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 in response to the communication filed on 07/11/2024.
Claims 1-21 are under examination.
The Information Disclosure Statements filed on 10/16/2024, 08/27/2025 and 10/30/2025 have been entered and considered.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 13-14 are objected to as being dependent upon a rejected base claim, but would be allowable if rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
Claims 1-12, 15-17 and 19-21 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to non-statutory subject matter because the claim(s) 1-12, 15-17 and 19-21 as a whole, considering all claim elements both individually and in combination, do not amount to significantly more than an abstract idea. The claim(s) 1-12, 15-17 and 19-21 is/are directed to the abstract idea of the management of usage data of services. The claimed invention is directed to a judicial exception (i.e., a law of nature, a natural phenomenon, or an abstract idea) without significantly more than the judicial exception itself. Claims 1-12, 15-17 and 19-21 are directed to an abstract idea without significantly more.
Step 1:
Regarding Step 1 of the Subject Matter Eligibility Test for Products and Processes (from the January 2019 §101 Examination Guidelines), claims 1-19 are directed to a computer readable media, claim 20 is directed to a method, and claim 21 is directed to a system. And all the claims recite a series of steps and, therefore the claims are viewed as falling in statutory categories
Step 2A Prong 1:
The claimed invention is directed to an abstract idea without significantly more. The claim(s) recite(s) a human activities/business process. Specifically, the independent claims 1,20, and 21 recite the limitation of implementing tenancies between provider, customer and reseller. Under its broadest reasonable interpretation, covers performance of the limitation in the human activities/business relations (organizing business relation information) but for the recitation of generic computer components. That is, other than reciting a processor, nothing in the claim precludes the implementing steps from practically being performed in the basic human activities/business relations. Therefore, the claims recite an abstract idea.
Step 2A Prong 2:
Independent claims 1, 20 and 21 recite the following additional elements: “cloud environment”, “cloud provider”, “cloud reseller”, “system”, “hardware processor” and “non-transitory computer readable medium”. The additional elements are recited as plurality of computer components. Therefore, these claims are directed to an abstract idea and the judicial exception does not integrate the abstract idea into a practical application.
Dependent claims 2-12 and 15-19 recite the additional element “subscription”, “account service”, “account”, “internal order”, “external order”, and “owner identifier”. The addition elements either common business activity element or can be implemented as a generic computer performing functions of processing and receiving data.
The dependent claims recite elements that narrow the metes and bounds of the abstract idea but do not provide “something more”. The dependent claims do not remedy these deficiencies.
Therefore, based on the above analysis as conducted based on the Guidance from the United States Patent and Trademark Office the claims are viewed as a court recognized abstract idea, are viewed as a judicial exception, does not integrate the claims into a practical application, and does not provide an inventive concept, therefore the claims are ineligible.
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 of this title, 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 1-2 and 20-21 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Cidon et al. (US 2021/0067468 A1) and Jeuk et al. (US 2016/0323183 A1).
Regarding claim 1, Cidon et al. discloses one or more non-transitory computer readable media comprising instructions which, when executed by one or more hardware processors, cause performance of operations for implementing a cloud environment, comprising: implementing a first set of one or more tenancies [abs, method for deploying different virtual networks over several public cloud datacenters for different entities service tenancy]; implementing a second set of one or more tenancies, wherein respective metadata associated with the second set of one or more tenancies indicates that each of the second set of one or more tenancies is associated with a cloud reseller [par. 0247, “the cloud reseller also provides the desired network configuration to the VNP 1625. This configuration described the attributes of the virtual network that needs to be deployed for a tenant. In some embodiments, this configuration data also includes a tenant identifier that the cloud reseller 1630 uses for its customer for which it directs the VNP 1625 to deploy a virtual network”]; and implementing a third set of one or more tenancies, wherein respective metadata associated with the third set of one or more tenancies indicates that each of the third set of one or more tenancies is associated with at least one of a plurality of customer organizations of the cloud reseller [par. 0250, “the cloud reseller also provides the desired network configuration to the VNP 1625. This configuration described the attributes of the virtual network that needs to be deployed for a tenant. In some embodiments, this configuration data also includes a tenant identifier that the cloud reseller 1630 uses for its customer for which it directs the VNP 1625 to deploy a virtual network”].
