UNITED STATES SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION
Form 10-K
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ANNUAL REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934 | |
| For the Fiscal Year Ended December 31, 2003 | ||
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TRANSITION REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934 | |
| For the transition period from to | ||
| Commission file number 000-26679 | ||
Art Technology Group, Inc.
| Delaware | 04-3141918 | |
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(State or other jurisdiction of incorporation or organization) |
(I.R.S. Employer Identification Number) |
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25 First Street
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02141 | |
| Cambridge, Massachusetts | (Zip Code) | |
| (Address of principal executive offices) |
(617) 386-1000
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Securities registered pursuant to
Section 12(b) of the Act:
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None | |
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Securities registered pursuant to
Section 12(g) of the Act:
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Common Stock, $0.01 par value with Associated Preferred Stock Purchase Rights (Title of Class) |
Indicate by check mark whether the registrant (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days. Yes þ No o
Indicate by check mark if disclosure of delinquent filers pursuant to Item 405 of Regulation S-K is not contained herein, and will not be contained, to the best of registrants knowledge, in definitive proxy or information statements incorporated by reference in Part III of this Form 10-K or any attachment to this Form 10-K. o
Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is an accelerated filer (as defined in Exchange Act Rule 12b-2). Yes þ No o
The aggregate market value of the voting and non-voting common equity held by non-affiliates of the registrant was approximately $112,548,000 based on the closing price of the registrants common stock on the Nasdaq National Market on June 30, 2003.
The number of shares of the registrants common stock outstanding as of March 11, 2004, was 73,145,185.
Documents Incorporated by Reference
Portions of the registrants proxy statement for its annual meeting of stockholders to be held on May 19, 2004 are incorporated by reference in Items 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14 of Part III.
ART TECHNOLOGY GROUP, INC.
INDEX TO FORM 10-K
ATG, Art Technology Group and Dynamo are our registered trademarks, and ATG Scenario Personalization and ATG Data Anywhere Architecture are our service marks. This report also includes trademarks, service marks and trade names of other companies.
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PART I
| Item 1. | Business |
Overview
We deliver software solutions to help consumer-facing organizations create an interactive experience for their customers and partners via the Internet and other channels. Our software helps our clients market, sell and provide self-service opportunities to their customers and partners, which can enhance our clients revenues, reduce their costs and improve their customers satisfaction. We also offer related services, including support, education and professional services.
Businesses and governments can use our solutions to provide a more productive and satisfying experience to users of their online services. By capturing and maintaining information about those online users personal preferences and online history, our software enables our clients to provide customers or customer segments with solutions specifically tailored to the customers needs. We seek to differentiate ourselves by designing applications that make it simpler to develop and maintain user profile information across multiple complex data sources, easier to model and influence desired user behavior, and faster to develop and maintain dynamic web content with a smaller investment than otherwise required. We provide tools to enable our clients to analyze the behavior of their customers and to improve the effectiveness of our clients merchandising. We also address our clients desire to provide a unified experience for their customers regardless of the channel through which they interact: online, in-store, or via a kiosk, mobile device or call center.
Our principal target markets are Global 2000 companies, government organizations, and other businesses that have large numbers of online users and utilize the Internet as a primary business channel. In the past, we have focused on providing our software and services to businesses in financial services, retail, media and entertainment, telecommunications, consumer products and services industries. We have delivered online solutions to companies such as Aetna Services, Alcatel, American Airlines, Barclays Global Investors, Best Buy, BMG Direct, Deutsche Post, Eastman Kodak, Ford Motor Credit, France Telecom, HSBC, J. Crew, Philips, Sun Microsystems, Walgreens and Wells Fargo.
We historically have provided Internet commerce and software solutions, including an application server and application products. We believe that the development of infrastructure products, including our application server, has become increasingly standards driven and that in the future there will be limited opportunities to differentiate ourselves based on our application server. As a result, while we intend to meet the standards requirements for our application server, we are focusing principally on developing application products, including several new application products that were introduced in 2004. We offer application products in the following three functional areas:
| | Our marketing applications are designed to help businesses attract new customers, promote new offerings to existing customers, and improve the cost-effectiveness of existing marketing expenditures. Our clients use our tools to integrate their online marketing activities with related sales and self-service initiatives. Our tools are designed to allow businesses to increase marketing effectiveness by visually defining desired customer experience activities and events that will drive desirable customer behavior. | |
| | Our online sales applications are used by our clients to facilitate transactions with consumers and channel partners. These commerce offerings are designed for the development of large consumer-facing e-commerce sites and channel partner extranets. We believe that, by using our online sales and marketing solutions together, our clients can create sophisticated promotions and offers that can drive incremental sales. | |
| | Our self-service applications are designed to decrease call-center service costs, to improve the speed with which customer needs are met, and to increase customer loyalty and satisfaction. We believe our self-service solutions become more useful through the use of our advanced personalization capabilities, which are designed to increase the likelihood that customer inquiries will be managed online avoiding the need for costly call center inquiry. |
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Our Strategy
Our objective is to be the industry leader in providing a comprehensive consumer-facing software platform for companies striving to give their customers a superior online experience. We intend to achieve this objective by implementing the following key components of our strategy:
