IBM has amassed about 40,000 patents. Their patent strategy - "We build technology that is built on standards," said Jim Stallings, IBM's vice president for IP and standards. "So we have leveraged out standards to grow our business into new areas. We expand on (standards) and allow them to be the glue that holds our products together." The patents give IBM a proprietary edge beyond the standard - you can buy vanilla from another vendor, but you have to buy IBM for the lucious sprinkles. Those IBM sprinkles were worth around $1.7 billion in licensing fees this past year.

SAP, with about 40 patents, has relied upon trade secrets, maintaining proprietary code. SAP's open source initiative is on the edges, in facilitating interfacing to it products. SAP leverages its patents as bargaining chips, and for counter-suit potential; purely defensive.

Oracle has been a convert to employing patents as a business strategy, transitioning for patenting for purely defensive reasons in the mid-1990s, to garnering patents, mostly through company acquisition, and creating a fledgling licensing program for its portfolio of around 625 patents. Oracle's IP head, Sanjay Prasad, still remains a whiner about patents, reflecting immaturity.

Microsoft too, whines, and only recently has been promoting licensing, as well as focusing on ramping its patent portfolio from its current tally of around 4,000. In typical manner, Microsoft boasts of filing 3,000 patents this year - both a complainer and generator of junk patents. Microsoft initiated in June an infringement indemnification program as a sop to its customers. While in the past not assertive about its patents, with its antitrust worries in the U.S. behind it, and having suffered over $1 billion in damages from infringement itself, Microsoft is shifting to its renown strategy of "hardcore", using patents as a barrier to entry.

SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft may be taking lessons from small-fry patent purveyors like Forgent, who have leveraged their JPEG patent into $100 million in licensing fees, and SCO, the little UNIX sand kicker that is going after IBM for its Linux work.

Jim Stallings of IBM sums up the adult attitude towards patents: "We see all of this as being no longer as much of a legal discussion as it was in the past. It's becoming a business discussion."