ITEM 1. Business
Overview
Five9 is a pioneer and leading provider of intelligent cloud software for contact centers. We were “born in the cloud,” and since our inception, we have exclusively focused on delivering our platform in the cloud and are disrupting a significantly large market by replacing legacy on-premise contact center systems. Contact centers are vital hubs of interaction between organizations and their customers and, therefore, are essential to delivering successful customer service, sales and marketing strategies. Our mission is to empower organizations to transform their contact centers into customer engagement centers of excellence, while improving business agility and significantly lowering the cost and complexity of their contact center operations. Our purpose-built, highly scalable and secure Virtual Contact Center, or VCC, cloud platform delivers a comprehensive suite of easy-to-use applications that enable the breadth of contact center-related customer service, sales and marketing functions. We have become an established leader in the cloud contact center market, facilitating more than six billion call minutes between our more than 2,000 clients and their customers per year. We believe our ability to combine software and telephony into a single unified platform that is delivered in the cloud creates a significant advantage.
We believe adoption of cloud contact center software solutions is increasing rapidly as a result of several distinct trends. The increasing adoption of cloud computing, especially within customer relationship management, or CRM, is creating strong demand for integrated cloud contact center software solutions. In addition, cloud contact center software solutions now offer the functionality required by large, complex enterprise contact centers. Furthermore, we believe organizations typically refresh their on-premise contact center systems every eight to 10 years, which provides an opportunity for cloud solutions to replace legacy on-premise contact center systems when these replacement decisions arise. On-premise systems require large up-front investments, long deployment cycles and are burdensome to maintain. These systems are also often inflexible, complex, and require significant duplication of effort and integration across multiple sites. This creates substantial challenges for clients with on-premise contact center systems to implement new features or upgrades, or to integrate with adjacent cloud solutions. As a result, cloud contact center software solutions are replacing legacy on-premise contact center systems.
Our solution, which is comprised of our VCC cloud platform and applications, allows simultaneous management and optimization of customer interactions across voice, chat, email, web, social media and mobile channels, either directly or through our application programming interfaces, or APIs. Our VCC cloud platform matches each customer interaction with an appropriate agent resource and delivers relevant customer data to the agent in real-time through integrations with adjacent enterprise applications, such as CRM software, to optimize the customer experience and improve agent productivity. Our solution ensures our clients always have the latest version of our software. Delivered on-demand, our solution enables our clients to quickly deploy agent seats in any geographic location with only a computer, headset and broadband internet connection, and rapidly adjust the number of contact center agent seats in response to changing business requirements. Unlike legacy on-premise contact center systems, our solution requires minimal up-front investment, can be rapidly deployed and is maintained by us in the cloud.
Our sales model consists of a field sales team that sells our solution into larger opportunities and a telesales team that sells our solution into smaller opportunities. We have developed a proven, high velocity, metrics-driven sales and marketing strategy, which is designed to effectively identify, qualify and close sales opportunities. To complement this go-to-market strategy, we have developed a large ecosystem of technology and system integrator partners and independent software vendors to help increase awareness of our solution in the market and drive additional sales opportunities with new and existing clients. We have also established, and are continuing to increase, our network of master sales agents, which provide sales leads and resellers that sell our solution to new clients. This network has helped us attract additional clients. Our resellers have assisted us in expanding in both domestic and international markets.
We provide our solution through a software-as-a-service, or SaaS, business model with recurring subscriptions based primarily on the number of agent seats and minutes of usage, as well as the specific functionalities and applications our clients deploy.
We have achieved significant growth in recent periods. For the years ended December 31, 2019, 2018 and 2017, our revenues were $328.0 million, $257.7 million and $200.2 million, respectively, representing year-over-year growth of 27% and 29%, respectively. We incurred net losses of $4.6 million, $0.2 million and $9.0 million for
the years ended December 31, 2019, 2018 and 2017, respectively, as a result of increased investment in our growth. As of December 31, 2019, 2018 and 2017, our total assets were $482.4 million, $394.7 million and $128.2 million, respectively. Our recurring revenue model combined with our Annual Dollar-Based Retention Rate, which was 105% as of December 31, 2019, have enhanced our ability to forecast our financial performance and plan future investments. For a description of how our Annual Dollar-Based Retention Rate is calculated, please refer to ITEM 7 “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” in Part II of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
We operate in a single reportable segment. Please refer to the geographical information for each of the last three years in Note 11 of the notes to our consolidated financial statements. Please refer to the discussion of risks related to our foreign operations in the section entitled “ITEM 1A. Risk Factors.”
Industry Overview
Contact centers must evolve in today’s rapidly changing technology environment
Contact centers are vital hubs of interaction between organizations and their customers and are mission critical to the successful execution of customer service, sales and marketing strategies. Both consumer and enterprise technology trends are driving an evolution in contact center strategies. Today, customers increasingly expect seamless communications across multiple channels, including voice, chat, email, web, social media and mobile, thereby increasing the number of touch points between organizations and their customers. Along with these additional channels, customers expect personalized interactions to enhance overall customer service. Delivering customer interactions to an appropriate agent resource, while delivering relevant customer data to the agent in real-time, is crucial in providing effective customer service.
As the needs of organizations and their customers have become more sophisticated, so have the demands for contact centers. Striving for greater efficiency in meeting demand, the use of remote agents and geographically dispersed contact centers has proliferated. To increase capacity and undertake upgrades, on-premise contact centers must unify geographically dispersed agents and hardware, which requires building out teams and facilities to forecasted future capacity and is a long-term undertaking. In order to meet these changing demands, contact centers must upgrade their existing on-premise contact center systems or migrate their contact center operations to the cloud.
Legacy on-premise contact center systems are inefficient
The majority of contact center operations today rely on legacy on-premise contact center systems that include business workflows, as well as hardware and software architectures designed more than a decade ago. Legacy on-premise contact center systems are typically developed for location-specific deployments and are often costly, inflexible, complex and require significant duplication of effort and integration across multiple sites. Key shortcomings of these legacy systems include:
•Long and complex implementation and upgrade cycles. Implementation of legacy on-premise contact center systems requires long deployment timelines and complex integrations with other enterprise systems. Once these systems have been deployed, integrated and customized, upgrades and modifications can be extremely challenging. Due to these customized solutions and complex integrations, clients will often forego or postpone upgrades for fear of disabling key functionality. If they do choose to upgrade, clients are often required to rebuild integrations in order to retain full functionality, which frequently results in significant expenditures of time, resources and capital.
•Inflexible resource deployment. As organizations expand globally, they require the ability to easily manage remote agents and quickly adjust agent seats to accommodate peak call volumes. Most legacy on-premise contact center systems do not provide these capabilities and, as a result, their clients are typically unable to quickly scale their contact center operations in response to changing business needs. This often results in costly over-building of additional capacity to accommodate peak volumes.
•Duplicative technology stacks across multiple sites. Organizations must integrate multiple contact center sites to drive efficiency and create a unified customer view. Organizations running on-premise systems often find themselves with dissimilar systems at each site resulting in non-integrated and inefficient silos of technology. Moreover, technology at each site is in a constant state of change over time. The initial and ongoing integration of these contact center sites for such organizations requires significant ongoing investment.
Our Opportunity
We believe the market for contact center solutions is undergoing a significant shift to the cloud driven primarily by:
•adoption of cloud CRM solutions;
•sophistication of cloud contact center software solutions;
•technology refresh of on-premise contact center systems; and
•simplicity of the cloud vs. complexity of legacy on-premise.
Adoption of cloud CRM solutions has grown as organizations seek to enhance their sales strategies, increase business agility and reduce costs. CRM solutions typically integrate deeply with contact center solutions to provide agents with real-time access to customer information. The shift to cloud CRM and ease of integration are creating significant demand for integrated cloud contact center software solutions. As the market opportunity has expanded, cloud contact center software solutions have evolved to meet the requirements of large, complex enterprise contact centers. We believe organizations have typically refreshed their on-premise contact center systems every eight to 10 years. Given the prevalence of cloud CRM and the capabilities of cloud-based contact centers, cloud solutions are increasingly considered as a replacement alternative to legacy on-premise contact center systems during these refresh decisions.
Our Solution
We deliver a comprehensive, end-to-end cloud software solution for contact centers. Our solution enables organizations of all sizes to enhance customer experience through voice as well as digital engagement channels, improve customer service, retain loyal customers, proactively learn about their needs rather than be reactive only when they call with an issue, increase sales performance and improve the efficiency and cost of their operations. Our solution is designed to enable our customers to comprehensively and seamlessly engage through voice, video, website, mobile, chat, email, click-to-call, callback, social and messaging. Our agent interface is an intuitive modern browser-based design that provides easy visualization of customer profile, context and cross channel history. This solution is built on a modern SaaS architecture, leveraging both our own data centers and the public cloud for certain international voice services. Our Freedom platform provides a modern micro services-based open enterprise architecture built with representational state transfer, or REST, APIs and powerful software development kits, or SDKs, that enables customers, partners and developers to deliver powerful solutions that bridge the context gap between their unique systems. We provide high voice quality at low costs with our Agent Connect service and our call-by-call carrier optimization routing. With our Artificial Intelligence, or AI, enablement layer, combined with our robust Natural Language Processing, or NLP, we can determine customer sentiment, reason for contact and recommend the next best action, augmenting their agents capabilities and thereby enabling enterprises to transform their customers’ experience from reactive interactions into trusted, proactive engagements. Our complete end-to-end capabilities include computer-telephony integration, or CTI, interactive voice response, or IVR, visual IVR, automatic contact distribution, or ACD, with skills-based routing, reporting, dashboards, agent and supervisor desktop, dialer, mobile applications for contact center and customer, pre-built CRM integrations, quality management, speech and desktop analytics, customer surveys and workforce management. Through our acquisition of substantially all of the assets of Whendu LLC, or Whendu, we now provide a “no-code, visual application layer” that allows enterprises to carry forward their custom workflows and accelerates the adoption of the cloud from on-premise contact center systems.
Our cloud contact center solution, which we refer to as our solution, provides the following key elements:
•Rapid implementation, seamless updates and pre-built integrations. Our solution is designed to be deployed quickly and seamlessly with minimal disruption to a client’s operations. The pre-built integrations with leading CRM and other enterprise applications reduce the complexity and burden-of-effort of integrating with the client’s business applications. Our solution is designed to be seamlessly updated so that clients are always operating on the latest version of the software, while maintaining their existing configurations, ensuring minimal disruption to the client’s contact center operations.
•Highly flexible platform. Our solution provides easy administration, configuration and role-based functionalities for agents, supervisors and administrators enabling the rapid adjustment of contact center resources to meet a changing mix of contact channels and peaks-and-troughs in contact volumes.
•Scalable, secure and reliable multi-tenant architecture. Our solution provides organizations of all sizes with the robust contact center functionality, scalability, flexibility and security required in the most sophisticated and distributed environments.
Our solution provides the following key benefits to clients:
•Higher agent productivity. Our solution empowers agent productivity and effectiveness by allowing agents to handle both inbound and outbound calls and interact with customers across multiple digital engagement channels, including voice, chat, email, web, social media and mobile. Our solution gives agents the ability to switch between media channels through an easy-to-use, unified interface that provides agents with all of the relevant content and tools needed to complete the task at hand.
•Improved customer experience. Our intelligent contact routing and self-service IVR capabilities, pre-built CRM integrations, and multichannel engagement ensure that customers receive an omnichannel experience. Each new contact is quickly routed to an appropriate agent resource. Using the rich contact history and additional context through integrations with CRM applications, agents have immediate access to the most current, relevant and accurate information about the customer, resulting in increased first contact resolutions and a more satisfying experience for the customer.
•Enhanced end-to-end visibility. Our solution provides clients’ operations staff, quality team and leadership with a complete view of contact center performance through a comprehensive set of historical reports, real-time dashboards, and quality and performance management tools. Clients can also extract reporting data from our solution for further analysis using a spreadsheet application or using the sophistication of an enterprise business intelligence application. This insight provides an organization-wide view of customer engagement performance and allows clients to quickly determine the appropriate actions required to address changing circumstances.
•Greater operational efficiency. Our solution provides contact center managers and supervisors with significant visibility into their agents’ productivity and effectiveness and the performance of their inbound queues and outbound campaigns. Our solution has robust intelligence and analytics capabilities to help supervisors optimize operations and campaigns in real-time to drive increased efficiency. Our role-based interfaces deliver specific functionality to both desktops and mobile devices to meet the unique needs of agents, supervisors and administrators.
•Compelling value proposition. We provide a unified cloud-based software and telephony platform for contact center operations, including software applications, technology infrastructure, maintenance, monitoring, storage, security, client support and upgrades, which enables our clients to simplify their technology infrastructure and streamline IT costs. We manage upgrades and deployments remotely, resulting in lower total cost of operations relative to legacy on-premise contact center systems that often require in-house technical support staff.
Our Competitive Strengths
We believe that our position as a leading provider of cloud contact center software results from several key competitive strengths, including:
•Cloud-based, enterprise-grade platform and end-to-end application suite. We deliver a cloud-based enterprise-grade platform and applications suite with multi-channel capabilities that allows our clients to manage their entire contact center operation. Our highly scalable, secure and multi-tenant architecture enables us to serve large, distributed enterprises with complex contact center requirements, as well as smaller organizations, all from a single cloud platform.
•Rapid deployment and support of our comprehensive solution. Our high-touch engagement model for larger implementations leverages a proven lifecycle approach including detailed discovery, design, testing, training and optimization. This not only accelerates agent activation, but also targets desired business outcomes. Through the use of tools and processes that have been refined over thousands of customers, we can also efficiently meet the needs of our smaller clients. We offer flexibility and integrate with a number of leading CRM vendors, including: salesforce.com, Inc., or Salesforce, Oracle Corporation, or Oracle, Zendesk, Inc., or Zendesk, Microsoft Corporation, or Microsoft, ServiceNow, Inc., or ServiceNow, and others. Once operational, we offer a high touch premium support service where we assign a technical account manager who has intimate knowledge of the customers’ operations so we can quickly resolve issues
and fine tune the solution. As a result, our clients’ contact centers become fully operational faster and they recognize time to value more quickly than with legacy on-premise contact center systems. Following our acquisition of Whendu, we now are able to combine these comprehensive integrations with over 50 out-of-the-box application adapters that allow our customers to build workflow integrations easily without the need for dedicated developers.
•Reliable, secure, compliant and scalable platform. Our platform delivers what we believe is industry leading reliability utilizing public and private cloud technology; cybersecurity using a defense-in-depth approach; scalability to accommodate the requirements of larger clients; and legal and regulatory compliance features designed to assist our clients in complying with applicable laws, regulations and industry standards including Telephone Consumer Protection Act, or TCPA, Customer Proprietary Network Information, or CPNI, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, various privacy laws including the California Consumer Privacy Act, or CCPA, EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, or PIPEDA, and analogous provincial laws, and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, or PCI DSS.
•Proven, repeatable and scalable go-to-market model. We engage with our clients through a highly scalable and metrics-driven sales and marketing organization that effectively identifies, qualifies and closes sales opportunities. The deep domain expertise of our field sales team is instrumental in selling to larger opportunities, and our highly efficient telesales model enables us to cost-effectively identify, qualify and close a high volume of smaller opportunities. Our ecosystem of technology and system integrator partners increases awareness of our solution and helps generate new sales opportunities. We believe our go-to-market model gives us an efficient and effective means of targeting organizations of all sizes.
•Established market presence and a large, diverse client base. We have a large, diverse client base of over 2,000 organizations across multiple industries. We believe our clients view us as a key strategic solutions provider. The performance, reliability, ease-of-use and comprehensive nature of our solution has resulted in high client retention.
•Extensive partner ecosystem. We have cultivated a robust ecosystem of partners including a variety of leading CRM software vendors such as Salesforce, Oracle, Zendesk, Microsoft and ServiceNow; Workforce Optimization, or WFO, vendors such as Calabrio, Inc., or Calabrio, Verint Systems Inc., or Verint, and Coordinated Systems, Inc., or CSI (rebranded as Virtual Observer); unified communications vendors such as Microsoft Teams (formerly Skype for Business), Fuze, Zoom Video Communications; system integrators such as Accenture PLC, Deloitte Consulting LLP and PwC LLP; master agents and value-added resellers; independent software vendors; and telephony providers such as AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and CenturyLink Communications, LLC. We believe this ecosystem has enabled us to increase our brand awareness and enhance the functionality and value of our solution for our clients.
•Focus on innovation and thought leadership. Since our inception, we have been an innovator of intelligent cloud contact center software. Our investment in research and development has driven our growth and enabled us to deliver a cloud contact center software solution with the features and functionality to power the most complex contact centers. Our extensive domain expertise enables us to enhance our solution and serves as a critical competitive differentiator. We strive to be a thought leader in our industry, identifying and developing cloud capabilities to transform traditional contact center operations into customer engagement centers of excellence. One of the newest transformational technologies is AI, which relies on vast volumes of data. Contact centers are a rich source of this data, from call detail records to full recordings of calls and customer interactions. With recent advances in automatic speech recognition, voice recordings have the potential to quickly become a source for training machine-learning models. We believe that AI is likely to have a profound impact in how businesses deliver service to their customers.
Our Growth Strategy
Our objective is to strengthen our position as a leader in cloud contact center software. To accomplish this goal, we are pursuing the following growth strategies:
•Capture increased market share. We believe that the adoption of cloud contact center software solutions is increasingly driven by mainstream adoption of cloud computing, especially within CRM and unified communications, as well as the increasing capabilities of these solutions. With organizations refreshing their
on-premise contact center systems every eight to 10 years, cloud solutions have an opportunity to replace legacy on-premise contact center systems at the time a replacement decision is made. We believe there is a substantial opportunity for us to win new clients and increase our market share given the strength and client benefits of our cloud solution. We intend to continue to invest aggressively in our sales force and marketing capabilities to win new clients.
•Continue to increase sales in our existing client base. Many of our clients initially deploy our solution to support only a portion of their contact center agents. We intend to increase the number of agents using our solution within our existing clients as they experience the benefits of our cloud solution. We also intend to sell our existing clients incremental applications to increase our revenue and the value of our existing client relationships.
