Vistaprint 2011 Annual Report Download - page 14

Form 10-K
Technology Development
We intend to continue developing and enhancing our proprietary and licensed software
programs and our manufacturing processes. As of June 30, 2011, more than 360 of our employees
were engaged in technology development. Our technology and development expenses were
approximately 12% of total revenues in the years ended June 30, 2011, 2010, and 2009, 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 equipment and increasing overall system throughput.
Our customer-facing systems infrastructure, web and database servers are hosted in Bermuda
and we maintain data centers for backend server operations in our production facilities. 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, we seek 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.
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 56 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 March 2030. Our primary brand is
“Vistaprint,” and we hold trademark registrations for the Vistaprint trademark in 22 jurisdictions,
including registrations in our major markets in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.
The content of our websites and our downloadable software tools are copyrighted materials
protected under international copyright laws and conventions. These materials are further protected
by the Terms of Use posted on each of our websites, which customers acknowledge and accept
during the purchase process. We currently own or control a number of Internet domain names used in
connection with our various websites, including Vistaprint.com and related names. Most of our
localized sites use local country code domain names, such as Vistaprint.it for our Italian site.
From time to time, we are involved in lawsuits or disputes in which third parties claim that we
have violated their intellectual property rights. In addition, a third party may claim that we have
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