Cidon et al. does not explicitly disclose wherein respective metadata associated with the first set of one or more tenancies indicates that each of the first set of one or more tenancies is associated with a cloud provider.
However, Juek et al. teaches wherein respective metadata associated with the first set of one or more tenancies indicates that each of the first set of one or more tenancies is associated with a cloud provider [abs, A cloud provider supports cloud-based services accessible to tenants of the cloud provider over a network. In the cloud provider, classification information including a cloud-identifier to identify the cloud provider, par. 0016, Classification becomes even more critical with multi-tenancy and tenant/service mobility across clouds, par. 0022-0023, use cloud-ID to identify cloud providers in the tenancy].
Before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art to incorporate the teaching of Juek et al. into the teaching of Cidon et al. with the motivation to distinguish cloud providers globally and services and tenants per provider as taught by Juek et al. [Juek et al.: par. 0051].
Regarding claim 2, the rejection of claim 1 is incorporated.
Juek et al. further teaches wherein a service maintains the metadata associated with the first set of tenancies, the metadata associated with the second set of tenancies, and the metadata associated with the third set of tenancies [par. 0040, ”management system 610 periodically distributes the classification information (cloud-ID, service-IDs, and tenant-IDs) within the cloud provider, for example, the management system distributes the classification information to the services of the cloud provider and to the network devices (switches and routers) of the cloud provider”].
Before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art to incorporate the teaching of Juek et al. into the teaching of Cidon et al. with the motivation to distinguish cloud providers globally and services and tenants per provider as taught by Juek et al. [Juek et al.: par. 0051].
Regarding claim 20, it recites limitations like claim 1. The reason for the rejection of claim 1 is incorporated herein.
Regarding claim 21, it recites limitations like claim 1. The reason for the rejection of claim 1 is incorporated herein.
Claims 3 and 5 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Cidon et al. (US 2021/0067468 A1) and Jeuk et al. (US 2016/0323183 A1) as applied to claims 1-2 and 20-21 above, and further in view of Vangpat et al. (US 2025/0097215 A1).
Regarding claim 3, the rejection of claim 1 is incorporated.
Cidon et al. and Jeuk et al. discloses metadata associated with tenancies.
They do not explicitly disclose the metadata includes a tenancy type attribute, and the tenancy type field can be populated by a value indicating at least one of the following tenancy types: cloud provider, cloud reseller, end customer.
However Vangpat et al. teaches the metadata includes a tenancy type attribute, and the tenancy type field can be populated by a value indicating at least one of the following tenancy types: cloud provider, cloud reseller, end customer [par. 0039, “the tenant specific JSON Web Token includes a prefixed value that indicates the identity type”, par. 0036, The identity type is a client attribute, par. 0021,The identity type is an identity type that the client acts as, such as a specific user in a tenant].
Before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art to incorporate the teaching of Vangpat et al. into the teaching of Cidon et al. and Jeuk et al. with the motivation to enable the use of standard JSON Web Token libraries that are configured to interpret the identity of the client as a subject claim and can be used without custom parsing logic as taught by Vangpat et al. [Vangpat et al.: par. 0039].
Regarding claim 5, the rejection of claim 3 is incorporated.
Cidon et al. further disclose creating a tenancy of the second set of tenancies as part of a region build process [par. 0296, an entity can provide input to create a dedicated virtual network for the entity (e.g., for the VNP's tenant) over one or more public clouds of one or more public cloud providers. In some embodiments, the entity's input specifies the public cloud providers to use and/or the public cloud regions in which the virtual network should be defined].
Claim 4 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Cidon et al. (US 2021/0067468 A1), Jeuk et al. (US 2016/0323183 A1) and Vangpat et al. (US 2025/0097215 A1) as applied to claims 3 and 5 above, and further in view of RC et al. (US 2025/0085978 A1).
Regarding claim 4, the rejection of claim 3 is incorporated.
Cidon et al. and Jeuk et al. discloses metadata associated with tenancies.
They do not explicitly disclose the value of the tenancy type field can further indicate that the tenancy type is an internal tenancy.
