Over Memorial Day weekend, the USPTO made some serious upgrades to its server platform.
According to a blog post by USPTO Director Andrei Iancu and Chief Information Officer Jamie Holcombe, the agency’s new servers are “1,000 times faster, 20 times more efficient and far more stable and less prone to failure” than the technology it replaced.This complete overhaul was precipitated by a prolonged system outage in 2018, when a glitch in the agency’s 20-year old server caused it to go offline for a whole week. Because the server was interconnected with the offices other tech systems, the server glitch caused the PTO’s entire IT apparatus to go down, resulting in attorneys having to resort to snail mail and fax machines in order to file their documents.
The outage led the agency to conduct a top-to-bottom analysis of its systems, bringing on Mr. Holcombe to oversee the process, which is still ongoing. In their statement, Iancu and Holcombe outline their inventor-centric approach, describing a robust IT infrastructure as “critically important to help the USPTO better serve” inventors and entrepreneurs, and that “[t]heir pioneering innovations and brands create jobs, improve the quality of life and drive economic progress.”
