ITRenew Brings Suit Against Blancco for Patent Non-Infringement

ITRenew, Inc., in IT asset disposition services and data sanitization software, has filed a declaratory judgment of non-infringement regarding Blancco Technology Group‘s U.S. Patent No. 9,286,231 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Apparatus, a system, a method and a computer program for erasing data stored on a storage device.

ITRenew filed its complaint on June 10, 2016, but did not formally serve the suit in hopes of resolving the matter privately. Blancco has now filed an answer that, unusually and in contrast to its public statements, does not actually allege infringement against ITRenew.

“It is with regret that ITRenew is forced to take this action, but it is necessary because the allegations by Blancco are egregious and unsubstantiated,” said Aidin Aghamiri, VP of corporate strategy, ITRenew. “We closely examined the patent and know we do not infringe, which is why we initiated suit instead of agreeing to discuss Blancco’s unsupported request for a license. We cannot allow baseless allegations to linger without response; instituting suit allows us to directly confront Blancco’s misguided presumption that ITRenew infringes its narrow patent simply because we have developed an SSD erasure solution.“

According to ITRenew, Blancco has not undertaken the sort of analysis required to allege even a prima facie case of infringement, which is why, despite its public statements, Blancco has not actually alleged infringement in court.

“After an extensive analysis of the patent and its claims by our engineers and legal counsel, we determined that ITRenew’s Teraware SSD erasure technology bears no relation to Blancco’s patent,” said Aghamiri. “Our analysis furthermore calls into serious question the validity of the patent itself.”

While under no obligation to do so, ITRenew provided Blancco with claim charts demonstrating that it does not infringe the patent. In light of this detailed evidence, Blancco has avoided making any allegation of infringement in court. In fact, Blancco has refused, on four separate occasions, to substantiate any infringement, including failing to counter-complete the claim charts. According to ITRenew, this is a clear indication that Blancco has no idea whether Teraware infringes its patent.

“In short, we believe the nonspecific allegation lacks factual and legal support and is merely a tactic to gain access to proprietary information about the operation of Teraware,” said Aghamiri. “ITRenew is a recognized leader in our industry, and will not be bullied into disclosing proprietary information to a competitor.”

FAQ by ITRenew for customers and potential users of Teraware regarding this suit.

About Teraware
Teraware, a data security solution, was developed by ITRenew in 2007 to solve a need for scalable, high-performing data sanitization in the most hyperscaled data centers. It is an enterprise-grade platform to support multiple-vendor SSD sanitization for SAS, SATA, PCI-E and NVMe storage devices, and through an ADISA Claims Test conducted in October 2014, remains the only solution to have passed Risk Levels 1, 2, 3 and 4 (High) and Test Levels 1 and 2 for the forensic-level sanitization of SSDs. Teraware has been adopted by large cloud companies as the default data erasure solution due to its architecture and a feature set never before available to enterprises. Recognized by Gartner as a competitive differentiator, Teraware guarantees 100% sector-verified erasure, has a 95+% success rate and is used to sanitize more than four million drives a year.