However, RC et al. teaches the value of the tenancy type field can further indicate that the tenancy type is an internal tenancy [par. 0049, “transport system 120 may call an API of test tenant system 114 to request creation in the configuration data of system 114 of a Tester resource type having the same attribute values as the Tester resource type of the source configuration data”].
Before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art to incorporate the teaching of RC et al. into the teaching of Cidon et al., Jeuk et al. and Vangpat et al. with the motivation such that the configuration data is deployed to the test tenant for testing as taught by RC et al. [RC et al.: par. 0003].
Claims 6-11 and 15 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Cidon et al. (US 2021/0067468 A1) and Jeuk et al. (US 2016/0323183 A1) as applied to claims 1-2 and 20-21 above, and further in view of Srivastava et al. (US 10,496,306 B1) and Agarwal et al. (US 2023/0328003 A1).
Regarding claim 6, the rejection of claim 1 is incorporated.
Cidon et al. and Jeuk et al. discloses metadata associated with tenancies.
They do not explicitly disclose wherein subscriptions of the first set of tenancies are between the cloud provider and the cloud provider itself; wherein subscriptions of the second set of tenancies are between the cloud reseller and the cloud provider; and wherein subscriptions of the third set of tenancies are between the at least one of a plurality of customer organizations and the cloud reseller.
However, Srivastava et al. teaches wherein subscriptions of the first set of tenancies are between the cloud provider and the cloud provider itself; and wherein subscriptions of the third set of tenancies are between the at least one of a plurality of customer organizations and the cloud reseller [col. 3, lines 29-32, “Cloud services include various hardware and software resources that are hosted by a provider of these resources for use by others (referred to as “customers,” “subscribers,” or “tenants”)”, col. 5, line 60-col. 6, line 4, “the data center operator may be a cloud services provider, and may be leasing hardware and/or software resources to customers or tenants. In some examples, a customer or tenant can itself be a cloud services provider… the operator of the data center 104 may use the resources of the data center 104 partially or entirely for the operator's own uses”].
Before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art to incorporate the teaching of Srivastava et al. into the teaching of Cidon et al. and Jeuk et al. with the motivation for operating a computing system in a data center to assist in the management of the resources of the data center as taught by Srivastava et al. [Srivastava et al.: abs.].
Agarwal et al. teaches wherein subscriptions of the second set of tenancies are between the cloud reseller and the cloud provider [par. 0001, Cloud service providers are important entities to a variety of different customers, wherein the customers may use the cloud service providers to provide Software-Defined Data Centers (SDDCs), networking services and subscriptions, par. 0012, “Seller of record 130 may be a distributor associated with cloud service provider 120, a reseller associated with cloud service provider 120, or may comprise a branch of cloud service provider 120 itself” (customer, reseller and cloud service provider)].
Before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art to incorporate the teaching of Agarwal et al. into the teaching of Cidon et al., Jeuk et al. and Srivastava et al. with the motivation to provide centralized management for a customer organization to select desired sellers of record for services across cloud service providers as taught by Agarwal et al. [Agarwal et al.: par. 0003].
Regarding claim 7, the rejection of claim 6 is incorporated.
Srivastava et al. further teaches wherein parties to subscriptions are determined by an accounts based at least in part on a subscription metadata field associated with an accounts service [col. 4, lines 3-7, “a cloud services provider allocates to a tenant a set of resources, for which the tenant subscribes for a pre-determined period of time. From the point of view of the tenant, the resources can be organized into functional entities, such as user accounts”, col. 9, lines 23-27, “ a contract can define the fee, the subscription period, the use to which Tenant-0 102 can put the storage allocation 110, and/or the services to be provided by the data center 104 in exchange for the fee, among other things”].
Before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art to incorporate the teaching of Srivastava et al. into the teaching of Cidon et al. and Jeuk et al. with the motivation for operating a computing system in a data center to assist in the management of the resources of the data center as taught by Srivastava et al. [Srivastava et al.: abs.].
Regarding claim 8, the rejection of claim 7 is incorporated.
