The Company has recently undertaken a comprehensive review of its risk factor disclosures in light of recent acquisitions and other changes to its business. The following description of risk factors includes any material changes to, and supersedes the description of, risk factors associated with the Company’s business previously disclosed in Part I, Item 1A of the Company’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2017, under the heading “Risk Factors.” These risk factors should be read in conjunction with the considerations set forth above in “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” and in “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” set forth in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2017.
Our business depends upon customers using email and certain social media platforms to exchange confidential information, and a significant shift of those messages to other communication channels could impair our growth prospects and negatively affect our business, financial condition and financial results
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Our customers deploy and use our products and services to easily, securely and confidentially send and receive electronic messages, by way of internet communications channels including email and certain social media platforms. Our business and revenue substantially depend on our current and potential customers using email and social media to exchange sensitive information electronically. New technologies, products, or business models that could support migration to alternative means of secure communications could be disruptive to our business. If prospective or current customers were to send and receive sensitive information using technology or communication channels other than email or the social media platforms that we support, our growth prospects and our business, financial condition and financial results could be materially adversely affected
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Our business depends on market acceptance of our products and services, and our failure to achieve and maintain influential customers could negatively affect our business, financial condition and financial results.
In order to continue to operate profitably and grow, we must achieve and maintain broad market acceptance of our products and services at a price that provides us with an acceptable rate of return relative to our costs. We have been successful in selling our Email Encryption products and services to high-profile customers in the healthcare, financial services and government segments of the market. The acceptance and use of our products and services by those significant customers facilitates our sales to other potential customers, and an expanding base of users in the Zix Directory aids in our market penetration and expansion. The loss of an influential customer of our existing products and services, or the failure to achieve sufficient market adoption of new products including ZixProtect and ZixArchive, could impair our ability to expand the market penetration of our products and services, or cause us to
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reduce or increase prices, which could reduce our revenues and net income and materially adversely affect our business, financial condition and financial results.
Our business relies on securing new customer subscriptions and subscription renewals from existing customers.
A large portion of our revenue is derived from customer subscriptions, and existing customers have no contractual obligations to purchase beyond the initial subscription or contract period. Our ability to grow our business is dependent in part on customers renewing their existing subscriptions and purchasing additional solutions or services after the initial term of their agreement. Though we maintain and analyze historical data with respect to rates of customer renewals, upgrades and expansions, those rates may not accurately predict future trends in renewal of certain products and services offered by us. If our customers cancel or amend their agreements with us during their term, do not renew their agreements, renew on less favorable terms or do not purchase additional solutions or products during renewal periods, our revenue may grow more slowly than expected or decline and our profitability may be harmed.
Additionally, we have experienced, and expect to continue to experience, some level of attrition with existing customers and we may not maintain historical subscription rates, and we may be unable to accurately predict our customer renewal rates. Although we have historically retained approximately 90% of our recurring revenue on an annual basis, there has been some recent decline in such retention and our customers’ renewal rates may further decline or fluctuate as a result of a number of factors, including the level of their satisfaction with our products and technical support services, customer merger or acquisition activity, customer budgets, the pricing of our products compared with those offered by our competitors, technology trends, the prevailing regulatory regime and general market conditions. If new subscriptions or subscription renewals decline from their current levels, our revenue or revenue growth may decline, and our business may suffer which could have a materially adverse effect on our financial performance.
The security of our networks and data centers is critical to our business and an actual or perceived breach of security through a cyber-attack or otherwise could cause us to lose customers and could negatively affect our reputation, business, financial condition and financial results.
We are dependent on our networks and data centers to provide our products and services. Due to the nature of the products and services we provide and the sensitive nature of the information we collect, process, store, use and transmit, we may face cyber-attacks, data protection breaches, computer viruses and other similar disruptions from unauthorized tampering or human error that attempt to penetrate and could harm our networks and data centers. Our business depends on customers having and maintaining confidence that we provide effective network and security protection. To reduce the risk of a successful cyber-attack or similar event, we have implemented significant physical and logical security measures to detect, identify and mitigate threats as well as to monitor for and respond to potential breaches and incidents. Despite these security measures, our networks and data centers may remain vulnerable. We may not be able to correct a security flaw or particular vulnerability promptly, or at all. Further efforts to limit the ability of malicious third parties to disrupt or undermine our security efforts may be costly to implement and may not be successful. If a cyber-attack or other breach of security occurs, or is perceived to have occurred, in our internal systems or at our data centers and networks, it could cause negative publicity, interruption of our services, damage to our reputation, unauthorized disclosure of our customers’ confidential or proprietary information (including personally identifiable information), disclosure of our intellectual property, disclosure, modification or removal of our confidential or sensitive information, theft or unauthorized use or publication of our trade secrets, loss of customers, lost revenue and increased expense (including potentially indemnification or warranty costs), any of which could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and financial results.
