Obviousness — US Patent RE48633

Based on the provided prior art analysis, here is an analysis of the obviousness of US Patent RE48633 under 35 U.S.C. § 103.

Definition of a Person Having Ordinary Skill in the Art (PHOSITA)

For the technology disclosed in US RE48633, a Person Having Ordinary Skill in the Art (PHOSITA) as of the priority date (June 22, 2010) would have had a bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a related field, along with two to three years of professional experience in systems administration, enterprise software deployment, and virtualization technologies. Such a person would be familiar with the concepts of multi-tier application architecture, virtual machines, and the challenges of provisioning and configuring servers in a data center or early cloud environment.

Obviousness Analysis

The independent claims (1, 12, and 20) of RE48633 are likely invalid as obvious under 35 U.S.C. § 103 in view of multiple combinations of the cited prior art. The claims recite a three-part process: defining a non-existent N-tier environment, sending an event to provision its configuration, and then sending application data to run in that environment. This sequence represents a logical, predictable workflow for automated application deployment that was well within the grasp of a PHOSITA at the time of the invention.

1. Obviousness over Cherkasova ('285 publication) alone or with any other reference

The strongest argument is that the claims are obvious over the '285 publication (Cherkasova). As noted in the prior art analysis, Cherkasova appears to disclose all elements of the independent claims, making it a potential anticipatory reference under § 102.

Cherkasova's Disclosures: It teaches using a "logical service template" to define a multi-tier environment (meeting claim element 1a), using a "provisioning engine" to automatically set up the specified VMs and software (meeting claim element 1b), and explicitly teaches that after the infrastructure is provisioned, "application components are installed and configured on specified servers" (meeting claim element 1c).
Obviousness Argument: Even if a fact-finder determined that Cherkasova did not explicitly disclose one of the claimed limitations, arriving at the claimed invention from Cherkasova's teachings would have been an obvious step. For instance, if the "installing" of application components in Cherkasova was argued to be different from "sending application data," a PHOSITA would have readily understood that installing an application on a provisioned server necessarily involves sending its data (binaries, scripts, configuration files) to that server. This would be an obvious and necessary implementation detail of the system Cherkasova describes. Therefore, the claims are obvious over Cherkasova by itself.

2. Obviousness over Archarya ('703 patent) in view of Croft ('763 patent)

A compelling obviousness combination exists between the '703 patent (Archarya) and the '763 patent (Croft).

Base Reference - Archarya ('703): Archarya provides the foundational system for automated, on-demand infrastructure provisioning. It teaches receiving a "service specification" to define a desired environment (Claim 1a) and using a "Provisioner" to orchestrate the allocation and configuration of the necessary resources (Claim 1b). The explicit goal of Archarya is to create a ready-to-use virtual service environment.
Secondary Reference - Croft ('763): Croft addresses the specific problem of deploying a web application into a virtual machine. While Croft teaches a method of bundling the application within a virtual image, its core teaching is the automation of getting an application running in a virtualized environment based on a deployment document.
Motivation to Combine: A PHOSITA starting with Archarya's system for provisioning infrastructure would have been motivated to combine it with a method for deploying an application onto that infrastructure for a simple reason: provisioned infrastructure is useless without an application running on it. The entire purpose of the system taught by Archarya is to prepare an environment for an application.

Croft teaches one well-known method of deploying that application. A PHOSITA would recognize that the pre-packaged image approach of Croft is one of several known deployment strategies. Another common and often more flexible strategy, especially in environments with frequent application updates, is to provision a standardized, generic environment (as in Archarya) and then deploy the application code to it as a separate, subsequent step. This decouples the application lifecycle from the infrastructure lifecycle.

Therefore, a PHOSITA would have found it obvious to modify Archarya's provisioning system by adding the logical final step of deploying the application code once the environment was configured. This would have been a predictable solution to a known problem, yielding the exact process claimed in RE48633. The combination of Archarya's infrastructure provisioning with the known goal of application deployment (as exemplified by Croft) would render the claimed invention obvious.

Conclusion on Obviousness

The independent claims of US RE48633 recite a high-level, logical workflow for cloud application deployment that was a clear goal in the art at the time of the invention.

Cherkasova ('285 publication) appears to teach every element of the claims, making them obvious, if not anticipated.
The combination of Archarya ('703 patent) and Croft ('763 patent) demonstrates that the foundational pieces of the claimed invention—automated infrastructure provisioning and automated application deployment—were known. Combining them in the claimed sequence would have been an obvious and logical step for a PHOSITA seeking to create a complete, end-to-end automated deployment system.

The dependent claims of RE48633 add minor, well-known implementation details (e.g., specifying the number of tiers, using specific cloud providers, updating a central repository) that would not overcome the obviousness of the core method. Thus, all claims of US RE48633 are highly vulnerable to an invalidity challenge under 35 U.S.C. § 103.