LOGM 2017 Annual Report

protect our proprietary technology, processes and other intellectual property. As of December 31, 2017, our pat- ent portfolio consists of 173 issued patents with an additional 107 patent applications pending. We enter into confidentiality and other written agreements with our employees, customers, consultants and part- ners, and through these and other written agreements, we attempt to control access to and distribution of our software, documentation and other proprietary technology and other information. Despite our efforts to protect our proprietary rights, third parties may, in an unauthorized manner, attempt to use, copy or otherwise obtain and market or distribute our intellectual property rights or technology or otherwise develop products or services with the same functionality as our services. In addition, U.S. patent filings are intended to provide the holder with a right to exclude others from making, using, selling or importing in the United States the inventions covered by the claims of granted patents. If granted, our patents may be contested, circumvented or invalidated. Moreover, the rights that may be granted in those pending patents may not provide us with proprietary protection or com- petitive advantages, and we may not be able to prevent third parties from infringing these patents. Therefore, the exact effect of our pending patents, if issued, and the other steps we have taken to protect our intellectual prop- erty cannot be predicted with certainty. Although the protection afforded by copyright, trade secret and trademark law, written agreements and common law may provide some advantages, we believe that the following factors help us maintain a competitive advantage: • our large user and customer base; • the technological skills of our research and development personnel; • frequent enhancements to our services; and • continued expansion of our proprietary technology. “LogMeIn” is a registered trademark in the United States, Canada, Australia and the European Union. We also hold a number of other trademarks and service marks identifying certain of our services and features of our serv- ices. We also have a number of trademark applications pending. Competition The markets in which we compete are constantly evolving and we expect to face additional competition in the future. We believe that the key competitive factors in these markets include: • service reliability and security; • ease of initial setup and use; • fitness for use and the design of features that best meet the needs of the target customer; • the ability to support multiple device types and operating systems; • cost of customer acquisition; • product and brand awareness; • the ability to reach large fragmented groups of users; • cost of service delivery; and • pricing flexibility. We believe that our large user base, efficient customer acquisition model and low service delivery costs enable us to compete effectively against services offered by some of our largest competitors, which include Adobe Con- nect, Amazon, Cisco Systems’ WebEx division, Google and Microsoft Skype. Our audio services also compete with solutions from AT&T, BT, Intercall, PGi, RingCentral, Verizon and Vonage. Certain of our services also compete with current or potential services offered by companies like AgileBits, Apple, BlueJeans Networks, Box, Dashlane, Dropbox, GFI, IBM, KeePass, LivePerson, OKTA, Oracle, Splashtop, TeamViewer and Zoom Video Communications. 9