Public key cryptography technology used in our businesses is subject to technology integrity risks that could reduce demand for our products and services and could negatively affect our business, financial condition and financial results.
Our business employs public key cryptography technology and other encryption technologies to encrypt and decrypt sensitive data. The security afforded by encryption depends on the integrity of the private key, which is predicated on the assumption that it is very difficult to mathematically derive the private key from the related public key. Successful decryption of intercepted encrypted email, or public reports of successful decryption, whether or not true, could reduce demand for our products and services. If new methods or technologies, such as quantum computing, make it easier to derive the private key from the related public key, the security of encryption services using public key cryptography technology could be impaired and our products and services could become less marketable. That could require us to make significant changes to our products and services, which could increase our costs, damage our reputation, or otherwise harm our business. Any of these events could reduce our revenues, increase our expenses and materially adversely affect our business, financial condition and financial results.
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Our business depends substantially on our da
ta center facilities and other systems and infrastructure provided by third parties, and their unreliability or unavailability for a significant period could cause us to lose customers and could negatively affect our business, financial condition and finan
cial results.
Our business relies on third-party suppliers of computer, cloud and telecommunications infrastructure to provide our products and services through the global Internet and to provide network access between our data centers, our customers and end-users of our products and services. Much of the computer and communications hardware upon which our businesses depend is located in our data center facilities in North America and in the United Kingdom. Our data centers might be damaged or interrupted as a result of numerous factors, many of which are beyond our control, including fire, flood, power loss, mechanical failure, telecommunications failure, break-ins, cyber-attacks, sabotage, vandalism, earthquakes, terrorist attacks, hostilities or war or other events. Computer viruses, equipment failure, denial of service attacks, and similar disruptions affecting the internet, infrastructure supplied by third parties or our systems might cause service interruptions, delays and loss of critical data, and could prevent us from providing our services. Problems affecting our data center operations or the networks on which we rely, whether or not in our control, could result in loss of revenues, increased expenses, failure to achieve market acceptance, diversion of resources, injury to our reputation, liability and increased costs, and may cause our customers to terminate or elect not to renew their agreements. We do not carry sufficient insurance to compensate us for all losses that may occur as a result of any of these events. Though our products generally tolerate isolated supplier failures, the occurrence of any of these events, including multiple supplier outages or problems, could materially adversely affect our business, financial condition and financial results.
Outages or problems with systems and infrastructure supplied by third parties could negatively affect our business, financial condition and financial results.
Our business relies on third-party suppliers of the telecommunications infrastructure. We use various communications service suppliers and the global internet to provide network access between our data centers, our customers and end-users of our products and services. If those suppliers do not enable us to provide our customers with reliable, real-time access to our systems, we may be unable to gain or retain customers. These suppliers periodically experience outages or other operational problems as a result of internal system failures or external third-party actions. Though our products generally tolerate isolated supplier failures, multiple supplier outages or problems could materially adversely affect our business, financial condition and financial results.
The infrastructure supporting our business may suffer capacity constraints and business interruptions that could cause us to lose customers, increase our operating costs and could negatively affect our business, financial condition and financial results.
Our business depends on our providing our customers reliable, real-time access to our data centers and networks. Customers will not tolerate a service hampered by slow delivery times, unreliable service levels, service outages, or insufficient capacity. System capacity limits or constraints arising from unexpected increases in our volume of business or network traffic could cause interruptions, outages or delays in our services, or deterioration in their performance, or could impair our ability to process transactions. We may not be able to accurately project the rate of increase in usage of our systems or to timely increase capacity to accommodate increased traffic on our systems. System delays or interruptions may prevent us from efficiently providing services to our customers or other third parties, which could result in our losing customers and revenues, or incurring liabilities that could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and financial results.
