Vistaprint 2013 Annual Report Download - page 11

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matching return address labels, magnets, calendars, T-Shirts, pens, websites and similar products. Each of these
automatically generated product offers can be quickly and simply added to the customer’s order.
Automated Cross-Sell and Up-Sell technology permits us to show a customer, while the customer is in the
process of purchasing a product, marketing offers for one or more additional or related products. We use this
technology to dynamically determine the most effective products to offer to customers based on a number of
variables including how the customer reached the website, the customer’s purchase history, the contents of the
customer’s shopping basket and the various pages within the website that the customer has visited.
Localization/Language Map is our content management system that permits all of our localized websites,
and the changes to those websites, to be managed by the same software engine. Text and image components of
our web pages are separated, translated and stored in our managed content database. If a piece of content is
reused, the desired content automatically appears in its correct language on all websites, enabling our localized
websites, regardless of the language or country specific content, to share a single set of web pages that
automatically use the appropriate content, significantly reducing our software installation, deployment and
maintenance costs.
Technology Development
We intend to continue developing and enhancing our proprietary and licensed software programs and our
manufacturing processes. Our technology and development expenses were approximately $165 million (14% of
total revenues), $129 million (13% of total revenues) and $94 million (12% of total revenues) in the years ended
June 30, 2013, 2012, and 2011, respectively.
We have designed our website technologies and infrastructure to scale to accommodate future geographic
expansion and growth in the number of customer visits, orders, and product and service offerings. This Internet-
based architecture makes our applications highly scalable and offers our customers fast system responsiveness
when editing document designs. Our production technologies for aggregating jobs in preparation for manufacturing
are designed to readily scale as we grow. The more individual jobs received in a time period, the more efficiently
aggregations, or gangs, of similar jobs can be assembled and moved to the printing system, thereby maximizing the
efficient use of the production capacity and increasing overall system throughput.
The majority of customer-facing systems infrastructure, web and database servers and all payment
operations are hosted in Bermuda and we maintain data centers for backend server operations, uploads and limited
pre-sales customer-facing activities in our production facilities. Additionally, we host fulfillment of our electronic
offerings from a datacenter facility in Canada and our production facility in the Netherlands and a limited amount on
cloud-hosting providers. Our site systems are operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We believe our IT
solution is highly scalable, requiring only the addition of relatively inexpensive servers and processors.
Security is provided at multiple levels in both our hardware and software. We use 128-bit encryption
technology for secure transmission of confidential personal information between customers and our web servers. All
customer data is held behind firewalls. In addition, customer payment information is encrypted. We use fraud
prevention technology to identify potentially fraudulent transactions.
In addition to our software engineering and IT disciplines, we have a focused research and development
center in Winterthur, Switzerland that is consistently seeking to strengthen our manufacturing and supply chain
capabilities through engineering disciplines such as automation, manufacturing, facilities and new product design,
and process and color control.
Our Competitive Advantage: Intellectual Property
We seek to protect our proprietary rights through a combination of patent, copyright, trade secret, and
trademark law and contractual restrictions, such as confidentiality agreements and proprietary rights agreements.
We enter into confidentiality and proprietary rights agreements with our employees, consultants and business
partners, and control access to and distribution of our proprietary information.
We currently hold 159 issued patents worldwide, and we continue to file new patent applications around the
world. Subject to our continued payment of required patent maintenance fees, our currently issued patents will
expire between December 2017 and May 2030. Our primary brand is “Vistaprint,” and we hold trademark