| | Facilitate integrated life cycle experience for consumers. We believe that consumers want to cross seamlessly between the information-gathering, purchase and service phases of their online activity. During a single session, a consumer may research one purchase, modify another purchase and ask post-transaction questions about a third. We believe consumers will demand a consistent online experience from each of the businesses with which the consumers are interfacing through the Internet. Rather than focusing solely on marketing or sales or service, we design our core software functionality to allow our clients to provide their customers with an integrated online marketing, sales and service experience. | |
| | Develop new applications that operate on leading infrastructure products. We believe the development of infrastructure products has become standards driven, but that there is an opportunity for continued innovation relating to application products. We intend to differentiate ourselves through our application and administration products, including two new products that were introduced in the first quarter of 2004. We design our existing products and our products in development to operate on leading application server platforms from BEA and IBM, in addition to our proprietary server software. As a result, our application software can provide value to new and existing clients, regardless of the infrastructure products they select. | |
| | Leverage existing sales channels. We sell our products directly to end-users and through value-added resellers. In addition, approximately one-half of our product revenue is co-sold with a variety of business entities, including systems integrators, solution providers, technology partners and value-added resellers. We currently have a broad range of business alliances throughout the world, including large system integrators like Accenture, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, EDS, HP Consulting and SAIC, as well as regional integrators such as Analysts International, E-Tree, McFadyen Consulting, Rikei, SBI and Thales-IS. Our goal is to maintain close relationships directly with our clients and to motivate systems integrators to implement our applications in their projects and solution sets. | |
| | Leverage and expand service capabilities. We have extensive experience in Web application development and integration services. Through our Professional and Educational Services organizations, we provide services to train our systems integrators, value added resellers and complementary software vendors in the use of our products and offer consulting services to assist with customer implementations. We seek to motivate our business allies and sales forces to provide joint implementation services to our end user customers. We intend to continue to seek additional opportunities to increase revenues from product sales by expanding our base of partners trained in the implementation and application of our products. |
Products
We provide a comprehensive software solution set designed to allow application developers to develop customized websites more effectively and efficiently. Our software is also designed to provide content administrators and marketing executives with greater flexibility in maintaining their website content and in optimizing their consumers experience in order to improve revenue and cost performance.
Our products include both application and infrastructure components. We refer to our application components collectively as the ATG Customer Experience Platform. This product set includes:
| | ATG Adaptive Scenario Engine. This product, formerly known as ATG Relationship Management Platform, provides a rich set of features to support online marketing, sales and service solutions. ATG Adaptive Scenario Engine collects and maintains customer profile information enabling consumer-facing applications to be personalized to the needs of a customer or customer segment. It also enables development of scenarios that model and respond to consumer behavior, guiding consumers through the data and processes appropriate to their situation. ATG Adaptive Scenario Engine incorporates a |
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| data repository integration capability. Some of clients build custom applications directly on ATG Adaptive Scenario Engine, and all of our application products utilize the capabilities of ATG Adaptive Scenario Engine. | ||
| | ATG Commerce. This application provides a robust set of application components that allow our clients to create a customized experience for consumers, businesses and channel partners purchasing goods or services online, and facilitates administration by the online vendor. ATG Commerces functionality includes catalogs, product management, shopping carts, checkout, pricing management, merchandising, promotions, inventory management and complex business-to-business order management. | |
| | ATG Campaign Optimizer. This application, introduced in 2004, enables marketing professionals to define comparative tests of different offers, promotions and product representations, sometimes called A/B tests, to put those tests into production, specifying the segments of site visitors to be tested, and finally to receive reports on the test results. Other methods for testing campaigns often involve programming by expert developers, and sometimes even involve network infrastructure modifications. ATG Campaign Optimizer is designed to allow non-technical marketing professionals to create and execute comparative tests that can be used to increase the effectiveness of online marketing activities. | |
| | ATG Adaptive Customer Assistance. Introduced in 2004, this application combines a natural language search with the customer profile repositories in the ATG Adaptive Scenario Engine to provide a personalized tool for answering consumers questions during the buying process and for self-service. ATG Adaptive Customer Assistance provides consumers with personal transactional information by, for example, facilitating automated replies to questions such as How much is my account balance? ATG Adaptive Customer Assistance also enables a consumer to take direct action through relevant links built into the results. The product includes capabilities for creating and maintaining the answer repository, and for consumer feedback. | |
| | ATG Content Administration. This application, formerly known as ATG Publishing, enables marketing professionals and others to create, manage, preview, and deploy content while ensuring proper quality control. Leveraging ATG Adaptive Scenario Engine, ATG Content Administration provides the means to create product catalogs, post updates and design targeted e-mail marketing campaigns. |
Our applications are fully compatible with the BEA WebLogic Application Server and the IBM WebSphere Application Server, as well as our ATG Dynamo Application Server.
Our product license revenues were $27.1 million, or 37% of total revenues, in 2003; $48.8 million, or 48% of total revenues, in 2002; and $76.6 million, or 55% of total revenues, in 2001.
Services
Our services organization provides a variety of consulting, design, application development, integration, training and support services in conjunction with our products. These services are provided through our Professional Services, Education, and Customer Support Service offerings.
