Support.com 2008 Annual Report Download - page 13

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Table of Contents
Technology, Research and Development
Our Consumer technology include a platform infrastructure for delivering services, technical support agent tools and consumer-resident client applications.
Through our Service Delivery Management System, we provide a hosted platform for multi-channel sale and delivery of premium technology services. Through
our Solutions Toolkit, we offer an integrated set of tools for delivery of premium technology services. In addition, our PC Health Check application aids in the
sale of premium technology services by offering recommendations to the consumer based on a quick automated diagnostic of their computer. Our Easy Support
resident client enables subscribers to our premium services to access our technical support agents and facilitates service delivery. We believe our continuing
investments in technology, research and development create competitive advantages for our Consumer offerings.
Our Enterprise software provides self-healing capabilities designed to identify, diagnose and correct potential problems prior to their impact on the
end-user. If an end-user does require assistance, our products are designed to provide an integrated approach to escalating the problem to either self-service
web-based portals or to help desk analysts who use our products to deliver the appropriate resolution to the problem. Many of our products have been designed to
function on a common software platform which is based on a set of patented technologies.
Our Enterprise technology is designed to enable our products to be extended and easily adapt to, and integrate with, varying software environments. Our
solutions support a high degree of scalability using industry standard web server infrastructure and data center practices such as load balancing, clustering and
data partitioning. Many of our products are web-based and provide similar functionality on a variety of web servers, application servers, operating systems and
databases. The product architecture has been used in implementations that scale to several million endpoints. Common services such as user and group
management, user-based security, user interface navigation, database access, extensible markup language handling, reporting and integration are shared by many
of our products, allowing for faster product development.
We devote substantial resources to research and development. Research and development expense was $8.9 million in 2008, $9.4 million in 2007 and
$9.2 million in 2006.
Intellectual Property
As of December 31, 2008, we had eight issued patents in the United States. We also hold patents in Canada, Korea, Singapore and Israel and have patent
applications pending in the U.S. and other jurisdictions. We may or may not seek additional patents in the future. We do not know if our current patent
applications or any future patent application will result in a patent being issued with the scope of the claims we seek, if at all. Also, we do not know whether any
patents we have or may receive will be challenged or invalidated. It is difficult to monitor unauthorized use of technology, particularly in foreign countries where
the laws may not protect our proprietary rights as fully as in the United States, and our competitors may develop technology that competes with ours but
nevertheless does not infringe our intellectual property rights.
We maintain a number of trademarks and service marks associated with our business, including registered trademarks in the U.S. and certain other
jurisdictions.
We own the domain name www.support.com and have rights to the phone number 1-800-PCSUPPORT.
We rely on a combination of copyright, trade secret, trademark and contractual protection to establish and protect our proprietary rights that are not
protected by patent. We also enter into confidentiality agreements with our employees and consultants involved in product development. We generally require
our employees, customers and potential business partners to enter into confidentiality agreements before we will disclose any sensitive aspects of our business.
Also, we generally require employees and contractors to agree to assign and surrender to
10
Source: SUPPORTSOFT INC, 10-K, March 11, 2009