At Anaqua we are proud of the client driven product priorities and AQX® roadmap. This journey began with our first Executive Council meeting five years ago, which led to the Anaqua Client Working Group initiative. We have listened to your recommendations, learned a lot, and stayed on the course. Over these years, AQX has established and maintained market leadership, thanks to you - our amazing clients!
The product roadmap development process is always iterative. The Anaqua Global Steering Committee and Working Groups are actively involved every step of the way. They help establish priorities, review prototypes, and validate user experiences. This iterative process demonstrates our focus to provide clients with enhanced solutions needed to do their jobs better, deliver greater value, and achieve better IP outcomes.
In developing the Anaqua roadmap for 2023, we launched customer and market surveys, reaching out to senior IP professionals in corporations and law firms. We wanted to understand from IP professionals where they felt Anaqua could add the greatest value to their organizations. We listened to our customers and the broader market, then worked with customers through two rounds of interviews to refine and validate our plans.
Armed with feedback from nearly three hundred survey respondents and over 75 individual client interviews, we have established priority product tracks for AQX and AQX Law Firm for 2023.
Core capabilities: We want to focus on the core AQX capabilities as our most important priority. We define core capabilities as docketing and paralegal activities, finance, document management, etc.
- Enhancements Requests: We want to provide transparent management and prioritization of Enhancement Requests (ER) submitted by clients. The new "Enhancement Request" process delivers the status of enhancements, streamlines the process of client requests, and helps manage client expectations.
- UI/UX Refresh: We plan to introduce new features to simplify and automate the data entry and docketing process, such as automatic data extraction using OCR and AI technology. We will enhance current functionalities, such as management of queues and workspaces and integrate with AcclaimIP™ to provide a more comprehensive view of the patent portfolio. We plan to refresh 900+ web forms to deliver a consistent look across the AQX platform.
- Enhanced Email Integration: We also plan to enhance Email Integration enabling clients to respond to emails directly from AQX, without the need to switch to their email client. This would improve productivity by allowing users to manage their email and other AQX tasks within a single application.
- Docketing: We will continue to focus on enhancing docketing capabilities. We will enhance IDS management, auto-processing of incoming documents, docketing automation, and Workspaces such as Decision Workspaces.
- European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO): EUIPO provides a suite of APIs that enable programmatic access to retrieve data from EUIPO's databases and systems. These APIs include information on trademarks and designs, and search results. By integrating AQX with EUIPO, users can automate certain manual tasks related to the management of their intellectual property portfolios and streamline their workflow.
- Reporting: We will enhance Find functionality and plan to provide data export capabilities for data warehouses and third-party analytical tools. Our plans include an upgrade of HyperView to address build issues and data coverage.
- AcclaimIP and AQX: We are planning to refresh dashboards and enhance analytics.
- Law Firms: We plan to integrate WiseTime to add autonomous time capture and billing capabilities with AQX. This will help streamline billing and timekeeping processes for law firms and create paralegal capacity for billable tasks. Enhancements are planned for workflow between paralegal, working attorney, billing attorney with Smart templates. In addition, we plan to enhance the Client Portal.
Additional priorities for 2023 include the following:
- Portfolio Management: To ensure IP department objectives are aligned with the overall business strategy, we plan to develop tools for users to define objectives for their portfolio and to track progress. We also want to provide AQX users with the tools and information needed to support R&D initiatives, including access to relevant data and insights into market trends and opportunities. We are working on smart tools to make recommendations on routine decisions and to allow portfolio managers to focus on critical decisions.
- Pharma: Pharmaceutical Exclusivity Optimization model is a tool to analyze the impact of various factors on the exclusivity period of a pharmaceutical product, such as its market potential, regulatory environment, and competition.
- Business Innovation Suite™: We plan to add new features for classification, documents, classes, contacts and strive for consistent user experience, and localization.
- Domain Name module: We will begin the development of a new module to manage domain names, with built-in connectors to major Domain Name registrars.
Validating proposed solutions with Client Working Groups
More than 250 IP professionals representing eighty corporate clients and twenty law firms are currently actively engaged in our various client working groups. Current active working groups include Law Firms, Portfolio Management, Docketing Automation, Platform Integration, Technology and Infrastructure, Reporting, and Pharma. Please reach out to your Client Director if you are interested in joining one or more of these working groups.
Next Steps
Anaqua plans to deliver these enhancements and new features as part of our product roadmap. AQX 10.8 is planned for release in April 2023. Details of further operational and business-focused enhancements included in AQX 10.8 will be provided in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, we will continue to engage with our clients throughout the development of each track and each release as part of our ongoing commitment to client collaboration.
We are most encouraged by the collaborative, constructive, and sustained collaboration with our clients which continues to help Anaqua maintain our market leadership.