LinkedIn 2014 Annual Report Download - page 15

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For our Sales Solutions, we divide our field sales organization between account executives who
are responsible for attracting new business and relationship managers who focus on renewing and
selling additional seats and solutions to existing customers. Our Sales Solutions products are also
available for purchase online.
Marketing
To date, our member base has grown, in large part, virally based on members inviting other
members to join our network. Through this word-of-mouth marketing, we have been able to build our
brand with relatively low marketing costs. We use the quality of our own products and solutions as our
most effective marketing tool, and word-of-mouth momentum continues to drive member awareness
and trust worldwide.
Customer Support
We believe that customer support is critical to retaining and expanding both our member base and
customers. Our global customer operations group responds to both business and technical inquiries
from individual members, enterprises and professional organizations relating to their accounts and how
to use our features and products. Self-service support is available through our website and customers
can also contact us via email. We have specific premium support teams dedicated to premium
subscribers, online advertisers, and our Talent and Sales Solutions customers.
Customers
Our customers include individuals, enterprises, and professional organizations. No individual
customer represented more than 10% of our net revenue in 2014, 2013 or 2012.
Technology Infrastructure
Our technology platform is designed to create an engaging professional networking experience for
our members and is built to enable future growth at scale. We employ technological innovations to
increase efficiency and scale our business.
Our products rely upon and leverage the massive amounts of data in our network. This rich
dataset has grown exponentially, requiring scalable computing resources. We will continue to invest in
building proprietary technologies and using open sourced technologies for our data, search and
solutions. Our product development expense was $536.2 million, $395.6 million and $257.2 million in
2014, 2013 and 2012, respectively.
Our key technology platforms are described below:
•Professional Graph. Our fully distributed system is comprised of a graph engine where nodes
can represent individuals, companies, schools and other entities and edges can be a connection,
a ‘‘follow,’’ or an employee at a given company. The professional graph holds an individual’s
real-time network and enables a variety of complex calls like establishing the degree by which
two nodes are connected (e.g., second degree vs. third degree).
•Open Sourced Technologies. We deploy aspects of our technology into the open source
community to help increase the speed at which the technology can mature. The combination of
open source and proprietary technologies used in our platforms allows us to quickly deploy our
products at scale. For example, Hadoop is an open source project used to batch compute data
for different features on our website based on our members’ data and traffic patterns. Hadoop
enables us to scale our calculations on an expanding set of data and to perform these
calculations more frequently.
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