Professional Services. The primary goal of our Professional Services organization is to increase customer satisfaction with our application solutions. Our Professional Services include four primary service offerings:
| | Lifecycle Project Delivery. Our lifecycle project development capability builds upon our deep knowledge of best practices and the ATG Adaptive Delivery Framework methodology. Because we are responsible for the project from beginning to end, we can provide clients with a high-quality, structured experience from planning to post-deployment support. | |
| | Packaged Offerings. Our Upgrade and Migration packaged offerings are designed to provide clients with targeted services that can accelerate adoption of new ATG versions of existing products. We offer packaged offerings built to ease the implementation of new products such as Adaptive Customer |
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| Assistance. Our bundled implementation packages, which include best practices and methodologies, reduce the implementation risk and time of products such as Content Administration and Commerce. | ||
| | Structured Enabling Services. Working with a client or a designated team, we offer Structured Enabling Services to facilitate project success. Engaging our Professional Services team gives clients access to best practices that we have developed over hundreds of engagements. Structured Enabling Services also leverage the ATG Adaptive Delivery Framework methodology, while enabling the clients development team to complete a significant portion of the work. | |
| | Custom Solutions. We offer customized professional services solutions tailored to meet the specific needs of our clients across an entire project. Consulting services can include a combination of system architecture design, project management, web design, technical training and business consulting services. |
Education. We provide a broad selection of educational programs designed to train customers and partners on our applications. This curriculum addresses the educational needs of developers, technical managers, business managers, and system administrators. ATG Education also offers an online learning program that complements our instructor-led training. Developers can become certified on our base product or our commerce product by taking a certification exam in a proctored environment. We also measure partner quality using a partner accreditation program that ensures ATG partners have the skills necessary to effectively assist our clients with implementations. We provide a full range of instructor-led solutions to assist clients with these key initiatives.
Customer Support Services. We offer five levels of customer support ranging from our evaluation support program, which is available for 30 days, to our Premium Support Program, which includes access to technical support engineers 24 hours a day, seven days per week, for customers deploying mission critical applications. For an annual maintenance fee, customers are entitled to receive software updates, maintenance releases, online documentation and eServices including bug reports and unlimited technical support.
Our services revenues were $45.3 million, or 63% of total revenues, in 2003, $52.7 million, or 52% of total revenues, in 2002 and $63.7 million, or 45% of total revenues, in 2001.
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Markets
Our principal target markets are Global 2000 companies, government organizations, and other businesses that have large number of online users and utilize the Internet as a primary business channel. Our clients represent a broad spectrum of enterprises within diverse industry sectors. The following is a partial list:
Consumer Retail
Financial Services
International
Communications & Technology
Travel Media and Entertainment
Research and Development
Our research and development group is responsible for core technology, product architecture, product development, quality assurance, documentation and third-party software integration. This group also assists
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Since we began focusing on selling software products in 1996, the majority of our research and development activities have been directed towards creating new versions of our products, which extend and enhance competitive product features. In 2003, we began to focus our efforts on developing new and innovative applications, as well as integrating our products with external enterprise data sources. In line with these efforts, we have developed several new applications and aligned our research and development resources accordingly.
Sales Coverage Model
Our principal target markets are leading organizations with large constituencies who use the Internet as a primary business channel. We target these potential customers through our direct sales force and through channel partners, including systems integrators and other technology partners. We currently have approximately 100 business alliances throughout the world.
We employ one group of sales professionals who are compensated based on product and services sales made directly to end-users and through business partners, and another group of sales professionals who are dedicated to recruiting, training, developing business plans and joint selling and marketing with business alliances such as system integrators and value added resellers. We train and assist our business partners in promoting, selling, deploying, extending and supporting our products. The objectives of this strategy are to establish close product relationships directly with our clients and to motivate systems integrators to adopt our suite of products for commerce and self-service projects for their customers.
Our co-marketing relationships are with major hardware vendors, software providers, systems integrators and other consulting firms that serve the market for information system products and services. The objective of this co-marketing strategy is to assist our partners in creating demand for our products and extend our presence globally and regionally.
Set forth below is a partial list of organizations with which we have selling and marketing relationships:
North America
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As of December 31, 2003, in addition to offices throughout the United States, we had offices located in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy and sales personnel located in Spain. Our revenues from sources outside the United States were $25.3 million, or 35% of total revenue, in 2003, $30.1 million, or 30% of total revenue, in 2002 and $47.6 million, or 34% of total revenue, in 2001. During the past year, we have established relationships with new international partners and have added key international accounts.
Competition
The market for online sales, marketing and self-service software is intensely competitive, subject to rapid technological change, and significantly affected by new product introductions and other market activities. We expect competition to persist and intensify in the future. We currently have five primary sources of competition:
| | platform vendors such as BEA Systems and IBM, who are also our partners; | |
| | Microsoft, with whom we compete in commerce applications and, less directly, in the platform arena; | |
| | commerce-oriented vendors, such as Blue Martini and BroadVision, which compete on various levels including portals and e-commerce; | |
| | marketing and customer-service vendors such as Chordiant, E.piphany and Kana, which may or may not have a vertical industry focus; and | |
| | in-house development efforts by potential customers or partners. |
We compete against these alternative solutions by focusing on an integrated customer experience for online sales, marketing and self-service applications for consumer-facing businesses. We believe our solutions provide our clients with a rapid time to return on investment, attractive long-term total cost of ownership, a way to present a single view of themselves to their customers, the ability to improve the productivity and effectiveness of customer interactions, and the flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing and often unpredictable market needs.
We seek to provide our clients with a rapid time to return on investment through strong out-of-the-box functionality for online sales, marketing and self-service built on a flexible, component architecture that is practical and cost-effective to customize. These capabilities can enable our clients to get to market quickly in a manner that exploits their competitive advantages which helps drive their return on investment.