•Maintain our innovation leadership by strengthening and extending our solution. We have an innovative platform that has enabled us to establish a leadership position in the cloud contact center software market. To preserve and expand our leadership position, we intend to continue to make significant investments in research and development to strengthen our existing solution and develop additional industry-leading contact center features and applications. Facilitated by our AI-enablement layer, we plan to provide our customers with innovative AI-powered applications and use-cases, including conversational virtual agents, agent assistance, business insights and AI-powered routing. We are designing our AI products to improve customer experiences and operational effectiveness while potentially realizing significant cost savings for our clients.
• Access to Data. As AI becomes increasingly important in the contact center market, access to data will become a key differentiator among vendors. Leading vendors processing a high number of customer interactions will have more data that can be applied to necessary training of machine learning algorithms, which creates a positive reinforcement cycle that we believe will enable customer contact solutions to be more effective.
•Further develop our partner ecosystem. We have established strong partner relationships with organizations in the contact center ecosystem to further enhance the value of our VCC cloud platform. We intend to continue to cultivate new relationships with additional CRM, WFO and unified communications partners as well as system integrators, master agents, resellers, PBX providers, phone systems vendors, independent software vendors and telephony providers to enhance the value of our solution and drive sales.
•Expand internationally. To date, our primary focus has been on the U.S. market, which represented 92%, 93% and 94% of our revenue in 2019, 2018 and 2017, respectively, based on bill to addresses. We believe there is a significant opportunity for our cloud solution to disrupt incumbent legacy on-premise contact center systems internationally. We plan to increase our sales capabilities internationally by expanding our direct sales force and working with channel partners to target these markets and grow our international client base. We have co-location data center facilities in Europe to provide clients in certain countries of the European Union, or EU, with regional access to our cloud contact center solution to better serve local needs.
•Selectively pursue acquisitions. In addition to organically developing and strengthening our solution, we intend to continue to selectively explore acquisition opportunities of companies and technologies to expand the functionality of our solution, provide access to new clients or markets, or both. We completed acquisition of Whendu in the fourth quarter of 2019 and expect to close acquisition of CSI in the second quarter of 2020.
Our Virtual Contact Center Cloud Platform and Applications
Our cloud contact center software solution consists of our highly scalable VCC cloud platform that delivers a comprehensive suite of easy-to-use, secure applications to cover the breadth of contact center-related customer service, sales and marketing functions. Our VCC cloud platform acts as the hub for digital engagement channels between our clients and their customers. This enables clients to fully manage the end-to-end customer experience in a single unified architecture. Our solution enables our clients to manage customer interactions across multiple channels including voice, chat, email, web, video, social media and mobile and connects them to the most appropriate agent. Whether the resource is an internal contact center agent, an outsourcer, an agent working from home, a knowledge worker or self-service, our solution enables our clients to deliver a highly effective customer experience.
Our solution is built using a multi-tenant architecture and delivered in the cloud. The following diagram illustrates our “API-First” Architecture as well as the VCC cloud platform and comprehensive suite of applications used by agents, supervisors and administrators. In addition, we provide a robust set of management applications including workforce management, reporting, quality management and supervisor tools.
Overall View of Five9 Platform and Customer and Agent Facing Components that Connect With It
Inbound Contact Center: Our VCC cloud platform provides organizations of all sizes with everything they need to handle their inbound customer engagement. This includes the ability to take voice calls, respond to chats and emails, and engage with a wide range of social media sources. Our platform includes a full-featured IVR system that allows our clients to provide a self-service capability and to automatically determine the customer intent and identify the type of resource to best handle the customer inquiry. At the center of our VCC cloud platform is the ACD module, which provides intelligent routing of customer interactions. This enables clients to classify and prioritize customer interactions and ensure that the interactions are delivered to the most appropriate resource to provide the best customer experience and maximize business results.
Through CTI capabilities, out-of-the-box integrations with CRM solutions (such as Salesforce, Oracle, Zendesk, Microsoft and ServiceNow), and easy to use open APIs, clients can provide a personalized customer experience by prioritizing important customers and delivering customer information to the agent handling the interaction. This promotes quick first contact resolution, which is a key factor in delivering a superior customer experience.
Outbound Contact Center: Our Outbound Contact Center application enables our clients to improve the efficiency and productivity of outbound contact center agents. We provide a complete solution for outbound sales and marketing campaigns, including multiple automated dialing options, so our clients can find the right match for their needs and environment, whether outbound business-to-consumer, or B2C, business-to-business, B2B, or 1:1 proactive customer care. We provide a variety of outbound dialer modes, including a patented predictive dialer capability. The predictive dialer greatly enhances the productivity of agents and sales representatives by increasing productive talk time and minimizing idle time spent listening to voicemail and busy signals. These dialer solutions allow our clients to choose the automation capabilities that best align with their contact center environment and objectives, including lead prospecting, qualifying, nurturing and converting. We also provide campaign management tools such as list management, sophisticated dialer rules and agent scripting. In addition, we provide a manual touch mode option that provides tools to outbound clients to comply with the TCPA regulations.
Blended Contact Center: We provide both inbound and outbound capabilities on a single platform to unify contact center operations and enable end-to-end customer engagement. This improves agent productivity as interactions are automatically selected and routed to agents based on interaction volume. When inbound call volumes are low, the blending ability allows clients to shift inbound agent resources to outbound-related functions.
For example, inbound agents can be assigned to the outbound queue for automatic follow-ups on any customer interaction, flag customer surveys for personalized attention, or resolve open customer issues.
Digital Engagement Channels Powered by Five9: Our multichannel applications are powered by a unique set of technologies. These technologies include an advanced NLP engine to filter and categorize interactions, eliminate spam and determine sentiment. Based on a client’s unique set of business policies and needs, our solution provides simpler, smarter and more productive digital engagement channels by offering agents sentiment analysis, clustering, trending topics and relevance. In addition, Five9 powers agent assistance tools to help agents resolve issues quickly.
Five9 VCC integrates voice with chat, email, web, social media and mobile applications for a true omnichannel agent and customer experience.
•Five9 Social - Applies contact center customer service and sales best practices to social channels. Our solution routes, tracks and reports on agent performance in responding to social media posts in the same manner as other channels.
•Five9 Chat - Live consumer-to-agent chat from mobile or web devices gives agents the ability to respond, record and manage multiple chat interactions.
•Five9 Email - Makes email a high-response sales, service and support channel. Our solution’s email routing capability filters and intelligently routes email requests to enable the best qualified agents to respond in a timely manner.
•Five9 Visual IVR - Our solution’s visual IVR application provides mobile customer care for today’s connected customers. It allows clients to develop an IVR script once and deploy it on multiple touchpoints, including mobile devices and websites.
Management Applications: Our integrated portfolio of management applications is built and delivered on our highly scalable and flexible VCC cloud platform. Our solution provides real-time supervisor tools to monitor and manage the performance of agents and call flows. We also provide a suite of configurable management reports to enable clients to manage the end-to-end performance of their contact center operations. For clients with high-end WFO needs, our solution can provide fully integrated workforce and quality management applications through our strategic relationships with Calabrio, Verint and CSI. Our solution has native recording capabilities for contact centers that need to record their interactions.
Our clients can access our VCC cloud platform in five different ways:
•Agent Desktop: Serves as the unified environment for contact center agents. Agents are provided with one easy-to-use desktop that is designed to allow agents to seamlessly conduct omnichannel interactions. Our universal transaction model adjusts to the needs of the interaction, including voice, chat, email, web, social media or mobile, yet feels familiar to the agent, making training simple. Automated call scripting and real-time customer data, such as purchase and interaction history, is delivered to empower agents with the information they need to deliver a superior customer experience as illustrated in the following images.
•CRM Integrations: For clients that prefer to have their agents or sales representatives work within their CRM desktop, we offer pre-built integrations with leading providers of CRM systems such as Salesforce, Oracle, Zendesk, Microsoft and ServiceNow. In addition, professional services can provide integrations with custom or legacy CRM systems. Our solution provides softphone and telephony capabilities within the CRM desktop, and routes each customer interaction to an appropriate agent resource. Agents are able to work within a familiar desktop, equipped with full telephony controls and giving them immediate access to the most current, relevant and accurate information about the customer.
•Supervisor Plus: Provides supervisors with a modern browser-based tool to optimize the contact center and ensure high quality customer interactions. This tool includes a visual supervisor dashboard that provides easy to use visibility into call routing, queues, service levels, workflow management, utilization, campaign statistics and agent productivity. A mobile tablet version of the supervisor application is also available to help supervisors monitor agents, listen in on conversations, coach agents, and oversee queues and agent performance metrics while on the contact center floor. These metrics typically include average handle time, first contact resolution, number of interactions handled and contact outcomes as illustrated in the following images.
•Administrator: Provides administrators with a comprehensive set of integrated tools to easily configure agent skills (such as language, domain expertise, and media channels to service), determine interaction routing strategies, specify IVR scripts and manage the contact center operation. The Five9 Administrator system is easy to use so contact center business personnel can set up and make changes themselves, without having to rely on specialized IT staff often required to manage legacy on-premise contact center systems. This represents a key advantage of our VCC cloud platform as it allows businesses to adapt quickly to keep up with the rapid changes required in contact center operations.
•Reporting and Analytics: Real-time and historical reports provide statistics and key performance indicators to allow executives and supervisors to monitor the contact center, improve reaction time to interaction volume and manage agents more effectively. We provide more than 100 standard reports with multiple views and drill-downs into individual inbound calls and multichannel interaction metrics, customer interaction outcomes, and outbound sales and marketing program metrics. Our reporting module also enables clients to build customized reports and reporting schedules.
Experience Orchestration: The Five9 Engagement Workflow allows businesses to decide how customers can interact with the contact center. At the heart of Engagement Workflow is a powerful drag-and-drop workflow tool that is used to configure the customer experience. This is done using a set of pre-built and configurable modules; speech services such as automated speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis; text services such as NLP; data services such as database query; customization services such as scripting; and real-time rules modules. The Five9 AI-enablement layer is an integral part of Engagement Workflow, which allows AI technologies to be effectively applied to the delivery of experience to the customer.
Five9 Open Platform: We provide a comprehensive set of open APIs and SDKs that allow customers, developer partners, system integrators and independent software vendors to customize our application and to integrate complementary products with the Five9 solution. This open platform approach ensures that customers can have the confidence that the already high level of functionality we provide out-of-the-box can be further customized or enhanced to meet the specific needs of their business.
Clients
We have a large and diverse client base comprised of more than 2,000 organizations as of December 31, 2019, with no single client representing more than 10% of our revenues in 2019, 2018 or 2017. Our client base spans organizations of all sizes across multiple industries, including banking and financial services, business process outsourcers, consumer, healthcare and technology.
Sales
Our sales model consists of a field sales team that sells our solution into larger opportunities and a telesales team that sells our solution into smaller opportunities. We established our business targeting smaller opportunities and have expanded our sales focus to larger opportunities as we gained traction in the market and enhanced the capabilities of our cloud solution. We have developed a disciplined, high volume, metrics-driven sales strategy designed to enable us to efficiently generate and close a large number of new sales opportunities. Our telesales team focuses on qualified leads generated through traffic to our websites, and also supports our field sales team through lead generation and lead-tracking activities. Our field and telesales teams are also responsible for selling to existing clients that may renew their subscriptions, increase the number of agents using our cloud solution, add new applications from our solution and expand the deployment of our solution across their contact centers. We have cultivated strong partner relationships with master sales agents, system integrators and resellers to drive sales of our solution. We have established, and continue to increase, our network of master sales agents, which provide sales leads, and resellers, which sell our solution to new clients. This network has helped us attract additional clients.
Marketing
To build client awareness and adoption of our solution, our lead generation activities consist primarily of client referrals, search engine marketing, internet advertising, digital marketing campaigns, social media, trade shows, industry events, co-marketing with strategic partners, telemarketing and out-of-home campaigns. In addition, our industry analyst, press and media outreach programs, and web site marketing initiatives are designed to build brand awareness and preference for our solution. We offer free trials and services to allow prospective clients to experience the quality and ease-of-use of our cloud solution, to learn about the features and functionality of our VCC cloud platform in more detail, and to quantify the benefits of our cloud solution.
To complement our sales and marketing efforts, we have developed a large ecosystem of software, technology, telephony and system integrator partners and independent software vendors that help increase awareness of our solution and generate new and installed base sales opportunities.
Research and Development
Our ability to compete depends in large part on our continuous commitment to research and development and our ability to improve the functionality of, and add new features to, our VCC cloud platform. Our core research and
development center is based in our San Ramon, California headquarters with additional engineers located in Russia, which allows us to benefit from relatively low-cost and highly skilled software developers. Our engineering team has deep software and telecommunications skills, and works closely with our sales team to identify our clients’ product requirements. In addition, continuous interactions with our partners enable our engineers to enhance the usability and performance of our platform and its integration with best-in-class CRM and other business applications and telephony technologies.
As of December 31, 2019, we had 243 employees in our research and development group. Our research and development expenses totaled $45.2 million, $34.2 million and $27.1 million for the years ended December 31, 2019, 2018 and 2017, respectively. We intend to increase, in absolute dollars and as a percentage of revenue, our research and development spending in 2020 to continue to deliver robust functionality to our clients.
Professional Services
We offer comprehensive professional services to our clients to assist in the successful implementation and optimization of our solution. Our professional services include application configuration, system integration, and education and training. Our clients may use our professional services team for implementing our solution or, in limited cases, they may also choose to perform these services themselves or engage third-party service providers to perform such services. Our cloud solution allows us to eliminate the need for lengthy and complex technology integrations, such as deploying equipment or maintaining hardware infrastructure for individual clients. As a result, we are typically able to deploy and optimize our solution in significantly less time than required for deployments of legacy on-premise contact center systems.
Technology and Operations
Our highly scalable and flexible VCC cloud platform is the result of our extensive research, development, client engagement and operational experience. Our platform is comprised of in-house developed intellectual property, open source products and commercially available hardware and software. Our platform is designed to be redundant and we believe that all components can be upgraded, expanded or replaced with minimal or no interruption in service.
We currently deliver our services globally from four third-party co-location data center facilities located in Santa Clara, California; Atlanta, Georgia; Slough, England and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. We also host some of our voice services on the public cloud in Europe, Asia, South America and Australia. In addition, we are in the process of establishing new public cloud deployments to facilitate our platform in certain international markets. We have partnered with a third-party to develop, test and deploy our technology to offer a full stack of services on the public cloud in certain international markets. Our infrastructure, including our third-party co-location facilities, is designed to support real-time mission-critical telecommunications, applications and operational support systems. Our infrastructure is built with redundant, fault-tolerant components divided into distinct security zones forming protective layers for our applications and customer data.
We have designed and maintain an operations, capacity and security program to monitor and maintain our platform, ensure efficient utilization of the platform capacity and protect against security threats or data breaches. Our operations team monitors our data centers for potential performance issues, unauthorized attempts to access secure data or applications and the overall integrity of the platform.
Competition
The market for contact center software is fragmented, highly competitive and evolving rapidly in response to shifting consumer behavior, especially the rapid adoption of mobile devices and social media. The proliferation of each is driving change in contact center technology, as customers expect companies to give them the option of seamless communication across any channel according to their preference and needs. Combined with the disruptive nature of the cloud in the contact center, this has resulted in competitors who come from different market and product heritages, and who vary in size, breadth and scope of the products and services offered. We currently compete with large legacy telephony vendors that offer on-premise contact center systems, such as Avaya Inc., or Avaya, and Cisco Systems, Inc., or Cisco, and legacy on-premise software companies that come from a CTI heritage, such as Aspect Software, Inc., or Aspect, and Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc., or Genesys (including through its acquisition of Interactive Intelligence Group, Inc., or Interactive Intelligence). These legacy technology and software companies are increasingly supplementing their traditional on-premise contact center systems with competing cloud offerings, through a combination of acquisitions, partnerships and in-house
development. Additionally, we compete with vendors that historically provided other contact center services and technologies and expanded to offer cloud contact center software such as NICE inContact, Inc. We also face competition from many smaller contact center service providers such as Talkdesk and Seranova, as well as vendors offering both unified communications and contact center solutions. In addition, Amazon.com, Inc., or Amazon, and Twilio Inc., or Twilio, have introduced solutions aimed at companies who wish to build their own contact centers with in-house developers. In addition, CRM vendors are increasingly offering features and functionality that were traditionally provided by contact center service providers. CRM vendors also continue to partner with contact center service providers to provide integrated solutions and may, in the future, acquire competitive contact center service providers. These factors could cause CRM vendors to reduce or terminate their partnerships with us, and could result in increased competition. Because CRM integration and partnerships are critical to the success of our solution, these factors could harm our revenue and results of operations.
Our actual and potential competitors may enjoy competitive advantages over us, including greater name recognition, longer operating histories and larger marketing budgets, as well as greater financial and technical resources. With the introduction of new technologies and market entrants, we expect competition to continue to intensify in the future. Our recent, and any future, acquisitions will subject us to new competitors and cause us to face additional and different competition in the markets served by these businesses. We believe the principal competitive factors in our market include:
•breadth and depth of solution features;
•reliability, scalability and quality of the platform;
•ease and speed of deployment;
•ease of application administration and use;
•level of client satisfaction;
•domain expertise in contact center operations;
•integration with third-party applications;
•ability to quickly adapt and upgrade to new and evolving technologies, including AI;
•pricing;
•ability to quickly adjust agent seats based on business requirements;
•breadth and domain expertise of the sales, marketing and support organization;
•ability to keep pace with client requirements;
•extent and efficiency of professional services;
•ability to offer multiple channels of engagement; and
•size and financial stability of operations.
We believe we currently compete effectively with respect to each of the factors identified above.
