which effectively surrenders control and management of the part of the cloud” at least suggests a VAR could obtain a rack while another obtains a server (segmented at a...level that is different). But Milojicic does not explicitly disclose wherein the first set of resources is partitioned at a first level and the second set of resources is segmented at a second level that is different than the first level
Kominos, however, discloses (pg. 36-37, sect. I; pg. 38, FIG. 1) analogous interface for acquiring cloud resources which facilitates different sets (first/second) of resources where a first set of resources is partitioned at a first level (e.g. bare metal) and the second set of resources is segmented at a second level (e.g. VM level) that is different than the first level.
It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art at the time the claimed invention was filed to modify Milojicic to provide offerings partitioned/segmented at different levels as taught by Kominos because each option offers exploitable tradeoffs to different users in different contexts (“As expected, bare-metal outperforms all other options in our tests. As such it is recommended for high intensity workloads. Deploying bare-metal via Ironic introduces no overhead and applications can run native on the hardware. However, the absence of overhead also means a lack of flexibility” (pg. 42, sect. V) and generally present opportunities for increased revenue from service providers (“Overall, we observe a considerable pressure to move away from pure VM based clouds to more flexible computing environments that make better use of available hardware resources, and improve the revenues/server ratio for cloud providers” pg. 43, sect. VI).
Claim 17:
The combination of Milojicic/Kominos discloses the limitations as shown in the rejections above. Milojicic further discloses the CSP-provided infrastructure is organized as one or more data centers of the CSP in the region (¶0010-0011).
Claim 18:
The combination of Milojicic/Kominos discloses the limitations as shown in the rejections above. Milojicic further discloses wherein the first portion of the CSP-provided infrastructure comprises at least one compute resource or a memory resource, and the second portion of the CSP-provided infrastructure comprises at least one compute resource or a memory resource (¶0011-0013, 0036, 0008).
Claim 19:
The combination of Milojicic/Kominos discloses the limitations as shown in the rejections above. Milojicic further discloses wherein the first portion of the CSP-provided infrastructure comprises a first rack, the first rack comprising a first plurality of servers; and the second portion of the CSP-provided infrastructure comprises a second rack separate from the first rack, the second rack comprising a second plurality of servers (¶0011, 0013, 0036, 0042, 0050, 0058) disclosing VAR resources, including server racks, are reserved for their (customer) use and are thus separate from the resources reserved by other VARs.
Claim 20:
The combination of Milojicic/Kominos discloses the limitations as shown in the rejections above. Milojicic further discloses wherein the first portion of the CSP-provided infrastructure comprises a first server in a rack; and the second portion of the CSP-provided infrastructure comprises a second server in the rack (¶0011, 0013, 0036, 0042, 0050, 0058).
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant’s disclosure:
“Random Online Algorithm for Reselling Reserved IaaS Instances in Amazon’s Cloud Marketplace” is directed to cloud customers acting as resellers.
US 20120215919 A1 is directed to multidimensional modeling of cloud offers.
Applicant's amendment necessitated the new ground(s) of rejection presented in this Office action. Accordingly, THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. See MPEP § 706.07(a). Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any nonprovisional extension fee (37 CFR 1.17(a)) pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the mailing date of this final action.
Any inquiry of a general nature or relating to the status of this application or concerning this communication or earlier communications from the Examiner should be directed to Paul Mills whose telephone number is 571-270-5482. The Examiner can normally be reached on Monday-Friday 11:00am-8:00pm. If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the Examiner’s supervisor, April Blair can be reached at 571-270-1014.
Examiner interviews are available via telephone, in-person, and video conferencing using a USPTO supplied web-based collaboration tool. To schedule an interview, applicant is encouraged to use the USPTO Automated Interview Request (AIR) at http://www.uspto.gov/interviewpractice.
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/P. M./
Paul Mills
06/28/2026
/APRIL Y BLAIR/ Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2196
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