Our products allow companies to present a single view of themselves to their customers through our repository integration. This integration technology allows companies to easily access and utilize data in the enterprise regardless of the data storage format or location. The data can be leveraged in their native form without having to move, duplicate or convert them. By enabling these capabilities in a cost-effective manner, we believe our products can help companies protect their brand and keep their customers from becoming confused or frustrated all of which positively impact customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Our adaptive scenario capability is designed to help companies make each interaction with their customers more productive and effective. These personalization capabilities help ensure that consumers are presented with the most relevant information. By avoiding information overload, consumers are more likely to have their needs met through the low cost online channel increasing the speed at which customer needs are met and decreasing the likelihood the consumer will use a more expensive channel such as a call center. Adaptive scenario capabilities can also make interactions with consumers more effective for our clients. It allows a business user to visually design a sequence of behaviors that our customer would like to encourage a consumer to undertake which can lead to a specific goal such as a site registration or transaction. Our
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Finally, we believe the combination of our out-of-the-box functionality, our component architecture and our repository integration helps companies that use our products to adapt quickly and economically to rapidly changing and unanticipated market needs.
We support the adoption of open application server infrastructure by our old and new customers and plan to work closely with other platform vendors to increase the value customers receive from our products regardless of the platform they select. We intend to focus our future development and marketing efforts on applications rather than on our platform, and as a result we expect our business and operating results will be less affected by competition with platform vendors such as BEA Systems and IBM.
Proprietary Rights and Licensing
Our success and ability to compete depends on our ability to develop and protect the proprietary aspects of our technology and to operate without infringing on the proprietary rights of others. We rely on a combination of trademark, trade secret and copyright law and contractual restrictions to protect our proprietary technology. These legal protections afford only limited protection for our technology. We seek to protect our source code for our software, documentation and other written materials under trade secret and copyright laws. We license our software pursuant to signed license, click through or shrink wrap agreements, which impose restrictions on the licensees ability to use the software, such as prohibiting reverse engineering and limiting the use of copies. We also seek to avoid disclosure of our intellectual property by requiring employees and consultants with access to our proprietary information to execute confidentiality agreements and by restricting access to our source code. Due to rapid technological change, we believe that factors such as the technological and creative skills of our personnel, new product developments and enhancements to existing products are more important than legal protections to establish and maintain a technology leadership position.
Employees
As of December 31, 2003, we had a total of 361 employees. Of our employees, 118 were in research and development, 92 in sales and marketing, 98 in services and 53 in general and administrative. Our future success will depend in part on our ability to attract, retain and motivate highly qualified technical and management personnel, for whom competition is intense. From time to time, we also employ independent contractors to support our professional services, product development, sales, marketing and business development organizations. Our employees are not represented by any collective bargaining unit, and we have never experienced a work stoppage. We believe our relations with our employees are good.
Internet Address and SEC Reports
We maintain a website with the address www.atg.com. We are not including the information contained on our website as a part of, or incorporating it by reference into, this Annual Report on Form 10-K. We make available free of charge through our website our Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and Current Reports on Form 8-K, and amendments to these reports, as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such material with, or furnish such material to, the SEC. We also include on our website our corporate governance guidelines and the charters for each of the major committees of our board of directors. In addition, we intend to disclose on our website any amendments to, or waivers from, our code of business conduct and ethics that are required to be publicly disclosed pursuant to rules of the SEC and Nasdaq.
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RISK FACTORS THAT MAY AFFECT RESULTS
This annual report contains forward-looking statements, including statements about our growth and future operating results. For this purpose, any statement that is not a statement of historical fact should be considered a forward-looking statement. We often use the words believes, anticipates, plans, expects, intends and similar expressions to help identify forward-looking statements.
There are a number of important factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those indicated or implied by forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include those discussed below, as well as those discussed elsewhere in this annual report.
Risks Related To Our Business
| We may not be able to sustain or increase our revenue or attain profitability on a quarterly or annual basis, which could lead to a material decrease in the price of our common stock. |
We incurred a loss in the first and third quarters of 2003 and in each quarter of fiscal 2002. As of December 31, 2003, we had an accumulated deficit of $195.7 million. Our revenues decreased 29% to $72.5 million for 2003 compared with $101.5 million for 2002. We believe the recent economic downturn within the software industry could continue to have an adverse effect on demand for our products and services, and therefore adversely affect our revenues as well. Because we operate in a rapidly evolving industry, we have difficulty predicting our future operating results and we cannot be certain that our revenues will grow or our expenses will decrease at rates that will allow us to achieve profitability on a quarterly or annual basis. Additionally, in recent years the slowdown in the software industry and the decrease in spending by companies in our target markets have reduced the rate of growth of the Internet as a channel for consumer branded retail and financial services companies. If current economic conditions continue for an extended period of time or worsen, we may experience additional adverse effects on our revenue, net income and cash flows, which could result in a decline in the price of our common stock.
| We expect our revenues and operating results to continue to fluctuate for the foreseeable future, and the price of our common stock is likely to fall if quarterly results are lower than the expectations of securities analysts. |
Our revenues and operating results have varied from quarter to quarter in the past, and are likely to vary significantly from quarter to quarter in the foreseeable future. If our quarterly results fall below our expectations and those of securities analysts, the price of our common stock is likely to fall. A number of factors are likely to cause variations in our operating results, including:
| | fluctuating economic conditions, particularly as they affect our customers willingness to implement new e-commerce solutions; | |
| | the timing of sales of our products and services; | |
| | the timing of customer orders and product implementations; | |
| | delays in introducing new products and services; | |
| | increased expenses, whether related to sales and marketing, product development or administration; | |
| | the mix of revenues derived from products and services; | |
| | timing of hiring and utilization of services personnel; | |
| | cost overruns related to fixed-price services projects; | |
| | the mix of domestic and international sales; and | |
| | costs related to possible acquisitions of technologies or businesses. |
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Accordingly, we believe that quarter-to-quarter comparisons of our operating results are not necessarily meaningful. The results of one quarter or a series of quarters should not be relied upon as an indication of our future performance.
| Turnover in our management, sales and engineering personnel may impair our ability to develop and implement a business strategy, which could have a material adverse effect on our operating results and common stock price. |
Members of our senior management team, including our two founders, our former Chief Executive Officer and President, and several senior managers, have left us during the past three years for a variety of reasons, and we cannot assure you that there will not be additional departures. As a result of this management turnover, our current management team has had limited experience working together and may be unsuccessful in developing or executing a business strategy for us. These changes in management, and any future similar changes, may be disruptive to our operations. In addition, equity incentives such as stock options constitute an important part of our total compensation program for management, and the volatility or lack of positive performance of our stock price may from time to time adversely affect our ability to retain our management team.
