MIME 2017 Annual Report

14 Despite our precautions, it may be possible for unauthorized third parties to copy our products and use information that we regard as proprietary to create products and services that compete with ours. Some license provisions protecting against unauthorized use, copying, transfer and disclosures of our products may be unenforceable under the laws of certain jurisdictions and foreign countries. In addition, the laws of some countries do not protect proprietary rights to as great of an extent as the laws of the United States, and many foreign countries do not enforce these laws as diligently as government agencies and private parties in the United States. Our exposure to unauthorized copying and use of our products and misappropriation of our proprietary information may increase as a result of our foreign operations. We expect that software and other solutions in our industry may be increasingly subject to third-party infringement claims as the number of competitors grows and the functionality of products in different industry segments overlap. Moreover, many of our competitors and other industry participants have been issued patents or filed patent applications, and have asserted claims and related litigation regarding patent and other intellectual property rights. Third parties, including non-practicing patent holders, have from time to time claimed, and could claim in the future, that our technologies infringe patents they now hold or might obtain or be issued in the future. See “Risk Factors — We may be sued by third parties for alleged infringement of their proprietary rights.” Competition Our market is large, highly competitive, fragmented, and subject to rapidly evolving technology and security threats, shifting customer needs and frequent introductions of new products and services. We do not believe that any specific competitor offers the fully unified service and integrated technology that we do. However, we do compete with companies that offer products that target email and data security, continuity and archiving, as well as large providers such as Google Inc. and Microsoft Corporation, who offer functions and tools as part of their core mailbox services that may be, or be perceived to be, similar to our offerings. Our current and potential future competitors include: Barracuda Networks, Inc., Google, Microsoft Exchange ® Online Protection, Proofpoint, Inc., Symantec Corporation and Cisco Systems Inc., in security, and EMC, Microsoft Office 365 ® , Veritas Technologies LLC and Barracuda in archiving. Some of our current and future competitors may have certain competitive advantages such as greater name recognition, longer operating history, larger market share, larger existing user base and greater financial, technical and other resources. Some competitors may be able to devote greater resources to the development, promotion and sale of their products than we can to ours, which could allow them to respond more quickly than we can to new technologies, threats and changes in customer needs. We cannot provide any assurance that our competitors will not offer or develop products or services that are superior to ours or achieve greater market acceptance. The principal competitive factors in our market include, but are not limited to: • reliability and effectiveness in protecting, detecting and responding to cyberattacks; • scalability and multi-tenancy of our system; • breadth and unification of our services; • cloud-only delivery; • total cost of ownership; • speed, availability and reliability; • integration into office productivity, desktop and mobile tools; • speed at which our services can be deployed; • ease of user experience for IT administrators and employees; and • superior customer service and commitment to customer success. We believe that we compete favorably on the basis of these factors. Our ability to remain competitive will depend to a great extent upon our ongoing performance in the areas of product and cloud architecture development, core technical innovation, channel management and customer support.