Intellectual Property
We rely on a combination of patent, copyright, and trade secret laws in the U.S. and other jurisdictions, as well as license agreements, confidentiality agreements and other contractual protections, to protect our proprietary technology. We also rely on a number of registered and unregistered trademarks to protect our brand. In addition, we require our employees and independent contractors involved in development of intellectual property on our behalf to enter into agreements acknowledging that all works or other intellectual property generated or conceived by them on our behalf are our property, and assigning to us any rights, including intellectual property rights, that they may claim or otherwise have in those works or property, to the extent allowable under applicable law.
As of December 31, 2019, our intellectual property portfolio included five registered U.S. trademarks, 10 issued U.S. patents, three pending U.S. patent application and one registered U.S. copyright. As of December 31, 2019, outside the U.S. we also had five issued patents and nine trademark registrations. The expiration dates of our issued patents range from 2031 to 2034. In general, our patents and patent applications apply to aspects of our VCC cloud platform.
We are also a party to various license agreements with third parties that typically grant us the right to use certain third-party technology in conjunction with our solution. We expect that software and other applications in our industry may be subject to third-party infringement claims as the number of competitors grows and the
functionality of applications in different industry segments overlaps. Any of these third parties might make a claim of infringement against us at any time.
Seasonality
We believe that there can be seasonal factors that may cause our revenues in the first half of a year to be lower than our revenues in the second half of the year. During 2019, 2018 and 2017, 54%, 53%, and 53% of our total revenues were generated in the second half of each year. We believe this is due to increased activities in retail, healthcare and education in the second half of each year.
Employees
As of December 31, 2019, we had 1,210 full-time employees, including 528 in technology and operations, 243 in research and development, 296 in sales and marketing and 143 in general and administrative. None of our employees are covered by collective bargaining agreements. We believe our employee relations are good and we have never experienced any work stoppages.
Regulatory
The following summarizes important, but not all, federal, state and foreign regulations that could impact our operations. Federal and state regulations are subject to judicial review, administrative revision and statutory changes through legislation that could materially affect how we and others in this industry operate.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 vests the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, with jurisdiction over interstate telecommunications services, while preserving state and local jurisdiction over many aspects of these services. As a result, telecommunications services are regulated at both the federal and state levels in the United States.
We are classified as a telecommunications service provider for federal regulatory purposes. Since our business is regulated by the FCC, we are subject to existing or potential FCC regulations relating to privacy, disability access, porting of numbers, automatic number dialing, contributions to the federal Universal Service Fund and related funds, or USF, and other requirements. If we do not comply with FCC rules and regulations, we could be subject to FCC enforcement actions, fines and possibly restrictions on our ability to operate or offer certain of our services. Any enforcement action by the FCC, which may be a public process, would hurt our reputation in the industry, possibly impair our ability to sell our services to clients and could harm our business and results of operations. The FTC also has jurisdiction over some of our business practices, including advertising, trade practices, privacy and telemarketing. If we do not comply with FTC rules and regulations, we could be subject to an FTC enforcement action, fines or restrictions on our business practices.
We must comply with numerous federal regulations, including:
•Telephone Consumer Protection Act, or TCPA, which regulates the use of automatic dialing equipment and pre-recorded messages to contact consumers, and the Telemarketing Sales Rule, which has similar obligations as to telemarketing activities;
•The TRACED Act and corresponding forthcoming regulations from the FCC, which requires carriers to authenticate incoming calls;
•CALEA, which requires telecommunications service providers to assist law enforcement in undertaking electronic surveillance;
•contributions to the USF, which requires that we pay a percentage of our revenues resulting from the provision of interstate telecommunications services to support certain federal programs;
•payment of annual FCC regulatory fees based on our interstate and international revenues;
•rules pertaining to access to our services by people with disabilities and contributions to the Telecommunications Relay Services fund;
•FCC rules regarding customer proprietary network information, or CPNI, which require that we not use certain information received from customers as a result of a service provider/customer relationship without customer approval, subject to certain exceptions;
•Federal Trade Commission Act and rules promulgated thereunder, which generally relate to avoiding unfair and deceptive trade practices, our advertising, and privacy practices; and.
•The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, or the CCPA, which requires us to comply with a new privacy framework and disclosure obligations to consumers for whom we hold or process personal data.
In addition, we must make contributions and other payments on our usage-based fees to state and local governmental entities. The tax and fee structure for communications services such as ours is complex, ambiguous and subject to interpretation. If taxing and regulatory authorities enact new rules or regulations or expand their interpretations of existing rules and regulations, we could incur additional liabilities. In addition, the collection of additional taxes, fees or surcharges in the future could increase our prices or reduce our profit margins. Compliance with these regulations may also make us less competitive with those competitors who are not subject to, or choose not to comply with, these regulations. See Note 10 of the notes to consolidated financial statements under ITEM 8 of this Form 10-K for a discussion of our liabilities related to USF matters.
As we expand internationally, we will be subject to laws and regulations in the countries in which we offer our services. Regulation of the solutions we provide outside the U.S. varies from country to country, is often unclear, and may be more onerous than those imposed on our services in the U.S. For example, the European Union adopted a law governing data protection and privacy called the General Data Protection Regulation, or the GDPR, which became effective on May 25, 2018. The law requires companies to meet new and extended requirements regarding the processing of personal data. Non-compliance with the GDPR can trigger steep fines of up to €20 million or 4% of total worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher. In addition, we are subject to Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, or PIPEDA, and the analogous provincial laws, which similarly impose data privacy and security obligations on our processing of personal data. Our regulatory obligations in foreign jurisdictions could harm the use or cost of our solution in international locations as data protection and privacy laws and regulations around the world continue to evolve.
The legislative and regulatory scheme for telecommunications service providers and other solutions we provide will continue to evolve and can be expected to change the competitive environment for these services. It is not possible to predict how such evolution and changes will affect our business or our industry. If we do not comply with current or future rules or regulations that apply to our business, we could be subject to substantial additional fines and penalties, we may have to restructure our service offerings, exit certain markets, accept lower margins or raise the price of our services, any of which could harm our business and results of operations. See “Risk Factors — Risks Related to Regulatory Matters” under ITEM 1A of this Form 10-K for more information.
Company Information
We were incorporated in Delaware in 2001. We operate in a single reportable segment. Our principal executive office is located at Bishop Ranch 8, 4000 Executive Parkway, Suite 400, San Ramon, CA 94583 and our telephone number is (925) 201-2000. Our website address is www.five9.com. Our website and the information contained therein or connected thereto shall not be deemed to be incorporated into this annual report on Form 10-K. We own or have rights to trademarks or trade names that we use in connection with the operation of our business, including our corporate names, logos and domain names. In addition, we own or have the rights to copyrights, trade secrets and other proprietary rights that protect the content of our products. Solely for convenience, some of the copyrights, trademarks and trade names referred to in this annual report on Form 10-K are listed without ©, ® and ™ symbols, but we will assert, to the fullest extent under applicable law, our rights to our copyrights, trademarks and trade names.
Available Information
Our annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K, proxy and information statements and amendments to reports are filed with, or furnished to, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, pursuant to the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, or the Exchange Act. The SEC maintains a website at https://www.sec.gov that contains reports, proxy and information statements and other information regarding Five9 and other companies that file materials with the SEC electronically. Copies of Five9’s reports on Form 10-K, Forms 10-Q and Forms 8-K, may be obtained, free of charge, electronically through our internet website, http://investors.five9.com/sec.cfm as soon as reasonably practicable after such material is filed electronically with, or furnished to, the SEC. The information on our website is not a part of, or incorporated by reference into, this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
ITEM 1A. Risk Factors
Our operations and financial results are subject to various risks and uncertainties. You should consider carefully the risks and uncertainties described below, together with all of the other information in this report. If any of the following risks or other risks actually occur, our business, financial condition, results of operations, and future prospects could be materially harmed, and the price of our common stock could decline.
Risks Related to Our Business and Industry
Our quarterly and annual results may fluctuate significantly, may not fully reflect the underlying performance of our business and may result in decreases in the price of our common stock.
Our quarterly and annual results of operations, including our revenues, profitability and cash flow have varied, and may vary significantly in the future, and period-to-period comparisons of our operating results may not be meaningful. Accordingly, the results of any one quarter or period, or series of quarters or periods, should not be relied upon as an indication of future performance. Our quarterly and annual financial results may fluctuate as a result of a variety of factors, many of which are outside our control and, as a result, may not fully reflect the underlying performance of our business. Fluctuation in quarterly and annual results may harm the value of our common stock. Factors that may cause fluctuations in our quarterly and annual results include, without limitation:
•market acceptance of our solution;
•our ability to attract new clients and grow our business with existing clients;
•client renewal rates;
•client attrition rates;
•our ability to adequately expand our sales and service team;
•our ability to acquire and maintain strategic and client relationships;
•the timing and success of new product and feature introductions by us or our competitors or any other change in the competitive dynamics of our industry, including consolidation, partnership or collaboration among competitors, clients or strategic partners;
•network outages or security incidents, which may result in additional expenses or losses, legal or regulatory actions, the loss of clients, the provision of client credits, and harm to our reputation;
•general economic, industry and market conditions;
•the amount and timing of costs and expenses related to the maintenance and expansion of our business, operations and infrastructure;
•seasonal factors that may cause our revenues in the first half of a year to be relatively lower than our revenues in the second half of a year;
•inaccessibility or failure of our cloud contact center software due to failures in the products or services provided by third parties;
•the amount and timing of costs and expenses related to our research and development efforts or in the acquisition of technologies or businesses and potential future charges for impairment of goodwill from acquired companies;
•our ability to successfully integrate companies and businesses that we acquire and achieve a positive return on our investment;
•our ability to expand, and effectively utilize, our network of master agents, resellers and systems integrators;
•the timing of recognition of revenues under current and future GAAP;
•changes in our pricing policies or those of our competitors;
•increases or decreases in the costs to provide our solution or pricing changes upon any renewals of client agreements;
•the level of professional services and support we provide our clients;
•fluctuations or changes in the components of our revenue;
•the addition or loss of key clients, including through acquisitions or consolidations;
•compliance with, or changes in, the current and future domestic and international regulatory environment;
•the hiring, training and retention of key employees;
•the outcome of litigation or other claims against us;
•the ability to expand internationally, and to do so profitability;
•our ability to obtain additional financing on acceptable terms if and when needed; and
•advances and trends in new technologies and industry standards.
If we are unable to attract new clients or sell additional services and functionality to our existing clients, our revenue and revenue growth will be harmed.
To increase our revenue, we must add new clients, add additional agent seats and sell additional functionality to existing clients, and encourage existing clients to renew their subscriptions on terms favorable to us. As our industry matures, as our clients experience seasonal trends in their business, or as competitors introduce lower cost or differentiated products or services that are perceived to compete favorably with ours, our ability to add new clients and renew, maintain or sell additional services to existing clients based on pricing, cost of ownership, technology and functionality could be harmed. As a result, our existing clients may not renew our agreements or may decrease their number of agent seats, and we may be unable to attract new clients or grow or maintain our business with existing clients, which could harm our revenue and growth.
Furthermore, a portion of our revenue is generated by acquiring domestic and international telecommunications minutes from wholesale telecommunication service providers and reselling those minutes to our clients. As telecommunications rates continue to decrease, we may not be able to resell more minutes to maintain our level of usage revenue.
Our recent rapid growth may not be indicative of our future growth, and if we continue to grow rapidly, we may fail to manage our growth effectively.
For the years ended December 31, 2019, 2018 and 2017, our revenues were $328.0 million, $257.7 million and $200.2 million, respectively, representing year-over-year growth of 27% and 29%, respectively. In the future, as our revenue increases, our annual revenue growth rate may decline. We believe our revenue growth will depend on a number of factors, including our ability to:
•compete with other vendors of cloud-based enterprise contact center systems, including recent market entrants, and with providers of legacy on-premise systems;
•increase our existing clients’ use of our solution and further develop our partner ecosystem;
•strengthen and improve our solution through significant investments in research and development and the introduction of new and enhanced solutions;
•introduce our solution to new markets outside of the United States and increase global awareness of our brand;
•selectively pursue acquisitions that enhance our solution offerings; and
•respond to general macro economic factors and industry and market conditions.
If we are not successful in achieving these objectives, our ability to grow our revenue may be harmed. In addition, we plan to continue to invest in future growth, including expending substantial financial and other resources on:
•sales and marketing, including a significant expansion of our sales and professional services organization;
•our technology infrastructure, including systems architecture, management tools, scalability, availability, performance and security, as well as disaster recovery measures;
•solution development, including investments in our solution development team and the development of new solutions, as well as new applications and features for existing solutions;
•international expansion; and
•general administration, including legal, regulatory compliance and accounting expenses.
Moreover, we continue to expand our headcount and operations. We grew from 860 employees as of December 31, 2017 to 983 employees as of December 31, 2018, and to 1,210 employees as of December 31, 2019. We anticipate that we will continue to expand our operations and headcount in the near term and beyond. This growth has placed, and future growth will place, a significant strain on our management, administrative, operational
and financial resources, company culture and infrastructure. Our success will depend in part on our ability to manage this growth effectively while retaining personnel. To manage the expected growth of our operations and personnel, we will need to continue to improve our operational, financial and management controls and our reporting systems and procedures. Failure to effectively manage growth could result in difficulty or delays in adding new clients, declines in quality or client satisfaction, increases in costs, system failures, difficulties in introducing new features or solutions, the need for more capital than we anticipate or other operational difficulties, and any of these difficulties could harm our business performance and results of operations.
The expected addition of new employees and the capital investments that we anticipate will be necessary to help us grow and to manage that growth will make it more difficult for us to generate earnings or offset any future revenue shortfalls by reducing costs and expenses in the short term. If we fail to manage our anticipated growth, we will be unable to execute our business plan successfully.
Failure to adequately retain and expand our direct sales force will impede our growth.
Key to our success is the continuity of our direct sales force. We need to continue to retain key members of our direct sales force while expanding and optimizing our sales infrastructure in order to grow our client base and business. We plan to continue to expand our direct sales force, both domestically and internationally. Identifying and recruiting qualified personnel and training them in the use and sale of our solution requires significant time, expense and attention. It can take several months before our sales representatives are fully trained and productive. Our business may be harmed if we fail to retain key members of our direct sales force or if our efforts, and the expense incurred, to expand and train our direct sales force do not generate a corresponding increase in revenues. In particular, if we are unable to hire, develop and retain talented sales personnel or if new sales personnel are unable to achieve desired productivity levels in a reasonable period of time, we may not be able to realize the expected benefits of this investment or increase our revenues.
If we fail to manage our technical operations infrastructure, our existing clients may experience service outages, our new clients may experience delays in the deployment of our solution and we could be subject to, among other things, claims for credits or damages.
Our success depends in large part upon the capacity, stability, security and performance of our operations infrastructure. From time to time, we have experienced interruptions in service, and may experience such interruptions in the future. These service interruptions may be caused by a variety of factors, including infrastructure changes, human or software errors, viruses, security attacks, fraud, spikes in client usage and denial of service issues. In some instances, we may not be able to identify the cause or causes of these performance problems within an acceptable period of time. Our failure to achieve or maintain expected performance levels, stability and security, particularly as we increase the number of users of our service and the product applications that run on our system, could harm our relationships with our clients, result in claims for credits or damages, damage our reputation, significantly reduce client demand for our solution, cause us to incur significant expense and personnel time replacing and upgrading our infrastructure and harm our business.
We have experienced significant growth in the number of agents seats and interactions that our infrastructure supports. As the number of agent seats within our client base grows and our clients’ use of our service increases, we need to continue to make additional investments in our capacity to maintain adequate and reliable stability and performance, the availability of which may be limited or the cost of which may be prohibitive, and any failure may cause interruptions in service that may harm our business. In addition, we need to properly manage our operations infrastructure in order to support version control, changes in hardware and software parameters and the evolution of our solution. If we do not accurately predict our infrastructure requirements or efficiently improve our infrastructure, our business could be harmed.
Our growth depends in part on the success of our strategic relationships with third parties and our failure to successfully maintain, grow and manage these relationships could harm our business.
We leverage strategic relationships with third parties, such as CRM providers, WFO providers, other technology providers, systems integrators, and telephony providers. For example, our relationship with CRM providers and systems integrators provide significant lead generation for new client opportunities. These relationships are typically not exclusive and our partners often also offer products of our competitors. As we grow our business, we will continue to depend on both existing and new strategic relationships. Our competitors may be more successful than we are in establishing or expanding relationships with third parties or may provide incentives to third parties to favor their products over our solution. Our competitors may also have deeper or broader
relationships with third parties, including products that we do not offer or that are outside our core markets, that could give these competitors an advantage in establishing and maintaining relationships with these third parties. These strategic partners may cease to recommend our solution to prospective clients due to actual or perceived lack of features, technological or security issues or failures, reputational concerns, economic incentives, or other factors, which would harm our business, financial condition and operations. Furthermore, there has and continues to be a significant amount of consolidation in our industry and adjacent industries, and if our partners are acquired, fail to work effectively with us or go out of business, they may no longer support or promote our solution, or may be less effective in doing so, which could harm our business, financial condition and operations. If we are unsuccessful in establishing or maintaining our strategic relationships with third parties, or these partners fail to recommend our solution, our ability to compete in the marketplace or to grow our revenues could be impaired and our operating results may suffer. Even if we are successful, we cannot assure you that these relationships will result in increased client usage of our solution or increased revenue.
In addition, identifying new partners, and negotiating and documenting relationships with them, requires significant time and resources. As the complexity of our solution and our third-party relationships increases, the management of those relationships and the negotiation of contractual terms sufficient to protect our rights and limit our potential liabilities will become more complicated. We also license technology from certain third parties, including through OEM relationships. Certain of these agreements permit either party to terminate all or a portion of the relationship without cause at any time and for any reason. If one of these agreements is terminated by the other party, we would have to find an alternative source or develop new technology ourselves, which preclude, limit or delay our ability to offer our solution or certain product features to our clients, result in increased expense and harm our business. Our inability to successfully manage and maintain these complex relationships or negotiate sufficient and favorable contractual terms could harm our business.
We have established, and are continuing to increase, our network of master agents and resellers to sell our solution; our failure to effectively develop, manage, and maintain this network could materially harm our revenues.