We rely heavily on our direct sales force. We have recently restructured and reduced the size of our sales force. Changes in the structure of the sales force have generally resulted in temporary lack of focus and reduced productivity.
In addition, we recently restructured our research and development group, which could result in interruptions in product development and reduced productivity.
| Our lengthy sales cycle makes it difficult to predict our quarterly results and causes variability in our operating results. |
Our long sales cycle, which can range from several weeks to several months or more, makes it difficult to predict the quarter in which sales may occur. We have a long sales cycle because we generally need to educate potential customers regarding the use and benefits of our products and services. Our sales cycle varies depending on the size and type of customer contemplating a purchase and whether we have conducted business with a potential customer in the past. In addition, we believe the recent economic downturn in the United States has contributed to an increased in the average length of our sales cycle as customers deferred implementing new e-commerce solutions.
We may incur significant sales and marketing expenses in anticipation of licensing our products, and if we do not achieve the level of revenues we expected, our operating results will suffer and our stock price may decline. These potential customers frequently need to obtain approvals from multiple decision makers prior to making purchase decisions. Delays in sales could cause significant variability in our revenues and operating results for any particular period.
Competition could materially and adversely affect our ability to obtain revenues from license fees from new or existing customers and professional services revenues from existing customers. While the list price for our software generally has been maintained over the past three years, competitive pressures could require us to reduce the price of our software products. In either case, our business, operating results and financial condition would be materially and adversely affected.
| We face intense competition in the market for Internet online marketing, sales and service applications, and we expect competition to intensify in the future. This competition could cause our revenues to fall short of expectations, which could adversely affect our future operating results and our ability to grow our business. |
The market for online marketing, sales and services applications is intensely competitive, and we expect competition to intensify in the future. This level of competition could reduce our revenues and result in increased losses or reduced profits. Our primary competition currently comes from in-house development
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Many of our competitors have longer operating histories and significantly greater financial, technical, marketing and other resources than we do and may be able to respond more quickly to new or changing opportunities, technologies and customer requirements. Also, many current and potential competitors have greater name recognition and more extensive customer bases that they can use to gain market share. These competitors may be able to undertake more extensive promotional activities, adopt more aggressive pricing policies and offer more attractive terms to purchasers than we can. Moreover, our current and potential competitors, such as Microsoft, may bundle their products in a manner that may discourage users from purchasing our products. In addition, current and potential competitors have established or may establish cooperative relationships among themselves or with third parties to enhance their products and expand their markets. Accordingly, new competitors or alliances among competitors may emerge and rapidly acquire significant market share.
Competition could materially and adversely affect our ability to obtain revenues from license fees from new or existing customers and professional services revenue from existing customers. Further, competitive pressures could require us to reduce the price of our software products. In either case, our business, operating results and financial condition would be materially and adversely affected.
| If we fail to maintain our existing customer base, our ability to generate revenues will be harmed. |
Historically, we have derived a significant portion of our revenues from existing customers that purchase our support and maintenance services and enhanced versions of our products. Retention of our existing customer base requires that we provide high levels of customer service and product support to help our customers maximize the benefits that they derive from our products. To compete, we must introduce enhancements and new versions of our products that provide additional functionality. Further, we must manage the transition from our older products so as to minimize the disruption to our customers caused by such migration and integration with the customers information technology platform. If we are unable to continue to obtain significant revenues from our existing customer base, our ability to grow our business would be harmed and our competitors could achieve greater market share.
| Our software offerings under our recent agreement with IBM may not achieve market acceptance, which may harm our business and operating results. |
On June 27, 2003, we entered into an original equipment manufacturer, or OEM, agreement with IBM under which we agreed to offer IBMs WebSphere Internet infrastructure software as part of our packaged software offerings. Market acceptance of our new relationship with IBM is important to our future success and is subject to a number of significant risks, many of which are outside our control. These risks include:
| | Our packaged software offerings must meet the requirements of our current and prospective clients. We are working with IBM to further integrate our applications to optimize their performance while running on IBM WebSphere, but we cannot assure you that our integration efforts will satisfy the needs of current and prospective customers. | |
| | IBM may determine not to devote significant resources to the arrangements contemplated by our OEM agreement or may disagree with us as to how to proceed with the integration of our products. The amount and timing of resources dedicated by IBM under the OEM agreement are not under our direct control. |
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| | Our arrangement with IBM may cause confusion among current and prospective customers as to our product focus and direction. |
If our new relationship with IBM does not achieve market acceptance, our business and operating results may be harmed.
