IBM has filed a lawsuit against LzLabs for alleged patent infringement and “deliberate” theft of intellectual property.
Founded in 2011, LzLabs created container technology to move applications from mainframes to cloud environments or Linux systems.
On Monday, IBM said in a statement that the Zurich, Switzerland-based company “has violated IBM’s intellectual property rights by repeatedly infringing the company’s patents protecting various aspects of IBM’s high-performance mainframe systems.” , a core technology that customers rely on for their most important workloads.”
Several patents involved
The lawsuit was filed in the District Court in Waco, Texas. LzLabs has recently expanded its business into the North American market.
Two patents at the heart of the lawsuit describe methods in the IBM mainframe “that LzLabs must emulate with or translate to Intel x86 instructions,” while two other patents involved improve emulation and translation efficiency. Another allegedly infringed patent relates to the translation of IBM mainframe applications “in which the IBM programs called by these applications are identified and an x86 is substituted for each of them”.
According to IBM, LzLabs not only used patents without permission, but also “deliberately misappropriated IBM trade secrets” by ripping apart IBM technologies by “reverse engineering, reverse compiling and translating IBM software.”
Therefore, IBM’s accusations also extended to the allegation of misrepresentation and potentially deceived customers about LzLabs’ products. IBM is seeking an injunction against LzLabs, as well as other forms of legal “relief.”
IBM already at war with the founders of LzLabs
According to the tech giant, the owners and management team of LzLabs include a number of people who previously operated Neon Enterprise Software, LLC, in Austin, Texas. Neon and IBM were embroiled in a lengthy lawsuit, with both sides attacking each other over mainframe technologies.
While Neon claimed that IBM engaged in anti-competitive business practices, IBM countered by claiming that Neon’s zPrime solutions violated its intellectual property. The companies reached a settlement in 2011 and Neon agreed to a permanent injunction banning zPrime from entering the market.
Proof of this is that the mainframe is still alive, IBM added that it has made “a significant investment in research and development in this critical technology area and will aggressively defend its investments and the resulting patents against those who violate them, such as LzLabs l ‘has now done several times’. Contacted by ZDNet, LzLabs has not responded to our requests for the time being.
Source: ZDNet.com