Srivastava et al. further teaches enforcing permissions to resources within the first set of tenancies, or the second set of tenancies, or the third set of tenancies, based at least in part on the value of the subscription metadata field associated with the accounts service [col;. 1, lines 50-52, “where the data center enables users associated with the tenant to use the set of computing resources during a subscription period”, col. 9, lines 23-27, “a contract can define the fee, the subscription period, the use to which Tenant-0 102 can put the storage allocation 110, and/or the services to be provided by the data center 104 in exchange for the fee, among other things”].
Before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art to incorporate the teaching of Srivastava et al. into the teaching of Cidon et al. and Jeuk et al. with the motivation for operating a computing system in a data center to assist in the management of the resources of the data center as taught by Srivastava et al. [Srivastava et al.: abs.].
Regarding claim 9, the rejection of claim 8 is incorporated.
Agarwal et al. further teaches the subscription between the cloud reseller and the cloud provider indicates that resource usage associated with the second set of tenancies is billed from the cloud provider to the cloud reseller [par. 0012, “Seller of record 130 may be a distributor associated with cloud service provider 120, a reseller associated with cloud service provider 120, or may comprise a branch of cloud service provider 120 itself”, par. 0017, “Seller of record 132 can then be responsible for providing any billing information to the intermediary seller of record between cloud service provider 121 and seller of record 132”].
Before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art to incorporate the teaching of Agarwal et al. into the teaching of Cidon et al., Jeuk et al. and Srivastava et al. with the motivation to provide centralized management for a customer organization to select desired sellers of record for services across cloud service providers as taught by Agarwal et al. [Agarwal et al.: par. 0003].
Regarding claim 10, the rejection of claim 6 is incorporated.
Cidon et al. further discloses implementing a fourth set of tenancies, wherein respective metadata associated with the fourth set of one or more tenancies indicates that each of the fourth set of one or more tenancies is associated with the cloud reseller [par. 0247, “the cloud reseller also provides the desired network configuration to the VNP 1625. This configuration described the attributes of the virtual network that needs to be deployed for a tenant. In some embodiments, this configuration data also includes a tenant identifier that the cloud reseller 1630 uses for its customer for which it directs the VNP 1625 to deploy a virtual network”].
Agarwal et al. further teaches wherein subscriptions of the fourth set of tenancies are between the cloud reseller and the cloud provider [par. 0001, Cloud service providers are important entities to a variety of different customers, wherein the customers may use the cloud service providers to provide Software-Defined Data Centers (SDDCs), networking services and subscriptions, par. 0012, “Seller of record 130 may be a distributor associated with cloud service provider 120, a reseller associated with cloud service provider 120, or may comprise a branch of cloud service provider 120 itself” (customer, reseller and cloud service provider)].
Before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art to incorporate the teaching of Agarwal et al. into the teaching of Cidon et al., Jeuk et al. and Srivastava et al. with the motivation to provide centralized management for a customer organization to select desired sellers of record for services across cloud service providers as taught by Agarwal et al. [Agarwal et al.: par. 0003].
Regarding claim 11, the rejection of claim 10 is incorporated.
Agarwal et al. further teaches creating a tenancy of the fourth set of tenancies responsive to an internal order submitted by the cloud reseller [par. 0012, “Once the terms are established, seller of record 130 can indicate the selection of the SDDC service to cloud management service 110, permitting cloud management service 110 to initiate the deployment of any required resources in cloud service provider 120, and the user to manage the deployment of the SDDC via cloud management service 110”].
Before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art to incorporate the teaching of Agarwal et al. into the teaching of Cidon et al., Jeuk et al. and Srivastava et al. with the motivation to provide centralized management for a customer organization to select desired sellers of record for services across cloud service providers as taught by Agarwal et al. [Agarwal et al.: par. 0003].
Regarding claim 15, the rejection of claim 11 is incorporated.
Agarwal et al. further teaches creating a tenancy of the third set of tenancies responsive to an external order submitted by the cloud reseller; and wherein the internal order and the external order are submitted by the cloud reseller to a same order management system [par. 0012, a user at administrator system may request to deploy a SDDC from seller of record. In response to the request, the user may communicate with seller of record to negotiate the terms associated with deploying the SDDC. Once the terms are established, seller of record can indicate the selection of the SDDC service to cloud management service, permitting cloud management service to initiate the deployment of any required resources in cloud service provider, and the user to manage the deployment of the SDDC via cloud management service” (an external order request from a user at admin system, the seller submit the order internally based on the request and the established term)].