| If systems integrators reduce their support and implementation of our products, our revenues may fail to meet expectations and our operating results would suffer. |
Since our potential customers often rely on third-party systems integrators to develop, deploy and manage Web sites for conducting commerce on the Internet, we cultivate relationships with systems integrators to encourage them to support our products. We do not, however, have written agreements with our systems integrators, and they are not required to implement solutions that include our products or to maintain minimum sales levels of our products. Our revenues would be reduced if we fail to train a sufficient number of systems integrators adequately or if systems integrators devote their efforts to integrating or co-selling products of other companies. Any such reduction in revenue would not be accompanied by a significant offset in our expenses. As a result, our operating results would suffer and the price of our common stock probably would fall.
| If value added resellers are unwilling to service and support our products, our revenues may fail to meet expectations and our operating results would suffer. |
We license products through value added resellers and encourage them to service and support our products. If we are unable to find qualified resellers, are unable to convince qualified resellers to license our products to end users, fail to adequately train a sufficient number of resellers or if resellers choose to devote their efforts to reselling our competitors products, our revenues could be reduced and our operating results could be harmed.
| Competition with our resellers could limit our sales opportunities and jeopardize these relationships. |
We sell products through resellers and original equipment manufacturers. In some instances, we target our direct selling efforts toward markets that are also served by some of these resellers. This competition may limit our ability to sell our products and services directly in these markets and may jeopardize, or result in the termination of, these relationships.
| We could incur substantial costs protecting our intellectual property from infringement or defending against a claim of infringement. |
Our professional services often involve the development of custom software applications for specific customers. In some cases, customers retain ownership or impose restrictions on our ability to use the technologies developed from these projects. Issues relating to the ownership of software can be complicated, and disputes could arise that affect our ability to resell or reuse applications we develop for customers.
We seek to protect the source code for our proprietary software both as a trade secret and as a copyrighted work. However, because we make the source code available to some customers, third parties may be more likely to misappropriate it. Our policy is to enter into confidentiality agreements with our employees, consultants, vendors and customers and to control access to our software, documentation and other proprietary information. Despite these precautions, it may be possible for someone to copy our software or other proprietary information without authorization or to develop similar software independently.
In recent years, there has been significant litigation in the United States involving patents and other intellectual property rights. We could incur substantial costs in prosecuting or defending any intellectual property litigation. If we sue to enforce our rights or are sued by a third party that claims that our technology infringes its rights, the litigation could be expensive and could divert our management resources. In February 2000, we settled a lawsuit filed by BroadVision, which alleged that we were infringing on a patent for a method
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Despite our efforts to protect our proprietary rights, unauthorized parties may attempt to copy aspects of our products or to obtain and use information that we regard as proprietary. Policing unauthorized use of our products is difficult and while we are unable to determine the extent to which piracy of our software exists, software piracy can be expected to be a persistent problem. Litigation may be necessary in the future to enforce our intellectual property rights, to protect our trade secrets, to determine the validity and scope of the proprietary rights of others or to defend against claims of infringement or invalidity. However, the laws of many countries do not protect proprietary rights to as great an extent as the laws of the United States. Any such resulting litigation could result in substantial costs and diversion of resources and could have a material adverse effect on our business, operating results and financial condition. There can be no assurance that our means of protecting our proprietary rights will be adequate or that our competitors will not independently develop similar technology. Any failure by us to meaningfully protect our intellectual property could have a material adverse effect on our business, operating results and financial condition.
In addition, we have agreed to indemnify customers against claims that our products infringe the intellectual property rights of third parties. The results of any intellectual property litigation to which we might become a party may force us to do one or more of the following:
| | cease selling or using products or services that incorporate the challenged intellectual property; | |
| | obtain a license, which may not be available on reasonable terms, to sell or use the relevant technology; or | |
| | redesign those products or services to avoid infringement. |
| If we fail to adapt to rapid changes in the market for Internet online marketing, sales, and service applications, our existing products could become obsolete. |
The market for our products is marked by rapid technological change, frequent new product introductions and Internet-related technology enhancements, uncertain product life cycles, changes in customer demands, coalescence of product differentiators, product commoditization and evolving industry standards. We may not be able to develop and market or acquire new products or product enhancements that comply with present or emerging Internet technology standards and to differentiate our products based on functionality and performance. In addition, we may not be able to establish strategic alliances with operating system and infrastructure vendors that will permit migration opportunities for our current user base. New products based on new technologies or new industry standards could render our existing products obsolete and unmarketable. For example, functionality that once differentiated our products over time has been incorporated into products offered by the major operating system and infrastructure providers.
To succeed, we will need to enhance our current products, develop new products on a timely basis to keep pace with developments related to Internet technology and to satisfy the increasingly sophisticated requirements of customers and leverage strategic alliances with third parties in the e-commerce field who have complementary or competing products. E-commerce technology is complex and new products and product enhancements can require long development and testing periods. Any delays in developing and releasing new or enhanced products could cause us to lose revenue opportunities and customers.
| If we fail to address the challenges associated with international operations, revenues from our products and services may decline or the costs of providing our products or services may increase. |
As of December 31, 2003 we had offices in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy, and additionally had sales personnel in Spain. We derived 35% of our total revenues in 2003 from customers outside the United States. In December 2002, we initiated a restructuring plan, which included the closing of
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| | changes in regulatory requirements, exchange rates, tariffs and other barriers; | |
| | longer payment cycles and problems in collecting accounts receivable in Western Europe and the Far East; | |
| | difficulties in managing systems integrators and technology partners; | |
| | difficulties in staffing and managing foreign subsidiary operations; | |
| | differing technology standards; | |
| | difficulties and delays in translating products and product documentation into foreign languages to the extent that our products are sold in countries that do not have English as their primary language; | |
| | reduced protection for intellectual property rights in some of the countries in which we operate or plan to operate; | |
| | potentially adverse tax consequences; and | |
| | political and economic instability. |
The impact of future exchange rate fluctuations on our operating results cannot be accurately predicted. We may increase the extent to which we denominate arrangements with international customers in the currencies of the countries in which the software or services are provided. From time to time we may engage in hedges of a significant portion of contracts denominated in foreign currencies. Any hedging policies implemented by us may not be successful, and the cost of these hedging techniques may have a significant negative impact on our operating results. Our software products may contain errors or defects that could result in lost revenues, delayed or limited market acceptance or product liability claims with substantial litigation costs.
