Following its April 2025 case againstFortinetin the Eastern District of Texas,UMBRA Technologies (US) Inc.andUMBRA Technologies Ltd., a British Virgin Islands entity, have filed suit againstPalo Alto Networks(PAN) (2:25-cv-00635) in the same district. A prior case againstVMwarehas ended; againstCisco, been stayed to await certain Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) proceedings; and againstJuniper Networks, has seen multiple amended complaints, collectively upping the number of asserted patents there to seven. PAN is accused of infringing five UMBRA patents, through the provision of "hardware and software products for network virtualization and related services".
Those five patents asserted against PAN are broadly directed to various aspects of networking, including a "multi-perimeter firewall" system (10,574,482;12,160,328), a "network system for connecting devices via a global virtual network" (10,659,256), content retrieval systems in a network (11,503,105), and network traffic management (11,799,687). UMBRA asserts the '482 patent against PAN's Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) products and its CN-series of containerized firewalls as used with other "associated PAN products, services, or subscriptions . . . for management, monitoring, balancing, routing, and otherwise controlling the inspection of network content including, but not limited to, Wildfire, Strata Cloud Manager, Panorama plug-ins, and SD WAN subscriptions".
The '256 patent is asserted against "PAN's SDWAN products and associated services and products", including "various releases and versions of the PAN-OS operating system that support the PAN SD-WAN products, as well as any required SDWAN plug-ins, Prisma Access services, and management and monitoring services such as Panorama and/or Strata Cloud management services"; the '105 patent, against "PAN's Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) physical appliances, hypervisors, and cloud computing management platforms, running certain releases of the PAN OS operating system, which is the operating system that runs on virtual and physical NGFW devices, commonly administered in a geographically distributed SD-WAN solution and similar versions"; the '687 patent, against "PAN's SDWAN products and associated services and products", including "various releases and versions of the PAN-OS operating system that support the PAN SD-WAN products, as well as any required SD-WAN plug-ins, Wildfire, Prisma Access services, and management and monitoring services such as Panorama and/or Strata Cloud management services"; and the '328 patent, against "PAN's SDWAN products and associated services and products", including "various versions of the PAN-OS operating system that support SD-WAN, SD-WAN plug-ins, Wildfire, Prisma Access, Panorama management and/or Strata Cloud management".
UMBRA Technologies (UK) is described as a company organized under the British Virgin Islands. UMBRA Technologies (US) is described as a Delaware company; records there indicate that a company with that name was formed in January 2015. A plaintiff in other cases in this campaign,UMBRA Technologies Limited (CN), is described as organized in Hong Kong. With respect to each asserted patent, the plaintiffs plead that "UMBRA" (defined collectively in the complaint's introduction) owns all right, title, and interest, without explaining the alleged ownership interest of each individual plaintiff.
UMBRA pleads that its asserted patents "resulted from the pioneering efforts of the Inventors in the 2010s, in areas related to secure network optimization, virtual networks including large area or global virtual networks (GVNs), next generation software-defined wide area networking (SDWAN), advanced smart routing (ASR), slingshot interconnection systems for sending files for example via remote direct memory access (RDMA), security such as multiple perimeter firewalls and other technologies" and that "[t]hese efforts resulted in the development of systems and methods for improving the performance of internet connections and large networks".
In connection with this lawsuit, the UMBRAs disclose that they are "individual private companies in association with each other doing business collectively as Umbra technologies", that each does not have a parent corporation, and that no publicly held company owns more than 10% of the "stock" of any one of them. In an August 2023 disclosure, they characterized themselves as "privately owned by more than 10% of its stock byCreative Digital Design Ltd., a private limited company organized under the laws of the United Kingdom", further indicating that "[e]ach Plaintiff declares that it has no other parent corporations". The plaintiffs never filed the required certificate of interested parties with the Northern District of California, after transfer of the VMware case there.
In a 2019 SEC filing, Creative Digital Design is described as the plaintiffs' sole stockholder and as "owned by the Founders and 4 other individual holders as more fully described below", that later description indicating that Jorn Knutsen (CEO) and Joseph Rubinstein (CTO, named inventor) are the founders, while Fred Broussard, Carlos Ore (a named inventor), Thibaus Saint-Marten (a named inventor), and Mike Silver are the other four. On social media, Knutsen tags himself with "Interaction design type", reporting a past and present with several design-related consultancies; there, Rubinstein bases himself in Hong Kong, describes his position since 2012 as CTO and president with UMBRA Technologies (HK) Ltd., and explains his "specialty": "Web Application Development from plan through to design to database schema to programming the engine to bug testing to tweaking to delivery to post delivery maintenance".
UMBRA sued Cisco and VMware in concurrent Delaware lawsuits filed in August 2023. In May 2024, the VMware case was dismissed with prejudice from the Northern District of California, shortly after an earlier transfer there. The case against Cisco has been stayed to await the resolution of various PTAB proceedings. Trials have been instituted, in response to petitions filed by Cisco, as to the other three patents in suit there, but the PTAB declined to institute a trial as to the '482 patent, a result that stands after a request for director review was rejected.Unified Patentstriggered a reexamination of the '482 patent; a certificate issued confirming the patentability of all of its claims (claims 1-26).
Last November, UMBRA sued Juniper Networks, originally over three patents (the '482, '687, and11,240,064patents) but adding the '328 patent to the case through a quick amended complaint. Juniper responded with an answer and a partial motion to dismiss, arguing that claim 1 of the '064 patent (alleged to be representative of the others) is ineligibly directed to the idea of "selecting communication paths between two devices in a network based on the security levels of those paths", an idea characterized as "an abstract concept—just as choosing between walking down a dark alley or along a crowded main street would be". The motion also argues that the claims of the '687 patent are ineligibly drawn to a lengthy abstract idea:
(a) creating routes, and a path of connected virtual interfaces (connected via VPN tunnels) that sequentially link three network nodes in different geographic regions; and (b) sending network traffic directed to a geographic region to the network node located in that geographic region, such that traffic travels down the path of connected virtual interfaces until it reaches that geographic region.
A second amended complaint (adding the12,289,183patent) and a third amended complaint (the12,309,001and12,316,554patents) have brought the number of patents now in suit against Juniper up to seven. Prosecution of multiple related applications, across various UMBRA families, continues before the USPTO. A declaration from Ivan Zatkovich, "a Principal Consultant ofeComp Consultants, Director of Network Support and technology consultant specializing in Telecommunications and Virtual Network Systems", is attached asExhibit 1to the third amended complaint, UMBRA relying on it as providing "[s]pecific details regarding the patents alleged by Juniper to cover ineligible subject matter" as well as about "the '183 patent, which issued from a continuation of a continuation application that issued as the '064 patent".
That case, as have the other Delaware suits, has been assigned to District Judge Jennifer L. Hall. The Cisco suit is stayed before Western District of Texas Judge Alan D. Albright. Eastern District of Texas Judge Rodney Gilstrap presides over the case against Fortinet and will likely be assigned to the suit against PAN. Devlin Law Firm LLC represents UMBRA. 6/13, Eastern District of Texas.
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