Today's acquisition environment requires that the part of the target that is wanted be captured, while the rest is monetized. Large companies and industry leaders, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard (HP), and Honeywell, are aggressively renting, selling, and enforcing their own IP, and the activity is creating a large pool of intellectual property (IP) waiting to be monetized. Such property, when monetized, has to be carefully handled and vetted to ensure that the price is right and to protect against post-close legal battles over disputed patents, copyrights, or trademarks. Commenting are spokespeople for Symantec, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pitman, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, and AT&T Knowledge Ventures. For instance, Abha Divine of AT&T Knowledge Ventures says an IP portfolio can be compared to a factory. Brands, trademarks, and patents can loll around creating nothing of value if the factory is in a lights out condition. On the other hand, the company can dedicate the people and resources needed to get the factory into the manufacturing business. Divine says the purchase of AT&T by SBC communications involved the blending of thousands of components of intellectual property (IP) into one organization in a time frame of less than 45 days. Important decisions involved the AT&T brand, and Divine says centralizing is more important in a merged business, as is the determination of a place where policy and control are decided and managed for consistency throughout a merger.