Salesforce.com applications, such as those sold in Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, are an increasingly attractive market for developers. Developers are excited by the ability to use Salesforce tools such as Salesforce1 to accelerate development via APIs and provide mobile apps to customers of the Salesforce service cloud.
Naturally, Salesforce apps have increasingly been a hot topic for patent clients. Salesforce apps are no different from other software when it comes to patent eligibility and patentability, which means yes, Salesforce apps are patentable.
We work with many software developers to help them patent their applications. A popular strategy for our clients is to file a provisional utility patent application near the launch date of the app. This strategy provides developers one year during which the provisional application is “patent pending” to learn whether the market demand makes it profitable to move forward with a non-provisional patent application when the deadline comes. This strategy enables you to minimize your upfront investment in the patent process, while maintaining your rights to pursue patent protection for your app while you explore the market.
When working with app developers, I am often able to prepare provisional patent applications for lower fees than a typical provisional application. This is because app developers often have very solid documentation of the invention (wireframes, screen shots, requirements docs., etc.) that helps to expedite the preparation of the provisional patent application. This can make the strategy of starting with a provisional patent application even more attractive.