ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,554,554, issued on Feb. 17, was assigned to ServiceNow Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Management instrumentation and discovery (MID) server support for executing automated flows within a cloud based system" was invented by Venkata Kiran Kumar Koya (Poway, Calif.), Robert Peter-Paul Recatto (La Jolla, Calif.), Nicholas Michael Stark (San Diego) and Harry Thomas Nelson (San Diego).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Executing and managing flow plans by performing at least the following: receiving an indication to initiate a task flow including a plurality of discrete but related operations at a customer instance environment of a cloud-based comput...