University of Tennessee Research Foundation (UTRF), as patent owner, together with Saint Matthew Research, LLC, as exclusive licensee, have dismissed the complaints that they filed against Citrix and Cloudera earlier this month in the Eastern District of Tennessee, in favor of new complaints asserting the same patents against each defendant but in the Middle District of Tennessee. Last Monday’s narrowed reading of the patent venue statute, announced in the US Supreme Court’s TC Heartland decision, appears to have motivated the move west. While the venue allegations in the Cloudera complaint (3:17-cv-00895) remain unchanged, the plaintiffs plead various connections between Citrix (3:17-cv-00894) and the district in a clear attempt to withstand a venue challenge there.

University of Tennessee Research Foundation (UTRF), as patent owner, together with Saint Matthew Research, LLC , as exclusive licensee, have initiated a new litigation campaign, asserting five patents (6,741,983; 7,272,612; 7,454,411; 7,882,106; 8,099,733) from a family of seven developed by professors and graduate students at The University of Tennessee. The patents generally relate to database storage and parallel processing techniques. All five patents are at issue against Amazon (3:17-cv-00181), Oracle (3:17-cv-00186), SAP (3:17-cv-00187), and Teradata (3:17-cv-00194) with subsets of the five patents asserted against Citrix (3:17-cv-00191), Cloudera (3:17-cv-00192), HPE (3:17-cv-00185), IBM (3:17-cv-00193), and Microsoft (3:17-cv-00184). The accused products are the defendants’ database storage and access platforms; for example, the plaintiffs accuse Amazon of infringement through provision of its data warehouse solution Amazon Redshift.