As a technology consultancy with highly comprehensive proprietary software tools, PatAnalyse is uniquely positioned to help clients with the Competitive Intelligence studies.

To track competitors' patents, businesses traditionally rely on resource intensive searches of international patent databases. Screening and classifying patents found in the search process is widely regarded as an even more time consuming and costly process. A decade ago an Aurigin's Aureka patent mapping tool was introduced as a 'magic button' solution to streamline the process of classifying patent portfolios. This semantically driven tool had been initially adopted by many commercial clients and had catalysed the appearance of the Patent Landscape offering from many technology consultancies. However the limitations of the semantic artificial intelligence tool have gradually became evident to most companies.  A substantial number of users have since abandoned using this product.

An alternative gradual development of software tools has been initiated outside of the circle of major patent search providers. Most large corporations use specialised patent knowledge management tools for organising work flow within their internal IP portfolios. In certain cases, patent management tools might become semi-aligned to carry out Competitive Intelligence studies. The tools from providers like Software for Intellectual Property (Invention Navigator), Innography, and Pantros IP (Pro Search) are combined directly with global patent searching capabilities. Several companies produce stand-alone versions which can take an input from a variety of external search systems. Examples of such providers include Gridlogics Technology (Patent iNSIGHT Pro), UBM Techinsight (PatentVista), Vantage Point, and Thomson Data Analyzer.

These patent management tools are still rather limited in their utility to assist in the efficiency of patent screening and classification tasks. The software tool developers do not actively use their own tool sets for delivering ambitious Patent Landscape studies. In addition, instead of cleaning bibliographic records, some providers cut out important available fields. The analytical resources in such systems rarely exceed the visualisation capabilities of Excel. To the best of our knowledge, such patent management tools are rarely adopted by technology consultants specialising in Patent Mapping studies. Instead in most cases the Patent Landscape projects carried out by external consultants are still delivered in a rather old fashioned manner using Excel spreadsheets as the main tool. This reduces the accuracy of such Patent Mapping studies, increases delivery time, and inflates the required budgets.

PatAnalyse has captured in its software tools the first-hand experience gained over a decade of active delivery of Patent Landscape studies. Novel software tools represent the next generation (after Aurigin's Aureka) bringing affordable and accurate Patent Landscape studies to the market using 21st century technologies. The power of artificial intelligence algorithms is introduced closely integrated to the judgement of subject area experts. The PatAnalyse tools allow the search to evolve into a self-learning iteration process, improving the completeness of final results. Screening and classification have been modified into a highly collaborative process with the automatic distribution of work among a dispersed team of experts. The tools have been further extended to provide the results of the patent study in a user-friendly patent knowledge management system, thus greatly improving the efficiency of re-use of the results of the study within the client's company.