Grant Gross
Senior Writer

Commerce One patents auctioned for $15.5 million

news
Dec 7, 20042 mins

Winner keeps quiet about plans for Web services technology

About 40 patents owned by bankrupt software vendor Commerce One were auctioned for $15.5 million in a San Francisco bankruptcy court Monday.

The winning bidder, JGR Acquisitions, has kept quiet about its plans for the patents, which cover Web services technology. JGR attorney Mark Mullion of the Dallas law firm Haynes and Boone LLP was not immediately available for comment Tuesday. Several news organizations reported that the attorney avoided reporters’ questions at the Monday hearing.

The rest of Commerce One’s remaining assets were sold for $4.1 million to Commerce One Acquisitions LLC, a company formed by ComVest Investment Partners II LLC and DCC Ventures LLC, two large Commerce One creditors, said Commerce One lawyer Craig Prim of the law firm Murray & Murray, based in Cupertino, California.

Earlier this month, Lee Van Pelt, an attorney at Van Pelt & Yi LLP in Cupertino, estimated the patents would sell for between $1 million and $10 million.

The Commerce One patents cover methods for companies to communicate with each other and provide certain types of information when carrying out machine-to-machine transactions over the Internet. Patents from the Santa Clara, California, company, which was a pioneer of electronic marketplaces, could cover e-commerce technologies widely used by other companies, according to analysts.

JGR beat out two other companies associated with former Microsoft Corp. chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold during the auction in U.S. Bankruptcy Court.

Filing a reorganization plan and paying off creditors is the next stage in Commerce One’s bankruptcy proceedings, Prim said. “We have virtually nothing left except for a bit of cash,” he said of the company’s status.

Grant Gross

Grant Gross, a senior writer at CIO, is a long-time IT journalist who has focused on AI, enterprise technology, and tech policy. He previously served as Washington, D.C., correspondent and later senior editor at IDG News Service. Earlier in his career, he was managing editor at Linux.com and news editor at tech careers site Techies.com. As a tech policy expert, he has appeared on C-SPAN and the giant NTN24 Spanish-language cable news network. In the distant past, he worked as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Minnesota and the Dakotas. A finalist for Best Range of Work by a Single Author for both the Eddie Awards and the Neal Awards, Grant was recently recognized with an ASBPE Regional Silver award for his article “Agentic AI: Decisive, operational AI arrives in business.”

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