Before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art to incorporate the teaching of Agarwal et al. into the teaching of Cidon et al., Jeuk et al. and Srivastava et al. with the motivation to provide centralized management for a customer organization to select desired sellers of record for services across cloud service providers as taught by Agarwal et al. [Agarwal et al.: par. 0003].
Claim 12 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Cidon et al. (US 2021/0067468 A1), Jeuk et al. (US 2016/0323183 A1), Srivastava et al. (US 10,496,306 B1) and Agarwal et al. (US 2023/0328003 A1) as applied to claims 6-11 and 15 above, and further in view of Chen et al. (US 12,412,103 B1).
Regarding claim 12, the rejection of claim 11 is incorporated.
Cidon et al. and Jeuk et al. discloses metadata associated with tenancies.
They do not explicitly disclose converting a tenancy from being within the fourth set of tenancies to being within the third set of tenancies, wherein converting comprises modifying the tenancy type attribute from a value indicating cloud reseller to a value indicating end customer.
However, Chen et al. teaches converting a tenancy from being within the fourth set of tenancies to being within the third set of tenancies, wherein converting comprises modifying the tenancy type attribute from a value indicating cloud reseller to a value indicating end customer [col. 14, line 66-col. 15, line 26, Partners and resellers may not be end customers. In such circumstances, product installations that are sold via partners and resellers should have intermediate identifiers belonging to both the partners/resellers as well as end user accounts. Hence dropping the intermediate identifiers from partners and resellers may be appropriate, account and product usage will be assigned to the child/grandchild account (change the account value to the end user account].
Before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art to incorporate the teaching of Chen et al. into the teaching of Cidon et al., Jeuk et al., Srivastava et al. and Agarwal et al. with the motivation to allow for subsequent, potentially automated actions to be as fine grained as possible as taught by Chen et al. [Chen et al.: col. 14, line 66-col. 15, line 26].
Claim 16 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Cidon et al. (US 2021/0067468 A1) and Jeuk et al. (US 2016/0323183 A1) as applied to claims 1-2 and 20-21 above, and further in view of Doshi et al. (US 2022/0116286 A1).
Regarding claim 16, the rejection of claim 1 is incorporated.
Cidon et al. and Jeuk et al. discloses metadata associated with tenancies.
They do not explicitly disclose the metadata includes a tenancy owner identifier attribute, and the tenancy owner identifier field indicates a unique identifier associated with a tenancy owner.
However, Doshi et al. teaches the metadata includes a tenancy owner identifier attribute, and the tenancy owner identifier field indicates a unique identifier associated with a tenancy owner [par. 0128, “the tenant ID owner 1006 is a UUID”].
Before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art to incorporate the teaching of Doshi et al. into the teaching of Cidon et al. and Jeuk et al. with the motivation to provide coordinated operation for applications and services, among multiple tenants and resource allocations could be isolated across tenant boundaries, as tenants could allow “use” via a subscription or transaction/contract basis as taught by Doshi et al. [Doshi et al.: par. 0057, par. 0067].
Claim 17 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Cidon et al. (US 2021/0067468 A1) and Jeuk et al. (US 2016/0323183 A1) as applied to claims 1-2 and 20-21 above, and further in view of Agarwal et al. (US 2023/0328003 A1).
Regarding claim 17, the rejection of claim 1 is incorporated.
Cidon et al. and Jeuk et al. discloses metadata associated with tenancies.
They do not explicitly disclose creating a tenancy of the third set of tenancies responsive to an external order submitted by the cloud reseller.
Agarwal et al. teaches creating a tenancy of the third set of tenancies responsive to an external order submitted by the cloud reseller [par. 0012, a user at administrator system may request to deploy a SDDC from seller of record. In response to the request, the user may communicate with seller of record to negotiate the terms associated with deploying the SDDC. Once the terms are established, seller of record can indicate the selection of the SDDC service to cloud management service, permitting cloud management service to initiate the deployment of any required resources in cloud service provider, and the user to manage the deployment of the SDDC via cloud management service” (an external order request from a user at admin system, the seller submit the order based on the request and the established term)].
