The Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) is a special operating agency of Innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED) Canada, a department within the Government of Canada. CIPO is responsible for managing intellectual property (IP) applications and grants including patents, trademarks, copyrights and industrial designs. CIPO has approximately 1,000 employees operating from a centralized office in Gatineau, Québec. It is the official national body that oversees implementation of the Government of Canada's intellectual property legislation.
Improving CIPO's services to Canadians
With a mandate to increase awareness, knowledge and delivery of IP related services to Canadians, CIPO's aging legacy systems were becoming a hindrance to their leadership role in providing IP services and educating Canadians on how to use IP more effectively.
Existing IT systems were over 20 years old. The development platform was becoming archaic and difficult to change. CIPO hired CGI and another third-party provider to bring front-end and back-end IT systems up to contemporary standards, with a particular focus on the development of a new Intellectual Property Rights Management Solution (IPRMS).
During this period, departments at all levels within the Government of Canada were being encouraged to improve service delivery by upgrading to cloud-first systems. Most importantly, however, CIPO’s existing systems were having a significant negative impact on end users’ ability to receive effective services from the Office.
Deployment of an array of AWS cloud solutions
As a technology partner, CGI is leading the delivery of innovative solutions to achieve CIPO's business objectives. This involves a complete replacement of the existing, on-premise Intellectual Property Rights Management Solution (IPRMS) with more flexible and secure AWS cloud-based technology.
The digital transformation will replace legacy IT systems and business processes with modern, efficient and automated technology and business solutions using AWS cloud-based enablers. The upgrade will leverage ISED's existing, protected B AWS OpenShift container deployment platform for the IPRMS workflow and business rule components.
CGI is also implementing AWS cloud-based enablers for IP Rights Management, Document Management, Workload Management, Business Rules, Search, Work Product Generation, Reporting and Business Intelligence.
Core AWS Platform services that is being used by CIPO for AWS application services including AWS OpenSearch for Patent Search indexes, AWS SES for email notifications, and AWS RDS Postgres databases for all other applications. CGI will also leverage the core AWS services on two ground-to-cloud ETL data migration streams, while implementing a mix of tools including Data Migration, Glue, RDS-SQL Server Enterprise, EC2, S3, DMS, DataSynch, FSx and SQL tools.
AWS cloud technology to improve CIPO business processes
For CIPO, the work being done by CGI and the migration to AWS Cloud is not simply a technological upgrade but also a significant business transformation. This modern solution using modern technology will allow them to move past paper-based manual processing of requests to an enhanced and automated system.
IT architecture upgrades will enable improved speed, volume, efficiency and security of internal and client facing business processes. The cloud-based digital transformation represents an important improvement in both the quality of service delivery and the internal processes that will have a significant positive impact on CIPO's ability to offer its services to more Canadians.
The solutions provided by CGI to improve CIPO services will have an economic impact too. Improvement in service delivery will encourage more IP applications to be made in Canada, which will encourage Canadian talent to keep their valuable trademarks, copyrights and industrial designs in the country to the benefit of all citizens.