The growth of our business may require significant investment in systems and infrastructure and these investments may achieve delayed, or lower than expected benefits, which could impair our profitability and negatively affect our business, financial condition and financial results.
As our operations grow in size and scope, we continually need to improve and upgrade our technology offerings, systems and infrastructure to offer an increasing number of customers enhanced products, services, features and functionality, while maintaining the reliability and integrity of our systems and infrastructure and pursuing reduced costs per transaction. Expanding our technology offerings, systems and infrastructure may require us to commit substantial financial, operational and technical resources, with no assurance that the volume of our business will increase, which could reduce our net income, deplete our cash, and materially adversely affect our business, financial condition and financial results. Developing and launching new product offerings adjacent to or outside of our core service offerings can be particularly costly in terms of capital investments for both product development and marketing. At the same time, these new offerings involve greater uncertainty concerning both market acceptance and our ability to successfully execute a sales and marketing strategy that justifies our investments. Our failure to properly manage and execute new product initiatives could materially adversely affect our business, financial condition and financial results.
Because we recognize subscription revenue over the term of the applicable customer agreement, a decline in subscription renewals or new service agreements may not be reflected immediately in our operating results.
We generally recognize revenue from customers ratably over the terms of their customer agreements, which are typically one year or two years. As a result, much of the revenue we report in each quarter is deferred revenue from customer agreements entered
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to during previous quarters. Consequently, a decline in new or renewed client agreements in any one quarter will not be fully reflected in our revenue or our results of operations until future periods. Accordingly, this revenue recognition model also makes
it difficult for us to rapidly increase our revenue through additional sales in any period, as revenue from new clients must be recognized over the applicable subscription term.
Our failure to keep pace with rapid technology changes could have a negative impact on our business, financial condition and financial results.
The markets for our products and services are characterized by rapid technological developments and frequent changes in customer requirements. We must continually improve the performance, features and reliability of our products and services, particularly in response to competitive offerings, to keep pace with these developments. We must ensure that our products and services address evolving operating environments, devices, industry trends, certifications and standards. For example, we have been required to expand our offerings for virtual computer environments and mobile environments to support a broader range of mobile devices. We also may need to develop products that are compatible with new operating systems while remaining compatible with existing, popular operating systems. Our business could be harmed by our competitors announcing or introducing new products and services that could be perceived by customers as superior to ours. We spend considerable resources on technology research and development, but our research and development resources are more limited than many of our competitors.
In addition, we are also focused on addressing new and accelerating market trends, such as the continued decline of on premise email security and advance threat protection solution and the continued transition towards cloud-based solutions, which requires us to continue to improve our product and service offerings. We may experience delays in the anticipated timing of activities related to our efforts to address these challenges and higher than expected or unanticipated execution costs. Our failure to introduce new or enhanced products on a timely basis, to keep pace with rapid industry, technological or market changes or to gain customer acceptance for our new and existing products and services, such as mobile device data protection, could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and financial results.
We face strong competition, which could negatively affect our business, financial condition and financial results.
The markets in which we compete are characterized by rapid change and converging technologies and are very competitive. With rising demand for private and secure email communications, there is strong competition for email encryption products and services. Our Email Encryption Threat Protection, Archive, and Data Loss Prevention business competes with products and services offered by companies such as Microsoft, Barracuda Networks, Inc., Proofpoint, MIMECast, Virtru, and Micro Focus (Voltage). Our ZixOne business competes with products and services offered by companies such as AirWatch/VMWare, Citrix (with XenMobile), Blackberry, IBM/Fiberlink (with MaaS360), Microsoft (with ActiveSync), and MobileIron. Strong competition requires us to develop new technology solutions and service offerings to expand the functionality and value that we offer to our customers. Our competitors may develop products and services that are perceived by customers as equivalent to, or having advantages over, our products and services. Competitors could capture a significant share in our markets, causing our sales and revenue to decline or grow more slowly. Barriers to entry are relatively low, and new ventures are often formed that create products competitive with our products. Competitive pressures could lead to price discounting or to increases in expenses such as advertising and marketing costs. Increased competition could also decrease demand for our products and services. Competition could reduce our revenues and net income and materially adversely affect our business, financial condition and financial results.
Industry consolidation may lead to increased competition and may harm our operating results.