Complex software products such as ours often contain errors or defects, particularly when first introduced or when new versions or enhancements are released. We began shipping the latest version of the ATG 6.2 suite of products in the fourth quarter of 2003. Despite internal testing and testing by customers, our current and future products may contain serious defects. Serious defects or errors could result in lost revenues or a delay in market acceptance.
Since our customers use our products for critical business applications such as e-commerce, errors, defects or other performance problems could result in damage to our customers. They could seek significant compensation from us for the losses they suffer. Although our license agreements typically contain provisions designed to limit our exposure to product liability claims, existing or future laws or unfavorable judicial decisions could negate these limitations. Even if not successful, a product liability claim brought against us would likely be time-consuming and costly.
| If we acquire other companies or businesses, we will be subject to risks that could hurt our business. |
In the future, we may pursue acquisitions to obtain complementary businesses, products, services or technologies. An acquisition may not produce the revenues, earnings or business synergies that we anticipated, and an acquired business, product, service or technology might not perform as we expected. If we pursue an acquisition, our management could spend a significant amount of time and effort in identifying and completing the acquisition. If we complete an acquisition, we may encounter significant difficulties and incur substantial expenses in integrating the operations and personnel of the acquired company into our operations while preserving the goodwill of the acquired company. In particular, we may lose the services of key employees of the acquired company and we may make changes in management that impair the acquired companys relationships with employees and customers.
Any of these outcomes could prevent us from realizing the anticipated benefits of our acquisitions. To pay for an acquisition, we might use stock or cash. Alternatively, we might borrow money from a bank or other
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| Our announced restructurings may not result in the reduced cost structure we anticipate and may have other adverse impacts on productivity. |
During the second and third quarters of 2003, we had corporate restructurings involving workforce reductions and closures of excess facilities. In addition, there were changes in assumptions and estimates connected to prior restructuring charges and the leases that were settled during the period. These actions resulted in recording a net restructuring benefit of $5.4 million. In January 2003, we publicly announced a corporate restructuring involving a workforce reduction and the closing and consolidation of office facilities in selected locations. These actions resulted in recording a restructuring charge of $19.1 million in the fourth quarter of 2002. In addition, we recorded a restructuring charge of $75.6 million in 2001. These restructuring activities require that we close facilities, maintain sales efforts and provide continuing customer support and service in regions where the sales and support staff has been reduced or eliminated, reallocate workload among continuing employees, and seek to reduce liability for idle lease space. The outcomes of such restructuring activities are difficult to predict. While we believe our restructuring and consolidation activities will reduce our cost structure, we may not achieve the cost reductions that we are expecting. In addition, our restructuring activities may result in lower revenues as a result of the decreased staff in our sales and marketing and professional services groups or other adverse impacts on productivity that we did not anticipate.
| We may need additional financing in the future, and any additional financing may result in restrictions on our operations or substantial dilution to our stockholders. |
We may need to raise additional funds in the future, for example, to develop new technologies, support an expansion, respond to competitive pressures, acquire complementary businesses or respond to unanticipated situations. We may try to raise additional funds through public or private financings, strategic relationships or other arrangements. Our ability to obtain debt or equity funding will depend on a number of factors, including market conditions, our operating performance and investor interest. Additional funding may not be available to us on acceptable terms or at all. If adequate funds are not available, we may be required to revise our business plan to reduce expenditures, including curtailing our growth strategies, foregoing acquisitions or reducing our product development efforts. If we succeed in raising additional funds through the issuance of equity or convertible securities, the issuance could result in substantial dilution to existing stockholders. If we raise additional funds through the issuance of debt securities or preferred stock, these new securities would have rights, preferences and privileges senior to those of the holders of our common stock. The terms of these securities, as well as any borrowings under our credit agreement, could impose restrictions on our operations.
| We use the Java programming language to develop our products, and our business could be harmed if Java loses market acceptance or if we are not able to continue using Java or Java-related technologies. |
We write our software in the Java computer programming language developed by Sun Microsystems and we incorporate J2EE, Java Runtime Environment, Java Naming and Directory Interface, Java Servlet Development Kit, Java Foundation Classes, JavaMail and JavaBeans Activation Framework into our products under licenses granted to us by Sun. Our ATG 6.2 Relationship Management Platform has been designed to support Suns J2EE standards. If Sun were to decline to continue to allow us to use these technologies for any reason, we would be required to (a) license the equivalent technology from another source, (b) rewrite the technology ourselves or (c) rewrite portions of our software to accommodate the change or no longer use the technology.