Before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art to incorporate the teaching of Agarwal et al. into the teaching of Cidon et al. and Jeuk et al. with the motivation to provide centralized management for a customer organization to select desired sellers of record for services across cloud service providers as taught by Agarwal et al. [Agarwal et al.: par. 0003].
Regarding claim 19, the rejection of claim 1 is incorporated.
Cidon et al. further disclose each tenancy in the first set of tenancies, or the second set of tenancies, or the third set of tenancies, is associated with one or more respective administrators [par. 0283, “the SaaS domain list is provided by the administrator of the public cloud virtual network provider, while in other embodiments this list is provided by an administrator of the entity for which the public-cloud virtual network is defined by the virtual network provider”]; each respective administrator has permissions to access all resources within a tenancy associated with that administrator [par. 0284, “this database is accessible through one or more interfaces (e.g., web server interface and/or API interface) to administrators of the virtual network provider and/or of an entity (e.g., a tenant) for which the virtual network is deployed”]; each administrator associated with the first set of tenancies is associated with a cloud provider [par. 0283, “the SaaS domain list is provided by the administrator of the public cloud virtual network provider, while in other embodiments this list is provided by an administrator of the entity for which the public-cloud virtual network is defined by the virtual network provider”]; and each administrator associated with the third set of tenancies is associated with a customer organization of the plurality of customer organizations [par. 0014, “the method identifies the set of public cloud datacenters for an entity by receiving input from the entity's network administrator… different entities often end up with very different virtual networks as the entities often provide different input regarding the desired public cloud providers”].
They do not explicitly disclose each administrator associated with the second set of tenancies is associated with a cloud reseller.
Agarwal et al. teaches each administrator associated with the second set of tenancies is associated with a cloud reseller [par. 0011, The administrator may then select one or more services, resource requirements for the one or more services (processing resources, memory resources, storage resources, and the like), billing or subscription terms for the one or more services, or some other agreement for deploying the one or more services in a cloud service provider associated with the seller of record].
Before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art to incorporate the teaching of Agarwal et al. into the teaching of Cidon et al. and Jeuk et al. with the motivation to provide centralized management for a customer organization to select desired sellers of record for services across cloud service providers as taught by Agarwal et al. [Agarwal et al.: par. 0003].
Claim 18 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Cidon et al. (US 2021/0067468 A1) and Jeuk et al. (US 2016/0323183 A1) as applied to claims 1-2 and 20-21 above, and further in view of Mankekar et al. (US 2022/0337578 A1).
Regarding claim 18, the rejection of claim 1 is incorporated.
Cidon et al. and Jeuk et al. discloses metadata associated with tenancies.
They do not explicitly disclose federating an identity provider associated with a customer organization of the plurality of customer organizations with the IAM of the cloud provider, such that the identity provider provides authentication for the tenancy of the third set of tenancies and the IAM provides authorization for the tenancy.
Mankekar et al. teaches federating an identity provider associated with a customer organization of the plurality of customer organizations with the IAM of the cloud provider, such that the identity provider provides authentication for the tenancy of the third set of tenancies and the IAM provides authorization for the tenancy [par. 0003, Most customers also prefer to use their corporate identity providers (IDP) to extend their users' identities to the data lake, par. 0097, “ cloud providers often use their own representation of user identities—such as AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management) users and roles. To utilize cloud resources, the customers would need to create separate IAM users. Instead, the integrated authentication framework herein utilizes federated identities, e.g., by configuring Keycloak as a SAML 2.0 IDP 1600 in AWS IAM”].
Before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art to incorporate the teaching of Mankekar et al. into the teaching of Cidon et al. and Jeuk et al. with the motivation for authentication and authorization services in association with the provisioning of a cloud data lake and to enable a permitted user to use a single identity to access the first and second services in the data lake as taught by Mankekar et al. [Mankekar et al.: par. 0005].
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to Applicant’s disclosure:
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Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to JASON CHIANG whose telephone number is (571)270-3393. The examiner can normally be reached on 9 AM to 6 PM.
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Lynn Feild can be reached on (571) 272-2092. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/JASON CHIANG/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2431