Go Daddy 2015 Annual Report Download - page 18

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Table of Contents
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.
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