There has been a trend toward industry consolidation in our industry for several years. We expect this trend to continue as companies attempt to strengthen or hold their market positions in an evolving industry and as companies are acquired or are unable to continue operations. For example, some of our current and potential competitors have made acquisitions, or announced new strategic alliances. Companies that are strategic alliance partners in some areas of our business may acquire or form alliances with our competitors, thereby reducing their business with us. We believe that industry consolidation may result in stronger competitors that are better able to compete as sole-source vendors for customers. This could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and financial results.
Some competitors have advantages that may allow them to compete more effectively than us, which could negatively affect our business, financial condition and financial results.
Some of our competitors have longer operating histories, more extensive operations, greater name recognition, larger technical staffs, bigger product development and acquisition budgets, established relationships with more distributors and hardware vendors, and greater financial and marketing resources than we do. These advantages might enable them (independently or through alliances) to develop and expand functionality of products and services faster than we can, to spend more money to market and distribute products and services than we can, or to offer their products and services at prices lower than ours. These advantages could reduce our revenues and net income and materially adversely affect our business, financial condition and financial results.
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If we do not effectively expand and train our sales force, we may be unable to add new customers
or increase sales to our existing customers and our business may be harmed.
We continue to be substantially dependent on our sales force to obtain new customers and to sell additional solutions to our existing customers. We believe that there is significant competition for sales personnel with the skills and technical knowledge that we require. Our ability to achieve significant revenue growth will depend, in large part, on our success in recruiting, training and retaining sufficient numbers of sales personnel to support our growth. New hires require significant training and, in most cases, take significant time before they achieve full productivity. Our recent hires and planned hires may not become as productive as we expect, and we may be unable to hire or retain sufficient numbers of qualified individuals in the markets where we do business or plan to do business. If we are unable to hire and train sufficient numbers of effective sales personnel, or the sales personnel are not successful in obtaining new clients or increasing sales to our existing client base, our business will be harmed.
If we do not successfully manage our strategic alliances, we may not realize the expected benefits from such alliances and we may experience increased competition or delays in product development.
We have entered into several strategic alliances with other companies to offer complementary products and services. These arrangements are generally limited to specific projects or series of projects, and their main goal is generally to facilitate product compatibility and adoption of industry standards. There can be no assurance that we will realize the expected benefits from these strategic alliances. If successful, these relationships may be mutually beneficial and result in industry growth. However, alliances carry an element of risk because, in most cases, we must compete in some business areas with a company with which we have a strategic alliance and, at the same time, cooperate with that company in other business areas. Also, if these partner companies fail to perform or if these relationships fail to materialize as expected, we could suffer delays in product development or other operational difficulties.
We enlist third-party distributors to market our products and services, and our failure to succeed in those relationships could negatively affect our business, financial condition and financial results.
We distribute a significant percentage of our products and services by entering into alliances with third parties who can offer our products and services along with their own or our competitors’ products and services. Increased reliance on third parties to market and distribute our products and services exposes us to a variety of risks. For example, we have limited control over and visibility into the sales cycles of third-party distributors, which could increase the length of our sales cycle, cause our revenue to fluctuate unpredictably and make it difficult to accurately forecast our revenue. In addition, we may not succeed in developing or maintaining marketing alliances. Companies with which we have marketing alliances may in the future discontinue their relationships with us, form marketing alliances with our competitors, or develop and market their own products and services that compete with ours. If a significant distributor were to discontinue its relationship with us, we could experience an interruption in the distribution of our products and services and our revenues could decline. Our failure to develop, maintain and expand strategic distribution relationships could reduce our revenues and net income and materially adversely affect our business, financial condition and financial results.
Our future growth and success may be affected by acquisitions. If we are not able to successfully identify, negotiate, complete and integrate acquisitions, our operating results and prospects could be harmed.