We have established, and are continuing to increase, our network of master sales agents, which provide sales leads, and resellers, which sell our solution to new clients. This network has helped us attract additional clients. Our resellers have assisted us in expanding in both domestic and international markets. These master agents and resellers sell, or may in the future decide to sell, solutions for our competitors. Our competitors may be able to cause our current or potential master agents or resellers to favor their services over ours, either through financial incentives, technological innovation, solution features or performance, by offering a broader array of services to these service providers or otherwise, which could reduce the effectiveness of our use of these third parties. If we fail to maintain relationships with current master agents and resellers, fail to develop relationships with new master agents and resellers in new and existing markets, if we fail to manage, train, or provide appropriate incentives to our existing master agents and resellers, or if our master agents and resellers are not successful in their sales efforts, sales of our subscriptions may decrease or not grow at an appropriate rate and our operating results could be harmed. Additionally, in order to effectively utilize our resellers, we must enhance our systems, develop specialized marketing materials and invest in educating resellers regarding our systems, product offerings and services. Our failure to accomplish these objectives could limit our success in marketing and selling our products.
In addition, identifying new resellers, and negotiating and documenting relationships with them, requires significant time and resources. As the complexity of our solution and our reseller relationships increases, the management of those relationships and the negotiation of contractual terms sufficient to protect our rights and limit our potential liabilities will become more complicated. Our inability to successfully manage these complex relationships or negotiate sufficient contractual terms could harm our business.
Adverse economic conditions may harm our business.
Our business depends on the overall demand for cloud contact center software solutions and on the economic health of our current and prospective clients. In addition to the United States, Canada, the U.K. and Latin America, we plan to market and sell our solution in other European countries, Asia and other international markets. If economic conditions, including currency exchange rates, in these areas and other key potential markets for our solution remain uncertain or deteriorate, clients may delay or reduce their contact center and overall information technology spending. If our clients or potential clients experience economic hardship, this could reduce the demand for our solution, delay and lengthen sales cycles, lower prices for our solution, and lead to slower growth or even a decline in our revenues, operating results and cash flows.
Security breaches and improper access to or disclosure of our data or our clients’ data, or other cyber attacks on our systems, could result in litigation and regulatory risk, harm our reputation and our business.
Our solution involves the storage and transmission of our clients’ information, including information about our clients’ customers or other information treated by our clients as confidential. Unauthorized access, unauthorized use of our systems, security breaches or other cyber attacks could result in the loss of confidentiality, integrity and availability of such information, leading to litigation, governmental investigations and enforcements actions, indemnity obligations, increased expense, and other liability. Such incidents could also cause interruptions to the solution we provide, degrade the user experience, or cause clients to lose confidence in our solution.
While we have security measures in place to protect client information and minimize the probability of security breaches and other cyber attacks, if these measures fail as a result of a cyber-attack, other third-party action, employee error, malfeasance or otherwise, and someone obtains unauthorized access to our clients’ information, our reputation could be damaged, our business may suffer and we could incur significant liability. Because the techniques used to obtain unauthorized access or sabotage systems change frequently and generally are not identified until they are launched against a target, we may be unable to anticipate these techniques or to implement adequate preventative measures. In addition, third parties may attempt to fraudulently induce employees or users to disclose information in order to gain access to our data or our users’ data. Moreover, any failure on the part of third parties, including our clients, to maintain appropriate security measures for their own systems could harm our relationships with our clients, result in claims against us for credits or damages, damage our reputation and significantly reduce client demand for our solution. Any or all of these issues could harm our ability to attract new clients, cause existing clients to cancel, reduce or not renew their subscriptions, result in reputational damage or subject us to third-party lawsuits, governmental investigations and enforcement actions, regulatory fines or other action or liability, including orders or consent decrees forcing us to modify our business practices, all of which could materially harm our business, reputation or financial results.
The markets in which we participate involve numerous competitors and are highly competitive, and if we do not compete effectively, our operating results could be harmed.
The market for contact center solutions is highly competitive. Generally, we do not have long-term contracts with our clients and our clients can terminate our service and switch to competitors’ offerings on short notice.
We currently compete with large legacy technology vendors that offer on-premise contact center systems, such as Avaya and Cisco, and legacy on-premise software companies that come from a CTI heritage, such as Aspect and Genesys (including through its acquisition of Interactive Intelligence). These legacy technology and software companies are increasingly supplementing their traditional on-premise contact center systems with competing cloud offerings, through a combination of acquisitions, partnerships and in-house development. Additionally, we compete with vendors that historically provided other contact center services and technologies and expanded to offer cloud contact center software such as NICE inContact. We also face competition from many smaller contact center service providers such as Talkdesk and Seranova, as well as vendors offering unified communications and contact center solutions. In addition, Amazon and Twilio have introduced solutions aimed at companies who wish to build their own contact centers with in-house developers. In addition, CRM vendors are increasingly offering features and functionality that were traditionally provided by contact center providers. CRM vendors also continue to partner with contact center service providers to provide integrated solutions and may, in the future, acquire competitive contact center service providers. These factors could cause CRM vendors to reduce or terminate their partnerships with us, and could result in increased competition. Because CRM integration and partnerships are critical to the success of our solution, these factors could harm our revenue and results of operations.
Our actual and potential competitors may enjoy competitive advantages over us, including greater name recognition, longer operating histories and larger marketing budgets, as well as greater financial or technical resources. With the introduction of new technologies and market entrants, we expect competition to continue to intensify in the future. Our recent, and any future, acquisitions will subject us to new competitors and cause us to face additional and different competition in the markets served by these businesses.
Some of our competitors can devote significantly greater resources than we can to the development, promotion and sale of their products and services and many have the ability to initiate or withstand substantial price competition. Current or potential competitors may also be acquired by third parties with significantly greater resources. In addition, many of our competitors have stronger name recognition, longer operating histories, established relationships with clients, more comprehensive product offerings, larger installed bases and major
distribution agreements with consultants, system integrators and resellers. Our competitors may also establish cooperative relationships among themselves or with third parties that may further enhance their product offerings or resources and ability to compete. If our competitors’ products, services or technologies become more accepted than our solution, if they are successful in bringing their products or services to market earlier than ours, or if their products or services are less expensive or more technologically capable than ours, our revenues could be harmed. Pricing pressures and increased competition could result in reduced sales and revenues, reduced margins and loss of, or a failure to maintain or improve, our competitive market position, any of which could harm our business.
If our existing clients terminate their subscriptions or reduce their subscriptions and related usage, our revenues and gross margins will be harmed and we will be required to spend more money to grow our client base.
We expect to continue to derive a significant portion of our revenues from existing clients. As a result, retaining our existing clients is critical to our future operating results. We offer monthly, annual and multiple-year contracts to our clients, generally with 30 days’ notice required for reductions in the number of agent seats. Increases in the number of agent seats can be provisioned almost immediately. Our clients, therefore, are able to adjust the number of agent seats used to meet their changing contact center volume needs. Subscriptions and related usage by our existing clients may decrease if:
•clients are not satisfied with our services, prices or the functionality of our solution;
•the stability, performance or security of our solution are not satisfactory;
•the U.S. or global economy declines;
•our clients’ business declines due to industry cycles, seasonality, business difficulties or other reasons;
•clients favor products offered by other contact center providers, particularly as competition continues to increase;
•fewer clients purchase usage from us;
•alternative technologies, products or features emerge or gain popularity that we do not provide; or
•our clients or potential clients experience financial difficulties.
If our existing clients’ subscriptions and related usage decrease or are terminated, we will need to spend more money to acquire new clients and still may not be able to maintain our existing level of revenues. We incur significant costs and expenses, including sales and marketing expenses, to acquire new clients, and those costs and expenses are an important factor in determining our profitability. There can be no assurance that our efforts to acquire new clients will be successful.
The loss of one or more of our key clients, or a failure to renew our subscription agreements with one or more of our key clients, could harm our ability to market our solution.
We rely on our reputation and recommendations from key clients in order to market and sell our solution. The loss of any of our key clients, or a failure of some of them to renew or to continue to recommend our solution, could have a significant impact on our revenues, reputation and our ability to obtain new clients. In addition, acquisitions of our clients could lead to cancellation of our contracts with those clients, thereby reducing the number of our existing and potential clients and key reference clients.
Our clients may fail to comply with the terms of their agreements, necessitating action by us to collect payment, or may terminate their subscriptions for our solution.
If clients fail to pay us under the terms of our agreements or fail to comply with the terms of our agreements, including compliance with regulatory requirements and intellectual property terms, we may terminate clients, lose revenue, be unable to collect amounts due to us, be subject to legal or regulatory action and incur costs in enforcing the terms of our contracts, including litigation. Some of our clients may seek bankruptcy protection or other similar relief and fail to pay amounts due to us, seek reimbursement for amounts already paid, or pay those amounts more slowly, which could harm our operating results, financial position and cash flow.
We sell our solution to larger organizations that require longer sales and implementation cycles and often demand more configuration and integration services or customized features and functions that we may not offer, any of which could delay or prevent these sales and harm our growth rates, business and operating results.
As we continue to target our sales efforts at larger organizations, we face greater costs, longer sales and implementation cycles and less predictability in closing sales. These larger organizations typically require more configuration and integration services, which increases our upfront investment in sales and deployment efforts, with no guarantee that these clients will subscribe to our solution or increase the scope of their subscription. Furthermore, with larger organizations, we must provide greater levels of education regarding the use and benefits of our solution to a broader group of people in order to generate a sale. As a result of these factors, we must devote a significant amount of sales support and professional services resources to individual clients and prospective clients, thereby increasing the cost and time required to complete sales. Our typical sales cycle for larger organizations is four to six months, but can be significantly longer, and we expect that our average sales cycle may increase as sales to larger organizations continue to grow as a percentage of our business. Longer sales cycles could cause our operating and financial results to be less predictable and to fluctuate from period to period. In addition, many of our clients that are larger organizations initially deploy our solution to support only a portion of their contact center agents. Our success depends on our ability to increase the number of agent seats and the number of applications utilized by these larger organizations over time and additional sales and marketing expenses we incur in these efforts. There is no guarantee that these clients will increase their subscriptions for our solution. If we do not expand our initial relationships with larger organizations, the return on our investments in sales and deployment efforts for these clients will decrease and our business may suffer.
Furthermore, we may not be able to provide the configuration and integration services that larger organizations typically require. For example, our solution does not currently permit clients to modify our software code, but instead requires them to use our set of APIs. If prospective clients require customized features or functions that we do not offer, and that would be difficult for them to deploy themselves, they will need to use our services or third-party service providers or we may lose sales opportunities with larger organizations and our business could suffer.
Because a significant percentage of our revenue is derived from existing clients, downturns or upturns in new sales will not be immediately reflected in our operating results and may be difficult to discern.
We generally recognize subscription revenue from clients monthly as services are delivered. As a result, the vast majority of the subscription revenue we report in each quarter is derived from existing clients. Consequently, a decline in new subscriptions in any single quarter will likely have only a small impact on our revenue results for that quarter. However, the cumulative impact of such declines could negatively impact our business and results of operations in future quarters. Accordingly, the effect of significant downturns in sales and market acceptance of our solution, and potential changes in our pricing policies or renewal rates, will typically not be reflected in our results of operations until future periods. We also may be unable to adjust our cost structure to reflect the changes in revenue, resulting in lower margins and earnings. In addition, our subscription model makes it difficult for us to rapidly increase our revenue through additional sales in any period, as revenue from new clients will be recognized over time as services are delivered. Moreover, many of our clients initially deploy our solution to support only a portion of their contact center agents and, therefore, we may not generate significant revenue from these new clients at the outset of our relationship, if at all. Any increase to our revenue and the value of these existing client relationships will only be reflected in our results of operations as subscription revenue is recognized, and if and when these clients increase the number of agent seats and the number of components of our solution they deploy over time.
We rely on third-party telecommunications and internet service providers to provide our clients and their customers with telecommunication services and connectivity to our cloud contact center software and any failure by these service providers to provide reliable services could cause us to lose clients and subject us to claims for credits or damages, among other things.
We rely on third-party telecommunication service providers to provide our clients and their customers with telecommunication services. These telephony services include the public switched telephone network, or PSTN, telephone numbers, call termination and origination services, and local number portability for our clients. In addition, we depend on our internet bandwidth suppliers to provide uninterrupted and error-free service through their
telecommunications networks. We exercise little control over these third-party providers, which increases our vulnerability to problems with the services they provide.
When problems occur, it may be difficult to identify the source of the problem. Service disruption or outages, whether caused by our service, the products or services of our third party service providers, or our clients’ or their customers’ equipment and systems, may result in loss of market acceptance of our solution and any necessary repairs or other remedial actions may force us to incur significant costs and expenses.
If any of these service providers fail to provide reliable services, suffer outages, degrade, disrupt, increase the cost of or terminate the services that we and our clients depend on, we may be required to switch to another service provider. Delays caused by switching our technology to another service provider, if available, and qualifying this new service provider could materially harm our client relationships, business, financial condition and operating results. Further, any failure on the part of third party service providers to achieve or maintain expected performance levels, stability and security could harm our relationships with our clients, cause us to lose clients, result in claims for credits or damages, increase our costs or the costs incurred by our customers, damage our reputation, significantly reduce client demand for our solution and seriously harm our financial condition and operating results.
Our clients and their customers rely on internet service providers to provide them with access and connectivity to our cloud contact center software and changes in how internet service providers handle and charge for access to the internet could materially harm our client relationships, business, financial condition and operations results.
In 2015, the FCC released an order, commonly referred to as network neutrality, that, among other things, prohibited (i) the impairment or degradation of lawful internet traffic on the basis of content, application or service and (ii) the practice of favoring some internet traffic over other internet traffic based on the payment of higher fees. In June 2018, the FCC repealed the network neutrality regulations imposed by the 2015 order. Internet service providers in the U.S. may now be able to impair or degrade the use of, or increase the cost of using, our solution. The FCC’s 2018 repeal was largely upheld by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in a decision issued in October 2019. That same court rejected the FCC’s attempt to preempt states from adopting their own network neutrality requirements. As a result, network neutrality regulations vary widely among both the domestic and international jurisdictions in which we operate. While certain jurisdictions have strong protections for services such as ours, others either lack a network neutrality framework or otherwise do not enforce network neutrality regulations. The impairment, degradation or prioritization of lawful internet traffic by internet service providers could materially harm the performance of our solutions, our client relationships, business, financial condition and operating results.
We depend on data centers operated by third parties and public cloud providers and any disruption in the operation of these facilities could harm our business.
We host our solution at data centers located in Santa Clara, California; Atlanta, Georgia; Slough, England and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Any failure or downtime in one of our data center facilities could affect a significant percentage of our clients. While we control and have access to our servers and all of the components of our network that are located in our external data centers, we do not control the operation of these facilities. The owners of our data center facilities have no obligation to renew their agreements with us on commercially reasonable terms, or at all. If we are unable to renew these agreements on commercially reasonable terms, or if one of our data center operators is acquired, closes, suffers financial difficulty or is unable to meet our growing capacity needs, we may be required to transfer our servers and other infrastructure to new data center facilities, and we may incur significant costs and service interruptions in connection with doing so.
Our data centers are subject to various points of failure. Problems with cooling equipment, generators, uninterruptible power supply, routers, switches, or other equipment, whether or not within our control, could result in service interruptions for our clients as well as equipment damage. Our data centers are subject to disasters such as earthquakes, floods, fires, hurricanes, acts of terrorism, sabotage, break-ins, acts of vandalism and other events, which could cause service interruptions or the operators of these data centers to close their facilities for an extended period of time or permanently. The destruction or impairment of any of our data center facilities could result in significant downtime for our solution and the loss of client data. Because our ability to attract and retain clients depends on our providing clients with highly reliable service, even minor interruptions in our service could harm our business, revenues and reputation. Additionally, in connection with the continuing expansion of our existing data center facilities, there is an increased risk that service interruptions may occur as a result of server addition, relocation or other issues.
Our data centers are also subject to increased power costs. We may not be able to pass on any increase in power costs to our clients, which could reduce our operating margins.
We also host some of our voice services on the public cloud in Europe, Asia, South America and Australia. We have little or no control over public cloud providers. Any disruption of the public cloud or any failure of the public cloud providers to effectively design and implement sufficient security systems or plan for increases in capacity could, in turn, cause delays or disruptions in our services. In addition, using the public cloud presents a variety of additional risks, including risks related to sharing the same computing resources with others, reliance on public cloud providers’ authentication, security, authorization and access control mechanisms, a lack of control over the public cloud’s redundancy and security systems and fault tolerances, and a reduced ability to control data security and privacy.
Our efforts to establish public cloud-based data centers for our international operations may be unsuccessful and may present execution and competitive risks.
We are in the process of establishing new public cloud deployments to facilitate our platform in certain international markets. We have partnered with a third-party to develop, test and deploy our technology to offer a full stack of services on the public cloud in certain international markets. If we are successful, in deployment of our technology to the public cloud, we may expand our public cloud deployments to facilitate our platform in the U.S. and in additional international markets. Our public cloud-based platform offering is critical to developing and providing our solution to our clients, scaling our business for future growth, accurately maintaining data and otherwise operating our business. Infrastructure buildouts on the public cloud are complex, time-consuming and may involve substantial expenditures. In addition, the implementation of public cloud-based data centers involves risks inherent in the conversion to a new system, including loss of information and potential disruption to our normal operations. Even once we implement public cloud-based data centers, we may discover deficiencies in the design, implementation or maintenance of the system that could materially harm our business.
Shifts over time or from quarter-to-quarter in the mix of sizes or types of organizations that purchase our solution or changes in the components of our solution purchased by our clients could affect our gross margins and operating results.