While a number of companies have introduced Web applications based on Java, Java could fall out of favor, and support by Sun Microsystems or other companies could decline. Moreover, our new ATG 6.2
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Risks Related To the Internet Industry
| Our performance will depend on the growth of e-commerce and self-service. |
Our success will depend heavily on the continued use of the Internet for e-commerce. The recent United States economic downturn reduced demand for our products as customers and potential customers delayed or cancelled the implementation of online marketing, sales and service applications. If the market for our products and services fails to mature, we will be unable to execute our business plan. Adoption of electronic commerce and online marketing, sales and service applications, particularly by those companies that have historically relied upon traditional means of commerce, will require a broad acceptance of different methods of conducting business. Our future revenues and profits will substantially depend on the Internet being accepted and widely used for commerce and communication. If Internet commerce does not continue to grow or grows more slowly than expected, our future revenues and profits may not meet our expectations or those of analysts. Similarly, purchasers with established patterns of commerce may be reluctant to alter those patterns or may otherwise resist providing the personal data necessary to support our consumer profiling capability.
| Regulations could be enacted that either directly restrict our business or indirectly impact our business by limiting the growth of e-commerce. |
As e-commerce evolves, federal, state and foreign agencies could adopt regulations covering issues such as user privacy, content and taxation of products and services. If enacted, government regulations could limit the market for our products and services or could impose burdensome requirements that render our business unprofitable. Although many regulations might not apply to our business directly, we expect that laws regulating the solicitation, collection or processing of personal and consumer information could indirectly affect our business. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 prohibits certain types of information and content from being transmitted over the Internet. The prohibitions scope and the liability associated with a violation are currently unsettled. In addition, although substantial portions of the Communications Decency Act were held to be unconstitutional, we cannot be certain that similar legislation will not be enacted and upheld in the future. It is possible that legislation could expose companies involved in e-commerce to liability, which could limit the growth of e-commerce generally. Legislation like the Telecommunications Act and the Communications Decency Act could dampen the growth in Web usage and decrease its acceptance as a medium of communications and commerce.
| The Internet is generating privacy concerns that could result in legislation or market perceptions that could harm our business or result in reduced sales of our products, or both. |
Businesses use our ATG Adaptive Scenario Engine product to develop and maintain profiles to tailor the content to be provided to Web site visitors. When a visitor first arrives at a Web site, our software creates a profile for that visitor. If the visitor registers or logs in, the visitors identity is added to the profile, preserving any profile information that was gathered up to that point. ATG Adaptive Scenario Engine product tracks both explicit user profile data supplied by the user as well as implicit profile attributes derived from the users behavior on the Web site. Privacy concerns may cause visitors to resist providing the personal data or to avoid Web sites that track the Web behavioral information necessary to support our profiling capability. More
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Our products use cookies to track demographic information and user preferences. A cookie is information keyed to a specific user that is stored on a computers hard drive, typically without the users knowledge. Cookies are generally removable by the user, although removal could affect the content available on a particular site. Germany has imposed laws limiting the use of cookies, and a number of Internet commentators and governmental bodies in the United States and other countries have urged passage of laws limiting or abolishing the use of cookies. If such laws are passed or if users begin to delete or refuse cookies as a common practice, demand for our personalization products could be reduced.
Risks Related To The Securities Markets And Our Stock
| Our stock price may continue to be volatile. |
The market price of our common stock has fluctuated in the past and is likely to continue to be highly volatile. For example, the market price of our common stock has ranged from $.58 per share to $126.88 per share since our initial public offering in July 1999. Fluctuations in market price and volume are particularly common among securities of Internet and software companies. The market price of our common stock may fluctuate significantly in response to the following factors, some of which are beyond our control:
| | variations in our quarterly operating results; | |
| | changes in market valuations of Internet and software companies; | |
| | our announcements of significant contracts, acquisitions, strategic partnerships, joint ventures or capital commitments; | |
| | our failure to complete significant sales; | |
| | additions or departures of our key personnel; | |
| | future sales of our common stock; or | |
| | changes in financial estimates by securities analysts. |
| We may incur significant costs from class action litigation. |
We currently are the subject of securities class action litigation. If a court awards damages to the plaintiffs, the total amount could exceed the limit of our existing insurance. This litigation also may divert managements attention and resources. For a further description of the pending litigation, see Part II, Item 1. Legal Proceedings. We may be the target of similar litigation in the future if the market for our stock becomes volatile. While we believe that we have an appropriate amount of insurance for class action lawsuits, we cannot be certain that the insurance coverage will be available or, if available, sufficient to cover our liability with respect to a specific future action that may be brought.
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| Anti-takeover provisions in our charter documents and Delaware law could prevent or delay a change in control of our company. |
Certain provisions of our charter and by-laws may discourage, delay or prevent a merger or acquisition that a stockholder may consider favorable, which could reduce the market price of our common stock. These provisions include:
| | authorizing the issuance of blank check preferred stock; | |
| | providing for a classified board of directors with staggered, three-year terms; | |
| | providing that directors may only be removed for cause by a two-thirds vote of stockholders; | |
| | limiting the persons who may call special meetings of stockholders prohibiting stockholder action by written consent; | |
| | establishing advance notice requirements for nominations for election to the board of directors or for proposing matters that can be acted on by stockholders at stockholder meetings; and | |
| | authorizing anti-takeover provisions. |
In addition, we adopted a shareholder rights plan in 2001 and Delaware law may further discourage, delay or prevent someone from acquiring or merging with us.
| Item 2. | Properties |
Our principal administrative, research and development, sales, consulting, training and support facilities occupy approximately 60,000 square feet in Cambridge, Massachusetts, pursuant to a lease expiring in 2006. Our west coast headquarters occupy approximately 13,000 square feet in San Francisco, California pursuant to a lease expiring in 2007. Our European headquarters are located in Apex Plaza, Reading, United Kingdom where we lease approximately 16,000 square feet pursuant to a lease expiring in 2009.
At December 31, 2003, we also had offices in France, Germany and Italy. During 2