We have acquired and expect to continue to acquire new products and technology, as well as customers, through acquisitions. The success of our future acquisition strategy will depend on our ability to identify, negotiate, complete and integrate acquisitions. Acquisitions are inherently risky, and any acquisition we complete may not be successful. Acquisitions we pursue involve numerous risks, including the following:
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difficulties in integrating and managing the operations and technologies of the companies and assets we acquire;
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diversion of our management’s attention from normal daily operations of our business;
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our inability to maintain the customers, the key employees, the key business relationships and the reputations of the businesses and products we acquire;
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our inability to generate sufficient revenue from acquisitions to offset increased expenses generally associated with acquisitions;
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difficulties in predicting or achieving synergies and cost savings between our existing businesses and acquired businesses;
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our responsibility for the liabilities of the businesses we acquire, including liabilities arising out of their failure to operate correctly, maintain effective data security, data integrity, disaster recovery and privacy controls prior to acquisition, or their infringement or alleged infringement of third-party intellectual property, contract or data access rights prior to acquisition;
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difficulties in complying with new markets or regulatory standards to which we were not previously subject;
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difficulties or unanticipated expenses associated with development work that is necessary to achieve interoperability between our pro
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difficulties or unanticipated expenses associated with migrating customers from products and solutions developed by our acquisition targets to our own products and solutions;
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delays in our ability to implement internal standards, controls, procedures and policies in the businesses we acquire; and
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adverse effects of acquisition activity on the key performance indicators we use to monitor our performance as a business.
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Unanticipated events and circumstances occurring in future periods may affect the realizability of intangible assets that we are required to record on our balance sheet as a result of acquisitions. These events and circumstances could include significant under-performance relative to projected future operating results and significant changes in our overall business or product strategies. Such events and circumstances may cause us to revise our estimates and assumptions used in analyzing the value of our intangible assets, and any such revision could result in a non-cash impairment charge that could have a material impact on our financial results.
Unfavorable economic environments, particularly in the U.S., could negatively affect our business, financial condition and financial results.
Challenging economic conditions worldwide have from time to time contributed, and may continue to contribute, to slowdowns in the technology and networking industries at large, as well as in the email/data security market and in specific geographic markets in which we operate. If economic growth in those markets, particularly in the U.S., which accounts for a substantial majority of our revenue, slows, or credit is unavailable at a reasonable cost, current and potential customers may delay or reduce technology purchases, including the deployment or expansion of our products and services. Additionally, as we continue our corporate strategy of exploring additional international markets, we may become more susceptible to unfavorable economic environments outside the U.S. and that could compound the negative effects of unfavorable economic environments in markets in which we currently operate. This could result in reduced sales of our products and services, longer sales cycles, slower adoption of new technologies and increased price competition. In addition, adverse economic conditions could negatively affect the cash flow of our customers and distributors, which might result in failures or delays in payments to us. This could increase our credit risk exposure and delay our recognition of revenue. Specific economic trends, such as declines in the demand for cloud computing services and computing devices, or softness in corporate information technology spending, could have a more direct impact on our business. If these conditions persist, spread or deteriorate further, our business, financial condition and financial results could be materially adversely affected.
If our products do not work properly or have security vulnerabilities, our reputation, business, financial condition and financial results could be negatively affected and we could experience negative publicity, declining sales and legal liability.
The threats facing our customers are constantly evolving and the techniques used by experienced hackers to access or sabotage data change frequently, often are not recognized until launched against a target, and may originate from less regulated or remote areas around the world. As a result, we must constantly update our product solutions to respond to these threats. We produce complex solutions that incorporate leading-edge technology, including both hardware and software, that must operate in a wide variety of technology environments. Software may contain defects or “bugs” that can interfere with expected operations or introduce security vulnerabilities that can lead to unauthorized use or data loss. There can be no assurance that our testing programs will be adequate to detect all defects prior to the product being introduced, which might decrease customer satisfaction with our products and services. The product reengineering cost to remedy a product defect or mitigate vulnerabilities could be material to our operating results. Our inability to cure a product defect could result in the temporary or permanent withdrawal of a product or service from the market, a security breach, negative publicity, damage to our reputation, failure to achieve market acceptance, lost revenue and increased expense, any of which could have a material adverse effect on our reputation, business, financial condition and financial results.
Our transmission and storage of personally identifiable information, including the personal data of European data subjects and other confidential information, and the potential for inadvertent exposure of PII or CI, could cause us to violate data privacy laws or lose customers and could negatively affect our business, financial condition and financial results.
We transmit and store large amounts of personally identifiable information (“PII”) about individuals, which may include healthcare or financial information, and other confidential information (“CI”). Although we have established, and continue to develop and enhance, security measures and controls to help protect against unauthorized disclosure of such PII and other CI, an inadvertent disclosure of, or unauthorized third-party access to, PII or CI, could disrupt our operations, damage our reputation and subject us to claims or other liabilities.
