Damo4
Regular
I've had an interesting email exchange with Ken Scarince that I thought you might be interested in. I sent an email to the company as follows and had the following response:
The questions I asked in my email were:
'1. Why are Renesas not mentioned on the Partner page? Do we still have an IP Licence agreement with Renesas?
2. The partnerships: Is there a written partnership agreement with each of the partners? If not, how do we protect our IP and profit from the partnerships once products are developed?'
The Response from Ken Scarince was:
'Thanks for your note. I received your investor relations inquiry from our sales team.
We do indeed have an active IP agreement with Renesas. They are not considered an ecosystem partner, rather they are considered a customer. We define partners as companies or institutions with whom we collaborate on designs or applications using our combined technologies as opposed to a customer where we simply license our IP to them and they incorporate into their products for sale. And yes, we do have a written partnership agreement with each partner that very clearly defines who owns what to prevent any IP “pollution”. Typically, there is little risk of IP issues arising as the goal is to create something that requires a customer to purchase or license the core products from each partner. In some cases, the partners simply use our products to demonstrate the capabilities of their products when combined with Akida. But in any case, it goes through a thorough legal review process'
This means that we have a partnership agreement with each partner and that the goal is to develop products to on sell to their customers. As I suggested in an earlier post, this seems to be consistent with my view that the partnerships were really a way of getting companies on board quickly with Akida without the up front cost of an IP Licence. It also means that when the joint products are produced, they potentially have a ready customer base with our partner's customers. I think this puts in context the commercial purpose of the partnerships and makes you realise just how significant they are. It also means that we have products being developed by multiple partners now. Imagine what is going to happen when all the partners are ready to sell the products to their customers. It makes you start to think that in due course all these partnerships are potentially much more commercially significant than they might at first appear. (I don't wish to reopen the debate about whether they should have been announced on the ASX - no one will care about that when all the products are being sold in the market and the $$$ are rolling in)
Great post GD, I think it's important to also note that whilst Renesas are not "partners" and are instead customers, that's not to say some of our ecosystem partners can't be both in the future. I assume once they become customers, they may still being working as partners on future products and technology.
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