Microsoft launches the Azure IP Advantage Program to protect innovation in the cloud

Microsoft India today announced the launch of the Azure IP Advantage program – the industry’s comprehensive protection against intellectual property (IP) risks. The program is aimed at fostering a community that values and protects innovation and investments in the cloud.

The Azure IP Advantage program will help Azure customers and developers focus on innovation, while allowing businesses and enterprises to be able to respond to the changing needs of their customers with agility, without the fear of litigation.

As the industry shifts to the cloud, it will generate more than $1 trillion in IT spending by 2020, as per Gartner estimates. Given this enormous opportunity, it is important to address the growing risk of intellectual property lawsuits in the cloud.

Microsoft Azure IP Advantage program provides customers with:

• Best-in-industry intellectual property protection with uncapped indemnification coverage will now also cover any open source technology that powers Microsoft Azure services, such as Hadoop used for Azure HD Insight.
• The program will make available 10,000 Microsoft patents to customers that use Azure services for the sole purpose of enabling them to better defend themselves against patent lawsuits against their services that run on top of Azure. These patents are broadly representative of Microsoft’s overall patent portfolio and are the result of years of cutting-edge innovation by our best engineers around the world.