In addition, our processing and storage of certain types of data is subject to confidentiality agreements with our clients and handling PII is increasingly subject to a variety of changing privacy and data security regulations around the world. For example, the collection and use of personal data in the European Union, previously governed by the provisions of the Data Protection Directive, were replaced with the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, in May 2018. GDPR imposes several requirements relating to
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the collection, use, processing and transfer of pe
rsonal data, such as requirements for using consent or other legal grounds to process personal data, providing information to individuals about how their personal data is used, maintaining adequate security and data protection measures, giving data breach
notifications, complying with individuals’ requests to access, correct or delete their personal data and using third-party processors of personal data. GDPR also maintains the European Union’s strict rules limiting the transfer of personal data out of the
European Economic Area. Failure to comply with the requirements of GDPR and the applicable national data protection laws of the European Union Member States may result in fines and other administrative penalties. GDPR will introduce substantial potential f
ines for violations and increase our responsibility and liability in relation to personal data that we process. To comply with the GDPR, we may be required to put in place additional technical and administrative measures and controls mechanisms. This may b
e onerous and adversely affect our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects. Such laws and regulations are subject to new and differing interpretations and may be inconsistent among jurisdictions. For example, in October 2015, the
European Court of Justice invalidated the U.S.-EU Safe Harbor framework that had been in place since 2000, which allowed companies including us to meet certain European legal requirements for the transfer of personal data from the European Economic Area t
o the United States. In the wake of that decision, we decided to participate in the new EU-U.S. Privacy Shield framework established by the U.S. Department of Commerce and the European Commission and opened for participation on August 1, 2016. We applied f
or and were approved for certification and are now an Active Participant in the Privacy Shield program. Our Privacy Shield self-certification was finalized by the Department of Commerce and became effective as of November 9, 2016 and was renewed in Novembe
r 2017. This allows us to transfer personal data of European data subjects that we receive from customers to the United States, in compliance with the Privacy Shield principles. While our Privacy Shield certification and other mechanisms (such as Model Cla
uses) to lawfully transfer such data remain in place, those mechanisms are also subject to pending legal challenges and these legal challenges may result in different European data protection regulators applying differing standards for the transfer of pers
onal data. Future changes in requirements under these regulations may be inconsistent with our existing data management practices. If so, we could be required to fundamentally change our business activities and practices or modify our software, which could
have an adverse effect on our business, including increased cost of compliance and limitations on data transfer for us and our customers.
Any inability to adequately address privacy concerns, even if unfounded, or to comply with applicable privacy or data protection laws, regulations and policies, could result in additional costs and liability to us, damage our reputation, inhibit sales, and harm our business. Furthermore, any inadvertent disclosure of, or unauthorized access (including due to a cyber-attack) to, PII or other CI or other failure by us to comply with data privacy requirements could subject us to significant penalties, damages, remediation and other expenses, and damage our reputation, any of which could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and financial results.
Problems with protecting and enforcing our intellectual property rights could negatively affect our business, financial condition and financial results.
We rely on a combination of contractual rights, trademarks, trade secrets, patents and copyrights to establish and protect intellectual property rights and other proprietary rights in our products and services. These intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights might be challenged, invalidated or circumvented. The steps we have taken to protect our proprietary information may not prevent its misuse, theft or misappropriation. Competitors may independently develop technologies or products that are substantially equivalent or superior to our products or that inappropriately incorporate our intellectual property rights or other proprietary technology into their products. Competitors may hire our former employees who may misappropriate our intellectual property rights or other proprietary technology. Some jurisdictions may not provide adequate legal protection of our intellectual property rights or other proprietary technology.
We may have to defend or assert our rights in intellectual property that we use in our products and services, and we could be found to infringe the intellectual property rights of others, which could be disruptive and expensive to our business.
We may have to defend against claims that we or our customers are infringing the rights of third parties in patents, copyrights, trademarks and other intellectual property. If we acquire technology to include in our products and services from third parties, our exposure to infringement actions may increase because we must rely upon these third parties to verify the origin and ownership of such technology. Also, we may be required to spend significant resources to monitor and protect our intellectual property rights, including initiating claims or litigation against third parties for infringement or misappropriation. Intellectual property litigation and controversies are disruptive and expensive, whether or not resolved in our favor. Even unmeritorious claims brought against us or our customers may harm our reputation and customer relationships, may cause us to incur significant legal and other fees to defend, and may have to be settled for significant amounts. Infringement claims against us could require us to develop non-infringing products and services or enter into expensive royalty or licensing arrangements. Our business, financial condition and financial results could be materially adversely affected if we are not able to develop non-infringing technology or license technology on commercially reasonable terms.
