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Table of Contents
14
Technology and Infrastructure
Our technology platform forms the core of many of our solutions, and we have invested significantly to develop a platform
designed to be intelligent, fast, secure and scalable. Our technology and development expenses, including those expenses related
to our technology platform, were $270 million, $251 million and $206 million in 2015, 2014 and 2013, respectively. We have
built a scalable platform allowing us to provide faster business insights at lower costs, develop and introduce new products
quickly and leverage economies of scale to reduce costs and enable next-generation hosting architecture. Our technology stack,
which includes physical infrastructure, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, applications and data science, allows
our customers to build and manage their digital identities and enable access across multiple devices. We seek to continuously
enhance the performance and reliability of our technology infrastructure by investing in faster data centers, peering sites and local
points of presence, both domestically and internationally.
Physical infrastructure
Our physical technology infrastructure includes servers located throughout nine data centers around the world. We have also
invested significantly in our peering architecture and utilize multiple peering sites allowing us to handle high IP transit traffic at
low bandwidth costs. Our large technology infrastructure footprint allows us to leverage economies of scale through low server,
network, storage and processing costs by commoditizing hardware across various systems and leveraging virtualization where
possible.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service
We leverage an Infrastructure-as-a-Service model geared toward the virtualization and automation of common physical data
center components like servers, load balancers, switches and storage. We use open source solutions when possible to eliminate
manual processes and thereby reduce the risk of human error as well as to lower costs. Additionally, we are beginning to use a
single automated infrastructure based on OpenStack to enable next-generation hosting architecture.
Platform-as-a-Service
Our cloud platform offers our customers an integrated and comprehensive set of services saving them time. Our platform is
designed to help us reduce costs, increase personalization and more easily and quickly build and deploy new products. We
continuously invest to develop our platform capabilities and have recently deployed a new authentication platform allowing us to
onboard new products more quickly and securely. We have also deployed Cassandra, an open source distributed database
management system, across our datacenters for improved customer data replication enabling personalization.
Applications
Our platform is highly flexible which allows us to easily integrate third-party offerings and enhance our value proposition to
our customers by offering comprehensive and integrated solutions that can be rapidly scaled up or down and used across multiple
platforms, including mobile. Our platform also allows resellers to easily sell our products, thereby broadening our distribution. We
seek to continuously launch new and relevant applications and streamline our existing offerings in order to provide the best user
experience to our customers.
Data science
Our data collection technology enables us to collect customer, product and business data from various sources, including
web crawling, local listings providers (e.g. Yelp and state business registrations), social platforms (e.g. Facebook and Twitter) and
mobile platforms (e.g. geolocation and e-commerce). We use Hadoop, an open source software framework for storage and large-
scale processing of data sets, to develop an integrated customer insights data platform. By integrating this data, we are able to
offer personalized and intelligent insights and business intelligence to our customers that they can access via dashboards. These
dashboards also enhance our ability to develop and deploy differentiated products and more intelligent Customer Care. We
believe our ability to offer this insight helps us deliver the right solutions targeted to the needs of our customers and attract more
businesses to our platform.