Nextance Inc., a provider of enterprise contract management, has released its Intellectual Property Optimization Suite. The application "answers the urgent call to maximize royalty revenue by proactively managing valuable and complex intellectual property (IP) assets and their associated contractual agreements, as IP becomes an increasingly important revenue channel for companies," Nextance said in an announcement.

Where other technology offerings focus on a single aspect of the IP process, the company says, Nextance IP Optimization Suite manages the complete lifecycle from invention disclosure to license agreement creation to royalty collection to address serious and costly challenges, such as: underutilized IP assets; underpaid licensing and royalty revenue; unnecessary risks related to legal compliance; and sluggish time-to-market for new solutions that increasingly depend on IP that is licensed both in and out.

By managing the complete IP lifecycle, the new Nextance suite gives "unique visibility into the entire IP asset inventory in order to more effectively optimize revenue and mitigate legal risk related to IP," the company says. At the start of the process, the enterprise solution catalogues a complete library of all IP assets and provides the ability to protect and monetize these assets within marketable portfolios.

Nextance then matches these IP portfolios to market opportunities, creates agreements based on embedded best practices and proactively tracks the associated agreement milestones, royalty receipts and payments. Legal risk in IP deals is reduced by rigorous management of commitment and milestone due dates, enforcing infringement rules and giving visibility into compliance standards.

Redwood City, Calif.-based Nextance claims "another industry first" in Nextance's fully XML (extensible markup language)-based architecture, which provides "unprecedented flexibility to adapt and scale to the widest range of customer business processes as well as evolve with business requirements and processes."

Web: www.nextance.com