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We may face risks from using “open source” software that could negatively af
fect our business, financial condition and financial results.
Like many other software companies, we use “open source” software in order to take advantage of common industry building blocks and to add functionality to our products quickly and inexpensively. Open source software license terms could adversely affect our intellectual property rights in our products that include open source software. Depending upon how the open source software is deployed, we could be required to offer products that use the open source software for no cost, or make available the source code for modifications or derivative works. Any of these obligations could have an adverse impact on our intellectual property rights and revenue from products incorporating the open source software. Using open source code could also cause us to inadvertently infringe third-party intellectual property rights or require us to publicly disclose proprietary information. We have processes and controls in place that are designed to address these risks and concerns, but we cannot be sure that our process or controls will be sufficient to mitigate all risk in this regard. Open source software might also introduce security vulnerabilities or defective functionality. The open source community may not always respond with adequate urgency to mitigate the impacts of such defects.
We rely on the availability of third-party intellectual property, which may not be accessible to us on reasonable terms or at all.
Some of our products include third-party intellectual property, which may require licenses for our use. For example, a significant portion of the revenue generated by our recently acquired business, Erado, relies on the licensing of certain electronic message API’s, such as those made available by LinkedIn Corporation, SMS providers, Facebook, and other social media channels. Based on past experience and industry practice, we believe that such licenses can be obtained on reasonable terms; however, there can be no assurance that we will be able to obtain or maintain the necessary licenses for new or current products on acceptable terms or at all. Failure to obtain or maintain such licenses may limit our ability to sell our products, which could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and financial results.
We may fail to recruit and retain key personnel, which could impair our ability to meet key objectives.
Our success depends on our ability to attract and retain highly-skilled technical, managerial, sales, and marketing personnel. Changes in key personnel may be disruptive to our business. It could be difficult, time consuming and expensive to replace key personnel. Integrating new key personnel may be difficult and costly. Volatility, lack of positive performance in our stock price or changes to our overall compensation program including our stock incentive program may adversely affect our ability to retain key employees, many of whom are compensated, in part, based on the performance of our stock price. The loss of services of any of our key personnel, the inability to retain and attract qualified personnel in the future or delays in hiring required personnel could make it difficult to meet key objectives. Any of these impairments related to our key personnel could negatively affect our business, financial condition and financial results.
Governmental restrictions on the sale of our products and services in non-U.S. markets could negatively affect our business, financial condition and financial results.
Exports of software solutions and services using encryption technology such as ours are generally restricted by the U.S. government. Although we have obtained U.S. government approval to export our service to almost all countries, the list of countries to which we (and our distributors) cannot export our products and services could be expanded in the future. In addition, some countries impose restrictions on the importation and use of encryption solutions and services such as ours. The cost of compliance with U.S. and other export laws, or our failure to obtain governmental approvals to offer our products and services in non-U.S. markets, could affect our ability to sell our products and services and could impair our international expansion. We face a variety of other legal and compliance risks. If we or our distributors fail to comply with applicable law and regulations, we may become subject to penalties, fines or restrictions that could materially adversely affect our business, financial condition and financial results.
Our sales to government entities are subject to a number of challenges and risks.
Sales to U.S. federal, state and local governmental agency customers have accounted for a significant portion of our revenue in past periods, and we may in the future increase sales to government agencies. Sales to government entities are subject to a number of challenges and risks. Selling to government entities can be highly competitive, expensive and time consuming, often requiring significant upfront time and expense without any assurance that these efforts will generate a sale. Government contractual requirements often carry a high compliance risk. Government certification requirements for solutions like ours may change and in doing so restrict our ability to sell into the federal government sector until we have attained the revised certification. Government demand and payment for our solutions may be impacted by public sector budgetary cycles and funding authorizations, with funding reductions or delays adversely affecting public sector demand for our solutions. Government entities also may have statutory, contractual or other legal rights to terminate contracts for convenience or due to a default, and any such termination may adversely impact our future operating results.
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