Patents still serve for protecting your company's core competence against your competitors.
Furthermore the commercialization of industrial property rights becomes more and more important. Valuable scientific projects which are not part of your company's main field of interest can be commercialized, for example in tax-privileged foreign countries by a patent commercialization company.
Such a company would have a different name and could for example regarding a screening procedure protected by you take care of license payments of companies which are your clients but are still using your protected screening procedure.