Our strategy is to sell our solution to both smaller and larger organizations. Our gross margins can vary depending on numerous factors related to the implementation and use of our solution, including the features and number of agent seats purchased by our clients and the level of usage and professional services and support required by our clients. For example, our larger clients typically require more professional services and because our professional services offerings typically have negative margins, any increase in sales of professional services could harm our gross margins and operating results. We also have lower margins on our usage revenues. Sales to larger organizations may also entail longer sales cycles and more significant selling efforts and expense. Selling to smaller clients may involve smaller contract sizes, fewer opportunities to sell additional services, a higher likelihood of contract terminations, lower returns on sales and marketing expense, fewer potential agent seats and greater credit risk and uncertainty. If the mix of organizations that purchase our solution, or the mix of solution components purchased by our clients, changes unfavorably, our revenues and gross margins could decrease and our operating results could be harmed.
We continue to expand our international operations, which exposes us to significant risks.
To date, we have not generated significant revenues outside of the U.S., Canada and the U.K. However, we already have significant operations outside these countries and we expect to grow our international presence in the future. The future success of our business will depend, in part, on our ability to expand our operations and customer base to other countries. Operating in international markets requires significant resources and management attention and will subject us to regulatory, economic, and political risks that are different from those in the U.S. In addition, in order to effectively market and sell our solutions in international markets, we will be required to localize our solutions, including the language in which our solutions are offered, which will increase our costs, could result in delays in offering our solutions in these markets and may decrease the effectiveness of our sales efforts. Due to our limited experience with international operations and developing and managing sales and distribution channels in international markets, our international expansion efforts may not be successful.
Sales to clients outside the United States or with international operations and our international sales efforts and operations support expose us to risks inherent in international sales and operations.
A key element of our growth strategy is to expand our international sales efforts and develop a worldwide client base. Because of our limited experience with international sales, our international expansion may not be successful and may not produce the return on investment we expect. To date, we have realized only a small portion of our revenues from clients outside the United States, with approximately 92% of our revenue for the year ended December 31, 2019 derived from clients with billing addresses in the United States.
Our international employees are primarily located in the Philippines, where technical support, training and other professional services are performed, and Russia, where portions of engineering and operations are performed. We have increased our sales, marketing and support personnel in the U.K. to maintain and support our European data centers. Operating in international markets requires significant resources and management attention and subjects us to intellectual property, regulatory, economic and political risks that are different from those in the United States. As we increase our international sales efforts and continue our other international operations, we will face risks in doing business internationally that could harm our business, including:
•the need to establish and protect our brand in international markets;
•the need to localize and adapt our solution for specific countries, including translation into foreign languages and associated costs and expenses;
•difficulties in staffing and managing foreign operations, particularly hiring and training qualified sales and service personnel;
•the need to implement and offer customer care, in various languages;
•different pricing environments, longer sales and accounts receivable payment cycles and collections issues;
•weaker protection for intellectual property and other legal rights than in the U.S. and practical difficulties in enforcing intellectual property and other rights outside of the U.S.;
•privacy and data protection laws and regulations that are complex, expensive to comply with and may require that client data be stored and processed in a designated territory;
•increased risk of piracy, counterfeiting and other misappropriation of our intellectual property in our locations outside the U.S.;
•new and different sources of competition;
•general economic conditions in international markets;
•fluctuations in the value of the U.S. dollar and foreign currencies, which may make our solution more expensive in other countries or may increase our costs, impacting our operating results when translated into U.S. dollars;
•compliance challenges related to the complexity of multiple, conflicting and changing governmental laws and regulations, including employment, tax, telecommunications and telemarketing laws and regulations;
•increased risk of international telecom fraud;
•laws and business practices favoring local competitors;
•compliance with laws and regulations applicable to foreign operations and cross border transactions, including the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the U.K. Bribery Act and other anti-corruption laws, supply chain restrictions, import and export control laws, tariffs, trade barriers, economic sanctions and other regulatory or contractual limitations on our ability to sell our solution in certain foreign markets, and the risks and costs of non-compliance;
•increased financial accounting and reporting burdens and complexities;
•restrictions or taxes on the transfer of funds;
•adverse tax consequences; and
•unstable economic and political conditions and potential accompanying shifts in laws and regulations.
These risks could harm our international operations, increase our operating costs and hinder our ability to grow our international business and, consequently, our overall business and results of operations. In addition, if the political and military situation in Russia and Ukraine, or the relationship between Russia and the United States, significantly worsens, or if either Russia or the United States imposes or implements new or augmented economic sanctions, supply chain restrictions, or other restrictions on doing business, and we are restricted or precluded from
continuing our software development operations in Russia, our costs could increase, and our product development efforts, business and results of operations could be significantly harmed.
In addition, compliance with laws and regulations applicable to our international operations increases our cost of doing business outside the United States. We may be unable to keep current with changes in foreign government requirements and laws as they change from time to time, which often occurs with minimal or no advance notice. Failure to comply with these regulations could harm our business. In many countries outside the United States, it is common for others to engage in business practices that are prohibited by our internal policies and procedures or United States or international regulations applicable to us. Although we have implemented policies and procedures designed to ensure compliance with these laws and policies, there can be no assurance that all of our employees, contractors, strategic partners and agents will comply with these laws and policies. Violations of laws or key control policies by our employees, contractors, strategic partners or agents could result in delays in revenue recognition, financial reporting misstatements, fines, delays in filing financial reports required as a public company, penalties, or prohibitions on selling our solution, any of which could harm our business.
We have a history of losses and we may be unable to achieve or sustain profitability.
We have incurred significant losses in each annual period since our inception in 2001. We incurred net losses of $4.6 million, $0.2 million and $9.0 million for the years ended December 31, 2019, 2018 and 2017, respectively. As of December 31, 2019, we had an accumulated deficit of $156.0 million. These losses and our accumulated deficit reflect the substantial investments we have made, and continue to make, to develop our solution and acquire new clients, among other expenses. We expect the dollar amount of our costs and expenses to increase in the future as revenue increases, although at a slower rate. We expect our losses to continue for the foreseeable future as we continue to invest in research and development and expand our business. We also have lower margins on our professional services, which are expected to continue in the medium term. In addition, as a public company, we incur significant legal, accounting and other expenses. Our historical or recent growth in revenues is not necessarily indicative of our future performance. Accordingly, there is no assurance that we will achieve profitability in the future or that, if we do become profitable, we will sustain profitability.
Our recent growth makes it difficult to evaluate and predict our current business and future prospects.
While we have been in existence since 2001, much of our growth has occurred in recent years. Our recent growth may make it difficult for investors to evaluate our current business and our future prospects. We have encountered and will continue to encounter risks and difficulties frequently experienced by growing companies in rapidly changing industries, including increasing and unforeseen expenses as we continue to grow our business.
Our ability to forecast our future operating results is limited and subject to a number of uncertainties, including our ability to predict revenue and expense levels, and plan for and model future growth. We have encountered and will continue to encounter risks and uncertainties frequently experienced by growing companies in rapidly changing industries, such as the risks and uncertainties described in this annual report. If our assumptions regarding these risks and uncertainties, which we use to plan our business, are incorrect or change due to adjustments in our markets or our competitors and their product offerings, or if we do not address these risks successfully, our operating and financial results could differ materially from our expectations and our business could suffer.
Development of our AI solutions to make agents more efficient and improve customer experience may not be successful and may result in reputational harm and our future operating results could be materially harmed.
We plan to increase and provide our customers with AI-powered applications, including conversational virtual agents, agent assistance and business insights. While we aim for our AI-powered applications to make agents more efficient and improve customer experience, our AI models may not achieve sufficient levels of accuracy. In addition, we may not be able to acquire sufficient training data or our training data may contain biased information. Furthermore, the costs of AI technologies, such as speech recognition and natural language processing, may be too high for market adoption. Our competitors or other organizations may incorporate AI features into their products more quickly or more successfully and their AI features may achieve higher market acceptance than ours, which may result in us failing to recoup our investments in developing AI-powered applications. Should any of these items or others occur, our ability to compete, our reputation and operating results may be materially and adversely affected.
If our solution fails, or is perceived to fail, to perform properly or if it contains technical defects, our reputation could be harmed, our market share may decline and we could be subject to product liability claims.
Our solution may contain undetected errors or defects that may result in failures or otherwise cause our solution to fail to perform in accordance with client expectations and contractual obligations. Moreover, our clients could incorrectly implement or inadvertently misuse our products, which could result in client dissatisfaction and harm the perceived utility of our products and our brand. Because our clients use our solution for mission-critical aspects of their business, any real or perceived errors or defects in, or other performance problems with, our solution may damage our clients’ businesses and could significantly harm our reputation. If that occurs, we could lose future sales, or our existing clients could cancel our solution, seek payment credits, seek damages against us, or delay or withhold payment to us, which could result in reduced revenues, an increase in our provision for uncollectible accounts and service credits, an increase in collection cycles for accounts receivable, and harm our financial results. In addition, since telecommunications billing and associated telecom taxes and the related calculations and billing of telecom taxes are inherently complex and require highly sophisticated information systems to administer, our billing system may experience errors or we may improperly operate the system, which could result in the system incorrectly calculating the fees owed by our clients or related taxes and administrative fees. Clients also may make indemnification or warranty claims against us, which could result in significant expense and risk of litigation. Product performance problems could result in loss of market share, reputational harm, failure to achieve market acceptance and the diversion of development resources.
Any product liability, intellectual property, warranty or other claims against us could damage our reputation and relationships with our clients, and could require us to spend significant time and money in litigation or pay significant settlements or damages. Although we maintain general liability insurance, including coverage for errors and omissions, this coverage may not be sufficient to cover liabilities resulting from such claims. Also, our insurers may disclaim coverage. Our liability insurance also may not continue to be available to us on reasonable terms, in sufficient amounts, or at all. Any contract or product liability claims successfully brought against us would harm our business.
We are subject to many hazards and operational risks that can disrupt our business, some of which may not be insured or fully covered by insurance.
Our operations are subject to many hazards inherent in the cloud contact center software business, including:
•damage to third-party and our infrastructure and data centers, related equipment and surrounding properties caused by earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, fires and other natural disasters, explosions and acts of terrorism;
•security breaches resulting in loss or disclosure of confidential client and customer data and potential liability to clients and non-client third parties for such losses on disclosures; and
•other hazards that could also result in suspension of operations, personal injury and even loss of life.
These risks could result in substantial losses and the curtailment or suspension of our operations. For example, in the event of a major earthquake along the West Coast of the United States (where our corporate headquarters and one of our data centers are located), hurricane, tropical storm, flooding or severe weather in the southeastern United States (where our other U.S. data center is located) or catastrophic events such as fire, power loss, telecommunications failure, cyber-attack, war or terrorist attack, we may be unable to continue our operations and may endure system and service interruptions, reputational harm, delays in product development, breaches of data security and loss of critical data, any of which could harm our business and operating results.
We are not insured against all claims, events or accidents that might occur. If a significant accident or event occurs that is not fully insured, if we fail to recover all anticipated insurance proceeds for significant accidents or events for which we are insured, or if we or our data center providers fail to reopen facilities damaged by such accidents or events, our operations and financial condition could be harmed. In addition to being denied coverage under existing insurance policies, we may not be able to maintain or obtain insurance of the type and amount we desire at reasonable rates.
The contact center software solutions market is subject to rapid technological change, and we must develop and sell incremental and new features and products in order to maintain and grow our business.
The contact center software solutions market is characterized by rapid changes in client requirements, frequent introductions of new and enhanced products and features and continuing and rapid technological advancement. To
compete successfully, we must continue to devote significant resources to design, develop, deploy and sell new and enhanced contact center products, applications and features that provide increasingly higher capabilities, performance and stability at lower cost. If we are unable to develop or acquire new features for our existing solution or new applications that achieve market acceptance or that keep pace with technological developments, our business would be harmed. For example, we are focused on enhancing the reliability, features and functionality of our contact center solution to enhance its utility to our clients, particularly larger clients, with complex, dynamic and global operations. The success of these enhancements depends on many factors, including timely development, introduction and market acceptance, as well as our ability to transition our existing clients to these new products, applications and features. Failure in this regard may significantly impair our revenue growth. In addition, because our solution is designed to operate on a variety of systems, we need to continuously modify and enhance our solution to keep pace with changes in hardware, operating systems, the increasing trend toward multi-channel communications and other changes to software technologies. We may not be successful in developing or acquiring these modifications and enhancements or bringing them to market in a timely fashion. Furthermore, uncertainties about the timing and nature of new network platforms or technologies, or modifications to existing platforms or technologies, could delay introduction of changes and updates to our solution and increase our research and development expenses. Any failure of our solution to operate effectively, including with future network platforms and technologies, could reduce the demand for our solution, result in client dissatisfaction and harm our business.
Our ability to continue to enhance our solution is dependent on adequate research and development resources. If we are not able to adequately fund our research and development efforts, we may not be able to compete effectively and our business and operating results may be harmed.
In order to remain competitive, we must devote significant and increasing resources to develop new solution offerings, features and enhancements to our existing cloud contact center software, which will increase our research and development and operating expenses. Our research and development expenses totaled $45.2 million, $34.2 million and $27.1 million for the years ended December 31, 2019, 2018 and 2017, respectively. Maintaining adequate research and development personnel and resources to meet the demands of the market is essential. If we are unable to develop products, applications or features internally due to constraints, such as high employee turnover, insufficient cash, inability to hire sufficient research and development personnel or a lack of other research and development resources, we may miss market opportunities. Furthermore, many of our competitors have greater financial resources and expend considerably greater amounts on their research and development programs than we do, and those that do not may be acquired by larger companies that would allocate greater resources to our competitors’ research and development programs. Our failure to devote adequate research and development resources or compete effectively with the research and development programs of our competitors could harm our business.
If we are unable to maintain the compatibility of our software with other products and technologies, our business would be harmed.
Our clients often integrate our solution with their business applications, particularly third-party CRM solutions. These third-party providers or their partners could alter their products so that our solution no longer integrates well with them, or they could delay or deny our access to technology releases that allow us to adapt our solution to integrate with their products in a timely fashion. If we cannot adapt our solution to changes in complementary technology deployed by our clients, it may significantly impair our ability to compete effectively.
Our business could be harmed if our clients are not satisfied with the professional services and technical support provided by us or our partners.
Our business depends on our ability to satisfy our clients, not only with respect to our solution, but also with the professional services and technical support that are required for our clients to implement and use our solution to address their business needs. Professional services and technical support may be performed by our own staff or, in a select subset of cases, by third parties. Our professional services offerings typically have negative margins. Accordingly, any increase in sales of professional services could harm our gross margins and operating results. We will need to continue to expand and optimize our professional services and technical support in order to keep up with new client installations and ongoing service, which takes time and expense to implement. Identifying and recruiting qualified service personnel and training them in our solution is difficult and competitive and requires significant time, expense and attention. We may be unable to respond quickly enough to accommodate short-term increases in client demand for support services. We also may be unable to modify the format of our support services
or change our pricing to compete with changes in support services provided by our competitors. Increased client demand for these services, without corresponding revenues, could increase our costs and harm our operating results. If a client is not satisfied with the deployment and ongoing services performed by us or a third party, we could lose clients, miss opportunities to expand our business with these clients, incur additional costs, or suffer reduced (including negative) margins on our service revenue, any of which could damage our ability to grow our business. In addition, negative publicity related to our professional services and technical support, regardless of its accuracy, may damage our business by affecting our ability to compete for new business with current and prospective clients.
We depend on our senior management team, and the loss of one or more key employees or an inability to attract and retain highly skilled executives and other employees could harm our business and results of operations.
Our success depends, in part, upon the performance and continued services of our executive officers and senior management team. If our executive leadership team fails to perform effectively or if we fail to attract or retain our key executives or senior management, our business, financial condition or results of operations could be harmed. We also rely on our leadership team in the areas of research and development, marketing, sales, services and general and administrative functions, and on mission-critical individual contributors. The loss of one or more of our executive officers or key employees could seriously harm our business. We currently do not maintain key person life insurance policies on any of our employees.
To execute our growth plan, we must attract and retain highly qualified personnel and we may incur significant costs (including stock-based compensation expense) to do so. Competition for these personnel is intense, especially for senior executives, engineers highly experienced in designing and developing cloud software and for senior sales personnel. We have, from time to time, experienced, and we expect to continue to experience, difficulty in hiring and retaining employees with appropriate qualifications. We invest significant time and expense in training our employees, which increases their value to competitors who may seek to recruit them and increases our costs. If we fail to attract new personnel or fail to retain and motivate our current personnel, particularly our executive officers and senior management team, our business and future growth prospects would be harmed. Many of the companies with which we compete for experienced personnel have greater resources than we have. If we hire employees from competitors or other companies, their former employers may attempt to assert that these employees or we have breached legal obligations, resulting in a diversion of our time and resources and, potentially, damages.
Volatility or lack of performance in the trading price of our common stock may also affect our ability to attract and retain qualified personnel because job candidates and existing employees often emphasize the value of the stock awards they receive in connection with their employment when considering whether to accept or continue employment. If the perceived value of our stock awards is low or declines, it may harm our ability to recruit and retain highly skilled employees.
If we fail to grow our marketing capabilities and develop widespread brand awareness cost effectively, our business may suffer.
Our ability to increase our client base and achieve broader market acceptance of our cloud contact center software solution will depend to a significant extent on our ability to expand our marketing operations. We plan to continue to dedicate significant resources to our marketing programs, including internet advertising, digital marketing campaigns, social media, trade shows, industry events, co-marketing with strategic partners, telemarketing and out of home campaigns. The effectiveness of our internet advertising has varied over time and may vary in the future due to competition for key search terms, changes in search engine use and changes in the search algorithms used by major search engines. All of these efforts will continue to require us to invest significant financial and other resources in our marketing efforts. Our business will be seriously harmed if our efforts and expenditures do not generate a proportionate increase in revenue.
In addition, we believe that developing and maintaining widespread awareness of our brand in a cost-effective manner, both in the United States and internationally, is critical to achieving widespread acceptance of our solution and attracting new clients. Brand promotion activities may not generate client awareness or increase revenues, and even if they do, any increase in revenues may occur after the expense has been incurred, and may not offset the costs and expenses of building our brand. If we fail to successfully promote, maintain and protect our brand, or incur substantial costs and expenses, we may fail to attract or retain clients necessary to realize a sufficient return on our brand-building efforts, or to achieve the widespread brand awareness that is critical to increasing client adoption of our solution.
