Enom 2011 Annual Report Download - page 12

• identification protection services that help keep domain owners' information private through our ID Protect service;
• web hosting plans for both Linux and Windows; and
• customizable email accounts that allow the customer to set up multiple mailboxes using a domain name.
We have also developed a number of proprietary services designed to help enhance visibility and help drive traffic to our customers' sites, including Business
Listing services to help our customers advertise through Whois lookup inquiries and Rich Content, which allows website owners to add articles and videos
from our content library to their sites.
Technology
Our technologies include software applications built to run on independent clusters of standard and commercially available servers, with
redundancy at each layer: enterprise class storage systems, proprietary application logic and presentation to web visitors. We make substantial use of off the
shelf available open source technologies such as Linux, PHP, MySQL, mongoDB, Memcache, and Lucene in addition to commercial platforms from
Microsoft, including Windows Operating Systems, SQL Server, and .NET. These systems are connected to the Internet via load balancers, firewalls, and
routers installed in multiple redundant pairs. Third-party services are also utilized to geographically deliver data using major Content Distribution Network
("CDN") providers. Virtualization is heavily deployed throughout Demand Media's architecture, which affords scaling dozens of properties in a bi-directional
manner.
Our data centers located in North America and Europe host our various public-facing websites and applications, as well as many of our back-end
business intelligence and financial systems. Each major website is designed to be fault-tolerant, with collections of application servers connecting to a wide
variety of database servers. The infrastructure is equipped with redundant systems as well as enterprise class security solutions to combat events such as
Distributed Denial of Service attacks ("DDoS"). Our environment is staffed and equipped with a full scale monitoring solution, in a 24 hours a day-7 days a
week manner.
Customers
We currently deploy our platform to website publishers and our Registrar products and services to resellers, including large e-commerce websites,
Internet service providers and web-hosting companies and, to a lesser extent, retail consumers. Our top 3 Registrar customers, in the aggregate, represent more
than 7.5% of our total consolidated revenue.
Competition
Content & Media
The online content and media market we participate in is new, rapidly evolving and intensely competitive. Competition is expected to intensify in the
future as more companies enter the space. We compete for business on a number of factors including return on marketing investment, price, access to targeted
audiences and quality. Our principal competitors in this space include traditional Internet companies like Yahoo! and AOL, both of whom are making
significant investments in order to compete with aspects of our business. Additionally, we compete with web portals that focus on particular areas of
consumer interest such as WebMD and About.com. With respect to our social media tools we compete with companies such as Jive Software and Lithium.
Registrar
The markets for domain name registration and web-based services are intensely competitive. We compete for business on a number of factors
including price, value-added services, such as e-mail and web-hosting, customer service and reliability. Our principal competitors include existing registrars,
such as GoDaddy, Tucows and Melbourne IT, and new registrars entering the domain name registration business.
Intellectual Property
Our intellectual property, consisting of trade secrets, trademarks, copyrights and patents, is, in the aggregate, important to our business. We rely on a
combination of trade secret, trademark, copyright and patent laws in the United States and other jurisdictions, together with confidentiality agreements and
technical measures, to protect the confidentiality of our proprietary rights. As of December 31, 2011, we have been granted 11 patents by the United States
Patent and Trademark Office and have 26 patent applications pending in the United States and other jurisdictions. Our patents expire between 2021 and 2031.
We rely more heavily on trade secret protection than patent protection. To protect our trade secrets, we control access to our proprietary systems and
technology and enter into confidentiality and invention assignment agreements with our employees and consultants and confidentiality agreements with other
third parties. In addition, because of the relatively high cost we would experience in registering all of our copyrights with the United States Copyright Office,
we generally do not register the
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