Vistaprint 2008 Annual Report Download - page 16

Technology Development
We intend to continue developing and enhancing our proprietary and licensed software programs
and processes. As of June 30, 2008, more than 200 of our employees were engaged in technology
development. Our technology and development expenses were $44.8 million, $27.2 million, and $15.6
million in the years ended June 30, 2008, 2007, and 2006, respectively.
We have designed our infrastructure and technologies to accommodate future growth. We have
designed our website technologies to scale to accommodate future 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
pre-press and print production technologies for aggregating print jobs in preparation for printing 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 printing equipment and increasing overall system throughput.
Our systems infrastructure, web and database servers are hosted in Bermuda. Our hosting
vendor provides communication links, 24-hour monitoring and engineering support. Our hosting vendor
has its own generators and dual network access points. Our site systems are operated 24 hours a day,
seven days a week. We believe this solution is highly scalable, requiring only the addition of relatively
inexpensive servers and processors. We are in the process of establishing additional server
infrastructure in our Dutch and Canadian production facilities.
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 credit card information is
encrypted. We use fraud prevention technology to identify potentially fraudulent transactions.
The Customer Design and Purchase Experience
We recognize that our customers have differing needs, skills, and expertise, and we offer a
corresponding range of customer service options. Our websites offer a full complement of tools and
features allowing customers to create a product design or upload their own complete design, and place
an order on a completely self-service basis. Those customers in German and English-speaking
markets who have started the design process but find that they require some guidance or design help
can, with the assistance of our customer sales and support personnel, obtain real time design or
ordering assistance. Those customers who would like us to prepare designs can call our creative
services group and after an initial conversation, quickly receive custom design and copy options.
Designing Online
Customers visiting our websites can select the type of product they wish to design from our broad
range of available products. When a product type has been selected, the customer can initiate the
design process by using our predefined industry styles and theme categories, by entering one or more
keywords in our image search tool, or by uploading the customer’s own design. If the customer
chooses to do a keyword search, our automated design logic will, in real time, create and display to the
customer a variety of product templates containing images related to the customer’s keyword. When
the customer chooses a particular template for personalization, our user-friendly, browser-based
product design and editing tools are downloaded from our servers to the customer’s browser program.
We enable the customer to quickly and easily perform a wide range of design and editing functions on
the selected design, such as:
‰entering and editing text;
‰cropping images or entirely replacing images with other images;
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