We may not be able to secure additional financing on favorable terms, or at all, to meet our future capital needs.
To date, we have financed our operations, primarily through sales of our solution, lease facilities and the net proceeds from our equity and debt financings, including the sale of our convertible senior notes. We do not know when or if our operations will generate sufficient cash to fund our ongoing operations. We may require additional capital to respond to business opportunities, challenges, acquisitions, a decline in sales, increased regulatory obligations or unforeseen circumstances and may engage in equity or debt financings or enter into credit facilities.
We have a substantial amount of debt. As of December 31, 2019, we had approximately $258.8 million in principal amount outstanding under our convertible senior notes entered into in May 2018. See Note 6 to the consolidated financial statements.
Any debt financing obtained by us in the future would cause us to incur additional debt service expenses and could include restrictive covenants relating to our capital raising activities and other financial and operational matters, which may make it more difficult for us to obtain additional capital and pursue business opportunities and could be secured by all of our assets. If we raise additional funds through further issuances of equity or convertible debt securities, our existing stockholders could suffer significant dilution in their percentage ownership of our company, and any new equity securities we issue could have rights, preferences and privileges senior to those of holders of our common stock. If we are unable to obtain adequate financing or financing on terms satisfactory to us when we require it, our ability to continue to grow and support our business and to respond to business challenges could be significantly limited.
We may acquire other companies or technologies or be the target of strategic transactions, which could divert our management’s attention, result in additional dilution to our stockholders and otherwise disrupt our operations and harm our operating results.
We may acquire or invest in businesses, applications or technologies that we believe could complement or expand our solution, enhance our technical capabilities or otherwise offer growth opportunities. For instance, in the fourth quarter of 2019, we completed our acquisition of substantially all of the assets of Whendu, including its iPaaS platform, and in the second quarter of 2020, we expect to complete the acquisition of CSI. The pursuit of potential acquisitions may divert the attention of management, and cause us to incur various costs and expenses in identifying, investigating and pursuing acquisitions, whether or not they are consummated. We may not be able to identify desirable acquisition targets or be successful in entering into an agreement with any particular target.
To date, the growth in our business has been primarily organic, and we have limited experience in acquiring other businesses, having only completed one small acquisition in 2013, the acquisition of substantially all of the assets of Whendu, in the fourth quarter of 2019, and the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire CSI in the first quarter of 2020. With respect to these recent acquisitions and any future acquisitions, we may not be able to successfully integrate acquired personnel, operations and technologies, or effectively manage the combined business following the acquisition. We also may not achieve the anticipated benefits from these or any future acquisitions due to a number of factors, including:
•inability to integrate or benefit from acquisitions in a profitable manner;
•unanticipated costs or liabilities associated with the acquisition, including legal claims arising from the activities of companies or businesses we acquire;
•acquisition-related costs;
•difficulty converting the clients of the acquired business to our solution and contract terms, including due to disparities in the revenue, licensing, support or professional services model of the acquired company;
•difficulty integrating the accounting systems, operations and personnel of the acquired business;
•difficulties and additional costs and expenses associated with supporting legacy products and the hosting infrastructure of the acquired business;
•diversion of management’s attention from other business concerns;
•harm to our existing relationships with our partners and clients as a result of the acquisition;
•the loss of our or the acquired business’s key employees;
•diversion of resources that could have been more effectively deployed in other parts of our business; and
•use of substantial portions of our available cash to consummate the acquisition.
In addition, a significant portion of the purchase price of companies and businesses we acquire may be allocated to acquired goodwill and other intangible assets, which must be assessed for impairment at least annually. If our acquisitions do not yield expected returns, we may be required to take charges to our operating results based on this impairment assessment process, which could harm our results of operations.
Acquisitions could also result in dilutive issuances of equity securities, the use of our available cash, or the incurrence of additional debt to fund such acquisitions, which could harm our operating results. If an acquired business fails to meet our expectations, our operating results, business and financial condition could suffer.
In addition, third parties may be interested in acquiring us. We will continue to consider, evaluate and negotiate such transactions as we deem appropriate. Such potential transactions may divert the attention of management, and cause us to incur various costs and expenses in investigating, evaluating and negotiating such transactions, whether or not they are consummated.
If we are unable to maintain and further develop effective internal control over financial reporting, investors may lose confidence in the accuracy and completeness of our financial reports and the market price of our common stock may decrease.
As a public company, we are required to maintain internal control over financial reporting and to report any material weaknesses in such internal controls. Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, or Section 404, requires that we evaluate and determine the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting and provide a management report and attestation from our independent registered public accountant on our internal control over financial reporting. This attestation has and will continue to increase our independent public accountant costs and expenses.
If we identify one or more material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting, we will be unable to assert that our internal controls are effective, which could cause our stock price to decline. A “material weakness” is a deficiency, or a combination of deficiencies, in internal control over financial reporting such that there is a reasonable possibility that a material misstatement of our annual or interim financial statements will not be prevented or detected on a timely basis.
If we have material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting, we may not detect errors on a timely basis and our financial statements may be materially misstated. If we identify material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting, if we are unable to comply with the requirements of Section 404 in a timely manner, if we are unable to assert that our internal control over financial reporting is effective or if our independent registered public accounting firm is unable to attest that our internal control over financial reporting is effective, investors may lose confidence in the accuracy and completeness of our financial reports and the market price of our common stock could decrease. We could also become subject to stockholder or other third-party litigation as well as investigations by the stock exchange on which our securities are listed, the SEC or other regulatory authorities, which could require additional financial and management resources and could result in fines, penalties, trading suspensions or other remedies.
Changes in financial accounting standards or practices may cause adverse, unexpected financial reporting fluctuations and affect our reported operating results.
U.S. GAAP is subject to interpretation by the FASB, the SEC and various bodies formed to promulgate and interpret appropriate accounting principles. A change in accounting standards or practices can have a significant effect on our reported results and may even affect our financial statements issued before the change is effective. New accounting pronouncements and varying interpretations of accounting pronouncements have occurred and will occur in the future. Changes to existing rules or the questioning of current practices may harm our reported financial results or the way we account for or conduct our business.
For example, in May 2014, the FASB issued new revenue recognition rules under Accounting Standard Codification 606 - Revenue from Contracts with Customers (“ASC 606”), which included a single set of rules and criteria for revenue recognition to be used across all industries. We adopted this new standard in January 2018 using a modified retrospective method. With the adoption of this standard, the timing of our commission expense recognition changed, which caused fluctuations in our operating results. See Note 1 to the consolidated financial statements for more information.
Further, in February 2016, the FASB issued new rules for leases under the Accounting Standard Codification 842 - Leases (“ASC 842”), which requires a lessee to recognize assets and liabilities for both finance, previously known as capital, and operating leases with lease terms of more than 12 months. We adopted this new standard in January 2019 using a modified retrospective method. With the adoption of this standard, we recognized right-of-use, or ROU, assets and lease liabilities for operating leases. See Note 1 and 13 to consolidated financial statements for more information.
The application of any new accounting guidance is, and will be, based on all information available to us as of the date of adoption and up through subsequent interim reporting, including transition guidance published by the standard setters. However, the interpretation of these new standards may continue to evolve as other public companies adopt the new guidance and the standard setters issue new interpretative guidance related to these rules. As a result, changes in the interpretation of these rules could result in material adjustments to our application of the new guidance, which could have a material effect on our results of operations and financial condition. Additionally, any difficulties in implementing these pronouncements could cause us to fail to meet our financial reporting obligations, which could result in regulatory discipline, cessation or disruption of trading in our common stock and harm investors’ confidence in us.
In addition, certain factors have in the past and may in the future cause us to defer recognition of revenues. For example, the inclusion in our client contracts of non-standard terms, such as acceptance criteria, could require the deferral of revenue. To the extent that such contracts become more prevalent in the future our revenue may be harmed.
Because of these factors and other specific requirements under U.S. GAAP for revenue recognition, we must have precise terms and conditions in our arrangements in order to recognize revenue when we deliver our solution or perform our professional services. Negotiation of mutually acceptable terms and conditions can extend our sales cycle, and we may accept terms and conditions that do not permit revenue recognition at the time of delivery.
The results of the U.K.’s withdrawal from the European Union may have a negative effect on global economic conditions, financial markets and our business.
In June 2016, a majority of voters in the U.K. elected to withdraw from the European Union in a national referendum, referred to as Brexit. The U.K. withdrew from the European Union on January 31, 2020. Brexit has created significant uncertainty about the future relationship between the U.K. and the European Union, including with respect to the laws and regulations that will apply or continue to apply in the U.K. following Brexit as the U.K. and the European Union determine which European Union laws and regulations to replace, replicate, or amend after the effectiveness of Brexit.
Brexit has harmed and may continue to harm global economic conditions, as well as the stability of global financial markets. For example, Brexit introduced significant volatility in global stock markets and currency exchange rate fluctuations that resulted in the strengthening of the U.S. dollar against foreign currencies in which we conduct business. As part of Brexit, the U.K. and the European Union entered into a withdrawal agreement that includes, among other things, an implementation and transition period lasting from January 31, 2020 until December 31, 2020, which is referred to herein as the Transition Period. During the Transition Period, the terms governing future trade and economic relations between the U.K. and the European Union will be negotiated. Also during the Transition Period, the U.K. is legally no longer a Member State of the European Union, but it continues to be subject to all existing European Union laws, regulations, and directives and continues to participate in the European Single Market. Based on the current political climate, there is no guarantee that the U.K. and the European Union will reach an agreement on future trade and economic relations before the end of the Transition Period. It is unclear what financial, trade and legal implications would flow from the Transition Period ending and the U.K. no longer participating in the European Single Market without an agreement governing future trading and economic relations between the U.K. and the European Union, and how such an event would affect our business, operations, and financial performance.
In addition, the potential strengthening of the U.S. dollar relative to other currencies (including the British pound) would make our solution more expensive to international clients and may harm our international sales. Brexit could also cause disruptions to, and create uncertainty surrounding, the global economy, which could harm our ability to sell our solutions and may harm our results of operation, financial condition and cash flows. Brexit could also affect our relationships with our existing and future clients, owners of our data center facilities in the U.K.
and the Netherlands and our data center partners’ ability to retain and hire qualified employees, which could harm our business, business opportunities, results of operations, financial condition and cash flows.
We may not be able to utilize a significant portion of our net operating loss or research tax credit carryforwards, and under recently enacted lower federal corporate tax rates such tax benefits will be of less value, which could harm our profitability and financial condition.
As of December 31, 2019, we had federal and state net operating loss carryforwards due to prior period losses of $274.4 million and $154.5 million, respectively, which if not utilized will begin to expire in 2024 and 2028 for federal and state purposes, respectively. As of December 31, 2019, we also had gross research credit carryforwards for federal and California state tax purposes of $4.4 million and $3.5 million, respectively. If not utilized, the federal research credit carryforwards will begin to expire in 2024. The California research credit carryforwards do not expire. If we are unable to generate sufficient taxable income to utilize our net operating loss and research tax credit carryforwards, these carryforwards could expire unused and be unavailable to offset future income tax liabilities, which could harm our profitability and financial condition in future periods.
In addition, under Section 382 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended, or IRC Section 382, our ability to utilize net operating loss carryforwards or other tax attributes, such as research tax credits, in any taxable year may be limited if we experience an “ownership change.” An IRC Section 382 “ownership change” generally occurs if one or more stockholders or groups of stockholders who own at least 5% of our stock increase their ownership by more than 50 percentage points over their lowest ownership percentage within a rolling three-year period. Similar rules may apply under state tax laws. We experienced an ownership change prior to 2014 and the disclosed amounts of our net operating losses and research credit carryforwards have been reduced for the resulting effect of the IRC Section 382 limitations. Subsequent or future issuances or sales of our stock (including certain transactions involving our stock that are outside of our control) could cause an “ownership change” again, which would impose an annual limit on the amount of pre-ownership change net operating loss carryforwards and other tax attributes we can use to reduce our taxable income, potentially causing those tax attributes to expire unused or to be reduced, and increasing and accelerating our liability for income taxes. It is possible that such an ownership change could materially reduce our ability to use our net operating loss carryforwards or other tax attributes to offset taxable income, which could require us to pay more income taxes than if we were able to fully utilize our net operating loss carryforwards and harm our profitability.
In December 2017, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was enacted. The effect of the new tax law, and its regulations and interpretations, as well as any additional tax reform legislation in the United States or elsewhere, could harm our business and financial condition by, among other things, decreasing the value of our net operating loss carryforwards. If we are required to reduce the value of our net operating loss carryforwards, we may be required to record a corresponding charge to current earnings, which could harm our financial condition and results of operations in the period in which it is recorded.
Risks Related to Our Intellectual Property
Any failure to protect our intellectual property rights could impair our ability to protect our proprietary technology and our brand.
Our success and ability to compete depend in part upon our intellectual property. As of December 31, 2019, our intellectual property portfolio included five registered U.S. trademarks, 10 issued U.S. patents, three pending U.S. patent application and one registered U.S. copyright. As of December 31, 2019, we also had five issued patents, and nine trademark registrations outside the U.S. The expiration dates of our issued patents range from 2031 to 2034. We primarily rely on copyright, trade secret and trademark laws, trade secret protection and confidentiality or license agreements with our employees, clients, partners and others to protect our intellectual property rights. However, the steps we take to secure, protect and enforce our intellectual property rights may be inadequate. We may not be able to obtain any further patents or trademarks, our current patents could be invalidated or our competitors could design their products around our patented technology, and our pending applications may not result in the issuance of patents or trademarks. We have pending patent applications and trademark registrations outside the U.S., and we may have to expend significant additional resources to obtain additional protection and maintain current registrations as we expand our international operations. Furthermore, legal standards relating to the validity, enforceability and scope of protection of intellectual property rights in other countries, including Russia, where we have significant research and development operations, and the Philippines, where we have significant technical support, training and other professional services operations, are uncertain and may afford little or no effective
protection of our proprietary technology, and the risk of intellectual property misappropriation may be higher in these countries. Consequently, we may be unable to prevent our proprietary technology from being infringed or exploited abroad, which could affect our ability to expand into international markets or require costly efforts to protect our technology.
In order to protect our intellectual property rights, we may be required to spend significant resources to monitor and protect these rights. Litigation brought to protect and enforce our intellectual property rights could be costly, time consuming and distracting to our management and could result in the impairment or loss of our intellectual property. Furthermore, our efforts to enforce our intellectual property rights may be met with defenses, counterclaims and countersuits attacking the validity and enforceability of our intellectual property rights. Accordingly, we may not be able to prevent third parties from infringing upon or misappropriating our intellectual property. Our failure to secure, protect and enforce our intellectual property rights could substantially harm the value of our technology, solutions, brand and business.
We will likely continue to be subject to third-party intellectual property infringement claims.
There is considerable patent and other intellectual property development activity and litigation in our industry. Our success depends upon our not infringing upon the intellectual property rights of others. Our competitors, as well as a number of other entities and individuals, may own or claim to own intellectual property relating to our industry. From time to time, third parties have claimed that we are infringing upon their intellectual property rights. For example, NobelBiz, Inc., or NobelBiz, filed a patent infringement lawsuit against us alleging that our local caller ID management service infringed on certain of its patents. In December 2017, the lawsuit was settled and the case was dismissed in its entirety.
Certain technology necessary for us to provide our solution may be patented, copyrighted or otherwise protected by other parties either now or in the future. In such case, we would have to negotiate a license for the use of that technology. We may not be able to negotiate such a license at a price that is acceptable, or at all. The existence of such a patent, copyright or other protections, or our inability to negotiate a license for any such technology on acceptable terms, could force us to cease using such technology and offering solutions incorporating such technology.
Others have claimed, or in the future may claim, that our solution and underlying technology infringe or violate their intellectual property rights. However, we may be unaware of the intellectual property rights that others may claim cover some or all of our technology or solution. Any claims or litigation could cause us to incur significant costs and expenses and, if successfully asserted against us, could require that we pay substantial damages or ongoing royalty payments, require that we refrain from using, manufacturing or selling certain offerings or features or using certain processes, prevent us from offering our solution or certain features thereof, or require that we comply with other unfavorable terms, any of which could harm our business and operating results. We may also be obligated to indemnify our clients or business partners and pay substantial settlement costs, including royalty payments, in connection with any such claim or litigation and to obtain licenses, which could be costly. Even if we were to prevail in such a dispute, any litigation regarding our intellectual property could be costly and time consuming and divert the attention of our management and key personnel from our business operations.
Indemnity provisions in various agreements potentially expose us to substantial liability for intellectual property infringement and other losses.
In the ordinary course of business, we enter into agreements of varying scope and terms pursuant to which we agree to indemnify clients, vendors, lessors, business partners and other parties for third party claims with respect to certain matters, including, but not limited to, losses arising out of breach of such agreements, certain claims related to third-party privacy or cyber security breaches or from intellectual property infringement claims made by third parties. In addition, we have entered into indemnification agreements with our directors, officers and certain employees that will require us, among other things, to indemnify them against certain liabilities that may arise by reason of their status or service as directors, officers or employees. Large indemnity payments or damage claims from contractual breach could harm our business, results of operations and financial condition. Although we typically contractually limit our liability with respect to such obligations, we may still incur substantial liability related to them. Any dispute with a client with respect to such obligations could be expensive, even if we ultimately prevail, and could harm on our relationship with that client and other current and prospective clients, reduce demand for our solution and harm our business, results of operations and financial condition.
We employ third-party licensed software for use in or with our solution, and the inability to maintain these licenses or errors in the software we license could result in increased costs, or reduced service levels, which could harm our business.
Our solution incorporates certain third-party software obtained under licenses from other companies. We anticipate that we will continue to rely on such software from third parties in the future. Although we believe that there are commercially reasonable alternatives to the third-party software we currently license, this may not be the case, or it may be difficult or costly to transition to other providers. In addition, integration of the software used in our solution with new third-party software may require significant work and require substantial investment of our time and resources. To the extent that our solution depends upon the successful operation of third-party software in conjunction with our software, any undetected errors or defects in this third-party software could prevent the deployment or impair the functionality of our solution, delay new product or solution introductions, result in increased costs, or a failure of our solution and injure our reputation. Our use of additional or alternative third-party software would require us to enter into license agreements with third parties and to integrate such software to our solution.
