On May 15, 2017, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 5,978,951, owned and asserted by Plectrum LLC, a new NPE formed after acquiring several patents formerly owned by Hewlett Packard. The '951 Patent, directed to providing a hardware network address cache, has been asserted in 15 district court cases all of which were filed in February 2017.

The following companies have been sued by Plectrum:

Cisco Systems, Inc.
Juniper Networks, Inc.
Extreme Networks, Inc.
Fortinet, Inc.
Oracle Corporation
Huawei Technologies USA, Inc.
Facebook, Inc.

Nokia USA, Inc.
Arista Networks, Inc.
NEC Corporation of America
Brocade Communications Systems, Inc.
Broadcom Corporation
Verizon Communications, Inc.
Comcast Corporation
AT&T Inc.

To read the petition and view the entire case proceeding, please visit our PTAB Portal.