DETAILED ACTION
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 filed 10/24/2025 have been fully considered but they are not persuasive. The applicant’s arguments regarding the term “load balancer” are not persuasive. Paragraph 212 cited by the applicant has nothing to do with load balancing. Even if the applicant was attempting to reference paragraph 202, it describes routing and not load balancing as load balancing would require monitoring the load of devices and choosing a device, among devices, to route data to based on the loads of the devices. The applicant is describing multiplexing traffic based on its destination, which is not load balancing. The applicant does not describe monitoring any load of any entity and therefore does not “load balance”. The applicant’s arguments regarding the 112b rejection of claims 3 and 12 are not persuasive. Paragraph 155 of the disclosure states that the service account is an account used by a customer to access a cloud provider and therefore it is a business relationship. The applicant makes no attempt to explain how a software entity such as a load balancer can be deployed in a customer/service account. The load balancer could be deployed in a network based on information in the account but it cannot be deployed in the customer/service account itself. The applicant’s argument regarding support for the claimed subject matter in the provisional is not persuasive. The examiner reviewed appendixes F and K of the provisional and did not find support for the process claimed. The applicant’s arguments regarding the content of Shevade are not persuasive. The customer which maintains the on-premise network 152 is not the same provider as the cloud provider 102. The applicant’s characterization that the on-premise datacenters are operated the cloud service provider is not correct. Figure 1 of Shevade shows three providers, a cloud provider, a first customer provider, and a second customer provider. All of these providers provide cloud services in the broad context claimed. If the applicant has a specific definition of a cloud services provider in mind, it needs to be explicitly stated in the claims
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph:
The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention.
Claims 1, 3-10, and 12-19 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor (or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the applicant), regards as the invention.
Claims 1, 10, and 19 use terminology which is unclear. Where applicant acts as his or her own lexicographer to specifically define a term of a claim contrary to its ordinary meaning, the written description must clearly redefine the claim term and set forth the uncommon definition so as to put one reasonably skilled in the art on notice that the applicant intended to so redefine that claim term. Process Control Corp. v. HydReclaim Corp., 190 F.3d 1350, 1357, 52 USPQ2d 1029, 1033 (Fed. Cir. 1999). The term “load balancer” in claims 1-20 is used by the claim to mean “a device which multiplexes traffic received from different customers and directs the traffic to a specific backend proxy” (see paragraphs 192-205 of the applicant’s specification) while the accepted meaning is “a device which considers the load of different devices which perform the same function and based on the load chooses one of the devices to use.” The term is indefinite because the specification does not clearly redefine the term. While the disclosure describes using a load balancer as a multiplexer it does not explicitly redefine the term “load balancer” from its customary meaning, as required by section 2111.01(IV) of the MPEP.
Claims 3 and 12 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being incomplete for omitting essential structural cooperative relationships of elements, such omission amounting to a gap between the necessary structural connections. See MPEP § 2172.01. The omitted structural cooperative relationships are: Claims 3 and 12 cover “deploying the network load balancer” in a “service account”. The service account is defined as a business relationship in paragraph 155 of the applicant’s disclosure but it is also defined as a component of the network shown as a nebulous box 726A in Figure 7. It is therefore unclear what it means to deploy a load balancer, which is an actual functional component of the second cloud environment within a service account, which is an abstraction that defines a customer’s relationship to a network.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
The following is a quotation of the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(2) the claimed invention was described in a patent issued under section 151, or in an application for patent published or deemed published under section 122(b), in which the patent or application, as the case may be, names another inventor and was effectively filed before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claim(s) 1, 3-10, and 12-19 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(2) as being anticipated by U.S. Patent Number 12,021,743 to Shevade et al.
As to claim 1, Shevade teaches a method comprising: receiving, by a multi-cloud infrastructure (MNSG) included in a first cloud environment (Figure 10), a request (col. 30, line 62-col. 31, line 4) to create a network-link (ENS) between a second virtual network in a second cloud environment (customer premise network) and a service endpoint in the first cloud environment, wherein the service endpoint corresponds to a service provided by the first cloud environment (cloud provider infrastructure), and wherein the first cloud environment is provided by a first cloud services provider (owner of network 102) and the second cloud environment is provided by a second cloud services provider (customer) that is different than the first cloud services provider (Figure 1, customer networks 152A and 152B are different providers of cloud services than cloud provider network 102); and configuring, by the multi-cloud infrastructure, the network-link between the second virtual network and the service endpoint, the configuring comprising: deploying a network load balancer associated with the service in the second cloud environment (col. 23, line 63-col. 24, line 12, the customer-managed servers 1091 serve as the claimed and disclosed “load balancer”, which does not perform any load balancing in the claim yet is named “load balancer”); instantiating a packet processor (ref. no. 945 in Figure 9) in a link-enabling virtual network (cloud provider network 102) in the first cloud environment; forwarding by the network load balancer, traffic associated with the service and received from the second virtual network to the packet processor (col. 23, line 63-col. 24, line 12); and processing by the packet processor, the traffic received from the network load balancer to generate processed traffic (col. 23, lines 36-62), the processed traffic being forwarded by the packet processor to the service endpoint (virtual server in Figure 9) corresponding to the service (compute instance in Figure 9) in the first cloud environment (col. 22, line 62-col. 23, line 35).
As to claim 3, see Figure 10.
As to claim 4, the segments in Figure 1 serve as access points for the applications to access the infrastructure of the customer server.
As to claim 5, see col. 12, line 16-col. 13, line 2.
As to claim 6, see col. 22, line 49-col. 23, line 35.
As to claim 7, the applications in Figure 1 read on the first gateway and the customer network segment reads on the second gateway which interfaces the infrastructure.
As to claim 8, see col. 8, lines 47-59 and col. 9, lines 12-50.
As to claim 9, see Figure 1, MNSG.
As to claims 10 and 12-19, they are rejected for the same reasoning as claims 1 and 3-9.
Conclusion
THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. 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 concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to DOUGLAS B BLAIR whose telephone number is (571)272-3893. The examiner can normally be reached Monday-Friday 9am-5pm.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Glenton Burgess can be reached at 571-272-3949. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/DOUGLAS B BLAIR/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2454