There can be no assurance that the technology licensed by us will continue to provide competitive features and functionality or that licenses for technology currently utilized by us or other technology that we may seek to license in the future, including to replace current third-party software, will be available to us at a reasonable cost or on commercially reasonable terms, or at all. Third-party licensors may also be acquired or go out of business, which could preclude us from continuing to use such technology. The loss of, or inability to maintain, existing licenses could result in lost product features and litigation. The loss of existing licenses could also result in implementation delays or reductions until equivalent technology or suitable alternative solutions could be developed, identified, licensed and integrated, and could increase our costs and harm our business.
Our solution utilizes open source software, and any failure to comply with the terms of one or more of these open source licenses could negatively affect our business.
Our solution includes software covered by open source licenses, which may include, for example, free general public use licenses, open source front-end libraries and open source applications. The terms of various open source licenses have not been interpreted by United States courts, and there is a risk that such licenses could be construed in a manner that imposes unanticipated conditions or restrictions on our ability to market our solution. By the terms of certain open source licenses, we could be required to release the source code of our proprietary software, and to make our proprietary software available under open source licenses, if we combine our proprietary software with open source software in a certain manner. In the event that portions of our proprietary software are determined to be subject to an open source license, we could be required to publicly release the affected portions of our source code, re-engineer all or a portion of our technologies, or otherwise be limited in the licensing of our technologies, each of which could reduce or eliminate the value of our technologies and solutions. In addition to risks related to license requirements, usage of open source software can lead to greater risks than use of third-party commercial software, as open source licensors generally do not provide warranties or controls on the origin of the software. Given the nature of open source software, there is also a risk that third parties may assert copyright and other intellectual property infringement claims against us based on our use of certain open source software programs. Many of the risks associated with the usage of open source software cannot be eliminated, and could harm our business.
Risks Related to Regulatory Matters
Failure to comply with laws and regulations could harm our business and our reputation.
Our business is subject to regulation by various federal, state, local and foreign governmental agencies, including agencies responsible for monitoring and enforcing employment and labor laws, workplace safety, environmental laws, privacy or data security laws, consumer protection laws, anti-bribery laws, import/export controls, federal securities laws and tax laws and regulations. In certain jurisdictions, these regulatory requirements may be more stringent than those in the United States and in other circumstances these requirements may be more stringent in the United States. Noncompliance with applicable regulations or requirements could subject us to investigations, sanctions, mandatory recalls, notification obligations, enforcement actions, disgorgement of profits, fines, damages, civil and criminal penalties or injunctions. If any governmental sanctions, fines or penalties are imposed, or if we do not prevail in any civil or criminal litigation, our business, operating results, financial condition and reputation could be harmed. In addition, responding to any action will likely result in a significant diversion of
management’s attention and resources and an increase in professional fees. Enforcement actions and sanctions could further harm our business, operating results, financial condition and reputation.
Alleged or actual failure to comply with the constantly evolving legal and contractual environment surrounding calling consumers and wireless phone numbers by other companies or our competitors or governmental or private enforcement actions related thereto, could harm our business, financial condition, results of operations and cash flows.
The legal and contractual environment surrounding calling consumers and wireless phone numbers is constantly evolving. In the United States, two federal agencies, the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC and the FCC, and various states have laws including, at the federal level, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, or TCPA, that restrict the placing of certain telephone calls and texts to residential and wireless telephone subscribers by means of automatic telephone dialing systems, prerecorded or artificial voice messages and fax machines. These laws require companies to institute processes and safeguards to comply with these restrictions. The legal interpretation of certain of the requirements of these laws has been in dispute before the courts and federal agencies and the FCC is expected to conduct further rulemaking proceedings that may further alter its interpretation of the legal requirements involved. Some of these laws, where a violation is established, can be enforced by the FTC, FCC, State Attorneys General, or private party litigants. In these types of actions, the plaintiff may seek damages, statutory penalties, costs and/or attorneys’ fees.
We have designed our solution to comply with these laws. To the extent that our solution is viewed by clients or potential clients as less functional, or more difficult to deploy or use, because of our solution’s compliance features, we may lose market share to competitors that do not include similar compliance safeguards. Our contractual arrangements with our clients who use our solution to place calls also expressly require them to comply with all such laws and to indemnify us for any failure to do so. We take numerous steps to reasonably confirm that the use of our services complies with applicable laws. Even with these efforts, it is possible that the FTC, FCC, private litigants or others may attempt to hold our clients, or us as a software solution provider, responsible for alleged violations of these laws. To the extent any court finds that the software solution violated a controlling legal standard, we could face indemnification demands from our clients for costs, fees and damages with respect to calls placed using that solution. It also is possible that we may not successfully enforce or collect upon our contractual indemnities from our clients. Defending such suits can be costly and time-consuming and could result in fines, damages, expenses and losses. Additionally, these laws, and any changes to them or the interpretation thereof, that further restrict calling consumers, including to wireless phone numbers, adverse publicity regarding the alleged or actual failure by companies, including our clients and competitors, to comply with such laws or governmental or private enforcement actions related thereto, could result in a reduction in the use of our solution by our clients and potential clients, which could harm our business, financial condition, results of operations and cash flows.
On December 12, 2018, the FCC issued an order concluding that the Short Message Service, or SMS, or text messages, is an information service under federal law and not a telecommunications service. The regulatory significance to us is that the FCC’s decision gives wireless carriers the flexibility to block SMS messages if the carriers identify the messages as unwanted by their wireless customers. Such blocking efforts by carriers may make it more difficult for our clients to use SMS messages that are provided by us as a part of our overall communications and outreach solution for our clients. Thus, although SMS comprises only a very small portion of our revenue base, its future availability as an effective tool for communication and outreach for our clients and their customers is uncertain and could cause our solution to be less valuable to clients and potential clients.
Increased taxes on our service may increase our clients’ cost of using our service and/or increase our costs and reduce our profit margins to the extent the costs are not passed through to our clients, and we may be subject to liabilities for past sales and other taxes, surcharges and fees.
Based on analysis of our activities, we have determined that we are obligated to collect and remit U.S. state or local sales, use, gross receipts, excise and utility user taxes, as well as fees or surcharges as a communications service provider in certain U.S. states, municipalities or local tax jurisdictions. We are registered for collecting and remitting applicable taxes where such a determination has been made. Prior to our making such determination, we neither collected nor remitted these taxes, fees or surcharges to applicable local, municipal or state jurisdictions. We continue to analyze our activities to determine if we are subject to these taxes in additional jurisdictions and based on our ongoing assessment of our U.S. state and local tax collection and remittance obligations, we register for tax
and regulatory purposes in such jurisdictions and commence collecting and remitting applicable state and local taxes and surcharges to these jurisdictions.
We have accrued a contingent liability of $1.2 million for our best estimate of the probable amount of taxes and surcharges that may be imposed by various states and municipalities on our activities, including our usage-based and subscription services, prior to registration. This contingent liability is based on our analysis of a number of factors, including the source location of our usage-based fees, the taxability of our subscription services and the rules and regulations in each state. The actual amount of state and local taxes and surcharges paid may differ from our estimates. See Note 10 to the consolidated financial statements.
While we have accrued for these potential liabilities in each period, such accruals are based on analyses of our business activities, the operation of our solution, applicable statutes, regulations and rules in each state and locality and estimates of sales subject to sales tax or other charges. State and local taxing and regulatory authorities may challenge our position and may decide to audit our business and operations with respect to state or local sales, use, gross receipts, excise and utility user taxes, fees or surcharges, which could result in our being liable for taxes, fees, or surcharges, as well as related penalties and interest, above our recorded accrued liability or additional liability for taxes, fees, or surcharges, as well as penalties and interest for our clients, which could harm our results of operations and our relationships with our clients. In addition, if our international sales grow, additional foreign countries may seek to impose sales or other tax collection obligations on us, which would increase our exposure to liability.
The applicability of state or local taxes, fees or surcharges relative to services such as ours is complex, ambiguous and subject to interpretation and change. If states enact new legislation or if taxing and regulatory authorities promulgate new rules or regulations or expand or otherwise alter their interpretations of existing rules and regulations, we could incur additional liabilities. In addition, the collection of additional taxes, fees or surcharges in the future could increase our prices or reduce our profit margins. Compliance with new or existing legislation, rules or regulations may also make us less competitive with those competitors who are not subject to, or choose not to comply with, such legislation, rules or regulations. We have incurred, and will continue to incur, substantial ongoing costs associated with complying with state or local tax, fee or surcharge requirements in the numerous markets in which we conduct or will conduct business.
Our ability to offer services outside the United States is subject to different regulatory and taxation requirements, which may be complicated and uncertain.
As we continue to expand the sale and implementation of our solutions internationally, we will be subject to additional regulations, taxes, surcharges and fees. Compliance with these new complex regulatory requirements differ from country to country, and are frequently changing and may impose substantial compliance burdens on our business. At times, it may be difficult to determine which laws and regulations apply and we may discover that we are required to comply with certain laws and regulations after having provided services for some time in that jurisdiction, which could subject us to retroactive taxes, fees and penalties, and we may be subject to conflicting requirements. For example, prior to 2016, we had not collected taxes on our sales in Canada. During the second quarter of 2015, we reviewed the taxability of our sales in Canada and determined that we were obligated to collect from our Canadian clients and remit such taxes to the Canadian federal government and certain provincial governments Value-added Taxes and/or Provincial Sales Taxes. We commenced collecting and remitting such taxes in January 2016. Additionally, as we expand internationally, the risk that governments will regulate or impose new or increased taxes or fees on our services increases. Any such additional regulation or taxes could decrease the value of our international expansion and harm our results of operations.
We are subject to assessments for unpaid USF contributions, as well as interest thereon and civil penalties, due to our late registration and past failure to recognize our obligation as a USF contributor and as an international carrier.
We are classified as a telecommunications service provider for regulatory purposes and we are required to make direct contributions to the USF based on revenue we receive from the resale of interstate and international telecommunications services. In order to comply with the obligation to make direct contributions, we are registered with the Universal Service Administrative Company, or USAC, which is charged by the FCC with administering the USF, and have been remitting the required contributions to USAC since our registration with USAC in April 2013.
In June 2015, in connection with our late registration with the USAC and past failure to make USF contributions prior to 2013, we entered into a consent decree with the FCC Enforcement Bureau. In the consent
decree, we agreed to pay a civil penalty of $2.0 million to the U.S. Treasury, which was paid in installments ending on December 31, 2018. We also agreed to make USF contributions of $3.9 million based on our revenues for the period from 2008 to 2012. We are still in dispute with the FCC regarding whether we are liable for USF contributions related to the period from 2003 through 2007. As of December 31, 2019, we had accrued $0.9 million in respect of the remaining disputed assessments, including interest and penalties, for the period of 2003 through 2007. See Note 10 to the consolidated financial statements.
Although the effective period of the FCC consent decree has terminated, the FCC routinely imposes a higher expectation of regulatory compliance on companies that were previously subject to consent decrees and any further violations of FCC rules could subject us to heightened enforcement action, including higher fines and penalties.
Our ongoing obligations to pay federal, state and local telecommunications contributions and taxes may decrease our price advantage over, and ability to compete with our competitors who are not subject to, or choose not to comply with, those requirements. In addition, if we are unable to continue to pass some or all of the cost of these contributions and taxes to our clients, our profit margins on the minutes we resell will decrease. Our federal contributions and tax obligations may significantly increase in the future, due to new interpretations by governing authorities, governmental budget pressures, changes in our business model or solutions or other factors.
If we do not comply with FCC rules and regulations, we could be subject to further FCC enforcement actions, fines, loss of licenses and possibly restrictions on our ability to operate or offer certain of our services.
Since our business is regulated by the FCC, we are subject to existing or potential FCC regulations relating to privacy, disability access, porting of numbers, USF contributions and other requirements. If we do not comply with FCC rules and regulations, we could be subject to further FCC enforcement actions, fines, loss of licenses and possibly restrictions on our ability to operate or offer certain of our services. Any further enforcement action by the FCC, which may be a public process, would hurt our reputation in the industry, could impair our ability to sell our services to clients and could harm our business and results of operations.
The regulations to which we are subject (in whole or in part) include:
•the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, which requires covered entities to assist law enforcement in undertaking electronic surveillance;
•contributions to the USF which requires that we pay a percentage of our revenues resulting from the provision of interstate telecommunications services to support certain federal programs;
•payment of annual FCC regulatory fees based on our interstate and international revenues;
•rules pertaining to access to our services by people with disabilities and contributions to the Telecommunications Relay Services fund; and
•FCC rules regarding Customer Proprietary Network Information, or CPNI, which prohibit us from using such information without client approval, subject to certain exceptions.
If we do not comply with any current or future rules or regulations that apply to our business, we could be subject to additional and substantial fines and penalties, we may have to restructure our solutions, exit certain markets, accept lower margins or raise the price of our solutions, any of which could harm our business and results of operations.
Reform of federal and state USF programs could increase the cost of our service to our clients, diminishing or eliminating our pricing advantage.
The FCC and a number of states are considering reform or other modifications to USF programs. The way we calculate our contribution may change if the FCC or certain states engage in reform or adopt other modifications.
Should the FCC or certain states adopt new contribution mechanisms or otherwise modify contribution obligations that increase our contribution burden, we will either need to raise the amount we currently collect from our clients to cover this obligation or absorb the costs, which would reduce our profit margins. Furthermore, the FCC has ruled that states can require us to contribute to state USF programs. A number of states already require us to contribute, while others are actively considering extending their programs to include the solution we provide. Currently our USF contributions are borne by our clients, which could result in our solution becoming less competitive as compared to products provided by our competitors.
Privacy concerns and domestic or foreign laws and regulations may reduce the demand for our solution, increase our costs and harm our business.
Our clients use our solution to collect, transfer, use, and otherwise process, (collectively, Process or Processing), personal data regarding their customers and potential customers. The Processing of personal data and other types of protected data subjects us and our customers to a number of domestic and international laws that govern and regulate the Processing of personal data and other types of protected data. These laws regulate and address a range of issues including data privacy (e.g., restrictions or technological or process requirements regarding the Processing of data), cybersecurity (e.g., requirements for the protection of personal data against compromise of the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of personal data), breach notification, data governance, and risk management and reporting. These laws can vary substantially from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and are rapidly evolving. Domestic and international government authorities are considering adopting, or may adopt, laws and regulations in the future, regarding the Processing of personal data obtained from consumers and individuals.
Moreover, laws and regulations outside the United States, and particularly in the European Union, or EU, often are more restrictive than those in the United States. Such laws and regulations may have more stringent compliance obligations in regards to data protection. By way of example, under the EU General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, data subjects have the right to access, correct, and request deletion of personal data stored or maintained by companies subject to GDPR, such companies may have shorter timeframes and broader requirements for informing data protection authorities and individuals of security breaches that affect their personal data, and, in some cases, may be required to obtain individuals’ consent to process personal data for certain purposes. We also may be bound by additional, more stringent contractual obligations relating to our collection, use, and disclosure of personal, financial, and other data. It is possible that a governmental authority may implement a new law or interpret an existing law in a manner that limits our customers’ ability to use our solutions or that requires us to make costly or detrimental changes in our solutions and services, whether on a one-time basis or as an ongoing increase in our operating costs and expenses. Further, some laws might require us to disclose proprietary or confidential aspects of our solutions in a manner that compromises the effectiveness of our solutions or that enables our competitors or bad actors to gain insight into the operation of our technology, enabling them to copy or circumvent our solutions and thereby reducing the value of our technology.
The costs of compliance with, and other burdens imposed by, such laws and regulations that are applicable to us and the businesses of our clients may limit the use and adoption of our solution and reduce overall demand for our solution. Also, failure to comply with such laws may lead to significant fines, penalties or other regulatory liabilities, such as orders or consent decrees forcing us or our clients to modify business practices, and reputational damage or third-party lawsuits for any noncompliance with such laws. Our business could be harmed if legislation or regulations are adopted, interpreted or implemented in a manner that is inconsistent from country to country and inconsistent with our current policies and practices, or those of our clients.
Furthermore, privacy and data protection concerns may cause consumers to resist providing the personal data or other types of protected data that may be subject to laws and regulations that is necessary to allow our clients to use our solution effectively. Even the perception of privacy concerns, whether or not valid, may inhibit market adoption of our solution in certain industries or countries.
The European Union’s GDPR may continue to increase our costs and the costs of our clients to operate, limit the use of our solution or change the way we operate, exposes us to substantial fines and penalties if we fail to comply, and has led to similar laws being enacted in other jurisdictions.
On May 25, 2018, the EU adopted the GDPR. The GDPR replaced the EU Data Protection Directive, also known as Directive 95/46/EC, and is intended to harmonize data protection laws throughout the EU by applying a single data protection law that is binding throughout each member state. We and many of our customers are subject to the GDPR based upon our processing of personal data collected from EU data subjects, such as our processing of personal data of our customers in the EU and our processing of our EU employees’ personal data.
The GDPR enhances data protection obligations for processors and controllers of personal data, including, for example, expanded disclosures about how personal information is to be used, limitations on retention of information, mandatory data breach notification requirements and onerous new obligations on services providers. Non-compliance with the GDPR can trigger steep fines of up to €20 million or 4% of total worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher. The member states of the EU were tasked under the GDPR to enact certain implementing
legislation that would add to or further interpret the GDPR requirements and this additional implementing legislation potentially extends our obligations and potential liability for failing to meet such obligations.
Given the breadth and depth of changes in data protection obligations, our compliance with the GDPR’s requirements will continue to require time, resources and review of the technology and systems we use to satisfy the GDPR’s requirements. We have ongoing procedures to maintain GDPR compliance. We continue to deliver product features that enhance our data management and security in support of GDPR compliance.
Among the compliance obligations the GDPR raises for us and our customers are requirements regarding the transfer of personal data from the EU to other jurisdictions, including the United States. In order to comply with the data transfer obligations imposed by the GDPR, we rely on the use of standard contractual clauses issued by the European Commission. Where applicable, we also enter into data processing agreements including standard contractual clauses approved by the Article 29 Working Party (now the Data Protection Board) to authorize the transfer of personal data from the EU and in support of our data processing activities on behalf of our customers. Litigation challenging the adequacy of the standard contractual clauses could negatively impact the operation of our business. The invalidation of the standard contractual clauses may require us to adopt costly or burdensome alternatives. It may be necessary to establish additional systems and business operations in the EU to avoid the transfer of personal data out of the EU. Should a change in the conduct of our business be required, it may involve substantial expense and the diversion of resources from other aspects of our business, all of which may harm our business and results of operations.
Given the complexity of operationalizing the GDPR, the maturity level of proposed compliance frameworks and the relative lack of guidance in the interpretation of its numerous requirements, we and our customers are at risk of enforcement actions taken by EU data protection authorities or litigation from consumer advocacy groups acting on behalf of data subjects. This risk will likely remain until there is more guidance on the GDPR, including as to implementing legislation enacted by the member states and enforcement actions taken by various data protection authorities.
The implementation of the GDPR has led other jurisdictions to amend, or propose legislation to amend, their existing data protection laws to align with the requirements of the GDPR with the aim of obtaining an adequate level of data protection to facilitate the transfer of personal data from the EU. Accordingly, the challenges we face in the EU will likely also apply to other jurisdictions outside the EU that adopt laws similar in construction to the GDPR or regulatory frameworks of equivalent complexity.
The CCPA could increase our costs and the costs of our clients to operate, limit the use of our solution or change the way we operate, and expose us to substantial fines and class action risk if we fail to comply, and lead to similar laws being enacted in other states.
In 2018, the State of California adopted the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, or the CCPA. The CCPA applies to certain for-profit entities doing businesses in California. We and our qualifying customers were required to comply with these requirements before the CCPA became effective on January 1, 2020.
The CCPA establishes a new privacy framework for covered businesses by creating an expanded definition of personal information and creating new data privacy rights for consumers in the State of California. As required by the statute, entities doing business in California have new and ongoing disclosure obligations to consumers for whom they hold or process personal data. Businesses must also provide consumers with the right to dictate how their personal information is used and shared. Complying with these obligations will involve continued expenditures that could increase as more consumers exercise their rights under the statute.
The CCPA also creates a new and potentially severe statutory damages framework for violations of its provisions. The California Attorney General can enforce the CCPA by seeking statutory penalties for failure to comply with the act. For businesses that fail to implement reasonable security procedures, the CCPA also creates a private right of action for consumers whose personal data is subject to a data breach. This private right of action has the potential to create significant class action liability for businesses, like ours, that operate in California. To protect against these new risks, it may be necessary to change our insurance programs.
The CCPA was amended in September 2018 and in October 2019. Additional CCPA amendments have been proposed. It is unclear how, if at all, it may be modified, or how it will be interpreted by the California Attorney General. Accordingly, modifications to the CCPA could create additional liability and require costly expenditures to ensure continued compliance.
Risks Related to Ownership of Our Common Stock
Our stock price has been volatile, may continue to be volatile and may decline, including due to factors beyond our control.
The market price of our common stock has been volatile in the past and may fluctuate significantly in the future in response to numerous factors, many of which are beyond our control. During the twelve months ended December 31, 2019, the sale price per share of our common stock ranged from a low of $40.82 to a high of $69.86. Factors that may contribute to continuing volatility in the price of our common stock include:
•actual or anticipated fluctuations in our operating results;
•the financial projections we provide to the public, any changes in these projections, our failure to meet these projections, or our failure to exceed these projections by amounts or percentages expected by our investors and analysts;
•failure of securities analysts to initiate or maintain coverage of our company, changes in financial estimates by any securities analysts who follow our company, or our failure to meet these estimates or the expectations of investors;
•ratings changes by any securities analysts who follow our company;
•sales of our common stock (or securities that convert to our common stock) by us or our significant stockholders, or the public announcement of same;
•the assessment of our business or position in our market published in research and other reports;
•announcements by us or our competitors of significant product or technical innovations, financings, acquisitions, strategic partnerships, joint ventures or capital commitments;
•entry into the market by new competitors, or the introduction of new products or the generation of new sales by us or our competitors;
•changes in operating performance and stock market valuations of other technology companies generally, or those in the software as a service industry in particular;
•price and volume fluctuations in the overall stock market, including as a result of trends in the U.S. or global economy;
•any major change in our board of directors or management;
•lawsuits threatened or filed against us;
•security breaches or incidents impacting our clients or their customers and security breaches of companies that provide solutions similar to our solution, which could negatively impact our industry as a whole;
•legislation or regulation of our business, the internet and/or contact centers;
•loss of key personnel;
•new entrants into the contact center market, including the transition by providers of legacy on-premise contact center systems to cloud solutions;
•the perceived or real impact of events that harm our direct competitors;
•developments with respect to patents or proprietary rights;
•general market conditions; and
•other events or factors, including those resulting from war, incidents of terrorism or responses to these events, which would be unrelated to our business and industry, and outside of our control.
In addition, stock markets have experienced extreme price and volume fluctuations that have affected and continue to affect the market prices of equity securities of many technology companies. Stock prices of many technology companies have fluctuated in a manner unrelated or disproportionate to the operating performance of those companies. These and other factors may disproportionately impact the trading price of our common stock. In the past, stockholders have instituted securities class action litigation following periods of market volatility. If we were to become involved in securities litigation, it could subject us to substantial costs, divert resources and the attention of management from our business and harm our business, results of operations, financial condition, reputation and cash flows.
If securities or industry analysts discontinue publishing research or reports about our business, or publish negative reports about our business, our share price and trading volume could decline.
The trading market for our common stock depends in part on the research and reports that securities or industry analysts publish about us or our business, our market and our competitors. We do not have any control over these analysts. If one or more of the analysts who cover us downgrade our shares or change their opinion of our shares or our business, our share price would likely decline. If one or more of these analysts cease coverage of our company or fail to regularly publish reports on us, we could lose visibility in financial markets or our industry market, which could cause our share price or trading volume to decline.
Substantial future sales of shares of our common stock could cause the market price of our common stock to decline.
The market price of shares of our common stock could decline as a result of substantial sales of our common stock, particularly sales by our directors, executive officers and significant stockholders or the perception in the market that holders of a large number of shares intend to sell their shares.
The future registration of shares of our common stock may cause our stock price to decline, even before such shares are actually sold in the market. We have registered shares of common stock that we may issue under our employee equity incentive plans. These shares can be sold freely in the public market upon issuance.
We are unable to predict the effect that sales, or the perception that our shares may be available for sale, will have on the prevailing market price of our common stock.
Anti-takeover provisions in our charter documents and under Delaware law could make an acquisition of our company more difficult, limit attempts by our stockholders to replace or remove our current management and limit the market price of our common stock.
Provisions in our amended and restated certificate of incorporation and amended and restated bylaws may have the effect of delaying or preventing a change in control or changes in our management. Our amended and restated certificate of incorporation and amended and restated bylaws:
•provide that our board of directors is classified into three classes of directors;
•provide that stockholders may remove directors only for cause and only with the approval of holders of at least 66 2⁄3% of our then outstanding capital stock;
•provide that the authorized number of directors may be changed only by resolution of the board of directors;
•provide that all vacancies, including newly created directorships, may, except as otherwise required by law, be filled by the affirmative vote of a majority of directors then in office, even if less than a quorum;
•provide that our stockholders may not take action by written consent, and may only take action at annual or special meetings of our stockholders;
•provide that stockholders seeking to present proposals before a meeting of stockholders or to nominate candidates for election as directors at a meeting of stockholders must provide notice in writing in a timely manner, and also specify requirements as to the form and content of a stockholder’s notice;
•restrict the forum for certain litigation against us to Delaware;
•do not provide for cumulative voting rights (therefore allowing the holders of a majority of the shares of common stock entitled to vote in any election of directors to elect all of the directors standing for election);
•provide that special meetings of our stockholders may be called only by the chairman of the board, our chief executive officer or the board of directors pursuant to a resolution adopted by a majority of the total number of authorized directors; and
•provide that stockholders will be permitted to amend our amended and restated bylaws and certain parts of our amended and restated certificate of incorporation only upon receiving at least 662/3% of the votes entitled to be cast by holders of all outstanding shares then entitled to vote generally in the election of directors, voting together as a single class.
These provisions may frustrate or prevent any attempts by our stockholders to replace or remove our current management by making it more difficult for stockholders to replace members of our board of directors, which is responsible for appointing the members of our management. In addition, because we are incorporated in Delaware,
we are governed by the provisions of Section 203 of the Delaware General Corporation Law, which generally prohibits a Delaware corporation from engaging in any of a broad range of business combinations with any “interested” stockholder for a period of three years following the date on which the stockholder became an “interested” stockholder.
The existence of these provisions could negatively affect the price of our common stock and limit opportunities for you to realize value in a corporate transaction.
Our amended and restated certificate of incorporation provides that the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware is the sole and exclusive forum for substantially all disputes between us and our stockholders, which could limit our stockholders’ ability to obtain a favorable judicial forum for disputes with us or our directors, officers or employees.
Our amended and restated certificate of incorporation provides that, unless we consent to the selection of an alternative forum, the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware is the sole and exclusive forum for (1) any derivative action or proceeding brought on our behalf, (2) any action asserting a claim of breach of fiduciary duty owed by any of our directors, officers or other employees to us or to our stockholders, (3) any action asserting a claim arising pursuant to the Delaware General Corporation Law or (4) any action asserting a claim governed by the internal affairs doctrine. The choice of forum provision may limit a stockholder’s ability to bring a claim in a judicial forum that it finds favorable for disputes with us or our directors, officers or other employees, which may discourage such lawsuits against us and our directors, officers and other employees. Alternatively, if a court were to find the choice of forum provision contained in our amended and restated certificate of incorporation to be inapplicable or unenforceable in an action, we may incur additional costs associated with resolving such action in other jurisdictions, which could harm our business, operating results and financial condition.
We have never paid cash dividends and do not intend to pay dividends for the foreseeable future.
We have never declared or paid any cash dividends on our common stock. We currently intend to retain any future earnings and do not expect to pay any dividends in the foreseeable future. Any future determination to declare cash dividends will be made at the discretion of our board of directors, subject to applicable laws, and will depend on a number of factors, including our financial condition, results of operations, capital requirements, contractual restrictions, including under any future loan facilities, general business conditions and other factors that our board of directors may deem relevant. While our convertible senior notes do not prohibit payment of dividends, any dividends declared and paid by our board of directors would result in an adjustment to the conversion rate of such notes such that additional shares would be issuable upon conversion. Accordingly, holders of our common stock must rely on sales of their common stock after price appreciation, which may never occur, as the only way to realize any future gains on their investments.
Risks Related to Ownership of Our Convertible Senior Notes
Servicing our debt may require a significant amount of cash. We may not have sufficient cash flow from our business to pay our indebtedness, and we may not have the ability to raise the funds necessary to settle for cash conversions of the convertible senior notes or to repurchase the convertible senior notes for cash upon a fundamental change, which could adversely affect our business and results of operations.
In May 2018, we issued $258.8 million in aggregate principal amount of convertible senior notes in a private offering. The interest rate is fixed at 0.125% per annum and is payable semiannually in arrears on May 1 and November 1 of each year, beginning on November 1, 2018. Our ability to make scheduled payments of principal, interest, or to refinance our indebtedness, including the convertible senior notes, depends on our future performance, which is subject to economic, financial, competitive and other factors beyond our control. Our business may not generate cash flows from operations in the future that are sufficient to service our debt and make necessary capital expenditures. If we are unable to generate such cash flows, we may be required to adopt one or more alternatives, such as selling assets, restructuring debt or obtaining additional debt financing or equity capital on terms that may be onerous or highly dilutive. Our ability to refinance any future indebtedness will depend on the capital markets and our financial condition at such time. We may not be able to engage in any of these activities or engage in these activities on desirable terms, which could result in a default on our debt obligations.
Subject to certain conditions, holders of the convertible senior notes have the right to require us to repurchase for cash all or any portion of their convertible senior notes upon the occurrence of a fundamental change (as defined
in the indenture governing the convertible senior notes) at a fundamental change repurchase price equal to 100% of the principal amount of the convertible senior notes to be repurchased, plus accrued and unpaid interest, if any, to, but excluding, the fundamental change repurchase date. Upon conversion, unless we elect to deliver solely shares of our common stock to settle such conversion (other than paying cash in lieu of delivering any fractional share), we will be required to settle a portion or all of our conversion obligation through the payment of cash. We may not have enough available cash or be able to obtain financing at the time we are required to make repurchases in connection with such conversion and our ability to pay may additionally be limited by law, regulatory authority or agreements governing our future indebtedness. Our failure to repurchase the convertible senior notes at a time when the repurchase is required by the indenture governing the convertible senior notes or to pay any cash payable on future conversions as required by such indenture would constitute a default under such indenture. A default under the indenture or the fundamental change itself could also lead to a default under agreements governing our future indebtedness. If the repayment of the related indebtedness were to be accelerated after any applicable notice or grace periods, we may not have sufficient funds to repay the indebtedness and repurchase the convertible senior notes or make cash payments upon conversions thereof.
The conditional conversion feature of the convertible senior notes, if triggered, may adversely affect our financial condition and operating results.
One of the conditional conversion feature of the convertible senior notes was triggered in each of the third and fourth quarters of 2019. As such, holders of convertible senior notes are entitled to convert the convertible senior notes at any time during the first quarter of 2020 at their option. To the extent that conditional conversion features of the convertible senior notes are triggered in the future, holders of convertible senior notes will be entitled to convert the convertible senior notes at any time during the specified periods at their option. If one or more holders elect to convert their convertible senior notes, unless we elect to satisfy our conversion obligation by delivering solely shares of our common stock (other than paying cash in lieu of delivering any fractional share), we will be required to settle a portion or all of our conversion obligation through the payment of cash, which could adversely affect our liquidity. Upon conversion, we have the option to pay or deliver, as the case may be, cash, shares of our common stock or a combination of cash and shares of our common stock, at our election. As such, the ability of holders of convertible senior notes to convert their convertible senior notes currently or within 12 months from the balance sheet date does not cause us to reclassify all or a portion of the outstanding principal of the convertible senior notes as a current liability. We have received elections to convert a limited number of convertible senior notes in the fourth quarter of 2019 and first quarter of 2020. We elected to satisfy our conversion obligation through the payment of cash to such convertible senior note holders.
Transactions relating to our convertible senior notes may affect the value of our common stock.
The conversion of some or all of the convertible senior notes would dilute the ownership interests of existing stockholders to the extent we satisfy our conversion obligation by delivering shares of our common stock upon any conversion of such convertible senior notes. Our convertible senior notes may become convertible at the option of their holders under certain circumstances. If holders of our convertible senior notes elect to convert their convertible senior notes, we may settle our conversion obligation by delivering to them shares of our common stock, which would cause dilution to our existing stockholders. We have received elections to convert a limited number of convertible senior notes in the fourth quarter of 2019 and first quarter of 2020. We elected to satisfy our conversion obligation through the payment of cash to such convertible senior note holders.
In addition, in connection with the issuance of the convertible senior notes, we entered into capped call transactions with certain financial institutions (the “Option Counterparties”). The capped call transactions are expected generally to reduce the potential dilution to our common stock upon any conversion or settlement of the convertible senior notes and/or offset any cash payments we are required to make in excess of the principal amount of converted convertible senior notes, as the case may be, with such reduction and/or offset subject to a cap based on the cap price. From time to time, the Option Counterparties or their respective affiliates may modify their hedge positions by entering into or unwinding various derivative transactions with respect to our common stock and/or purchasing or selling our common stock or other securities of ours in secondary market transactions prior to the maturity of the convertible senior notes. This activity could cause a decrease in the market price of our common stock.
The accounting method for convertible debt securities that may be settled in cash, such as the convertible senior notes, could have a material effect on our reported financial results.
Under Financial Accounting Standards Board Accounting Standards Codification 470-20, Debt with Conversion and Other Options (“ASC 470-20”), an entity must separately account for the liability and equity components of convertible debt instruments (such as the convertible senior notes) that may be settled entirely or partially in cash upon conversion in a manner that reflects the issuer’s economic interest cost. ASC 470-20 requires the value of the conversion option of the convertible senior notes, representing the equity component, to be recorded as additional paid-in capital within stockholders’ equity in our consolidated balance sheet and as a discount to the convertible senior notes, which reduces their initial carrying value. The carrying value of the convertible senior notes, net of the discount recorded, will be accreted up to the principal amount of the convertible senior notes from the issuance date until maturity, which will result in non-cash charges to interest expense in our consolidated statement of operations. Accordingly, we will report lower net income or higher net loss in our financial results because ASC 470-20 requires interest to include both the current period’s accretion of the debt discount and the instrument’s coupon interest, which could adversely affect our reported or future financial results, the trading price of our common stock and the trading price of the convertible senior notes.
ITEM 1B. Unresolved Staff Comments
None.
ITEM 2. Properties
We currently lease approximately 135,700 square feet of office space worldwide. Information concerning our principal leased properties as of December 31, 2019 is set forth below:
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Location
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Principal Use
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Square Footage
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Lease Expiration Date
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San Ramon, California
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Corporate headquarters, sales, marketing, product design, professional services, research and development
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90,100
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March 2021
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The Philippines
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Technical support, training and other professional services
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16,300
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March 2020
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Russia
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Portions of engineering and operations
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23,400
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September 2024
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The hosting of our equipment and software at co-located third-party facilities is also significant to our business. We have entered into rental agreements with third-party facilities in Santa Clara, California; Atlanta, Georgia; Slough, England; and Amsterdam, the Netherlands, which require monthly payments for a fixed period of time in exchange for certain guarantees of space, network and telecommunication availability. These agreements expire at various dates through 2022.
We believe our facilities are sufficient for our current needs.