SPECIAL NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS
This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which involve substantial risks and uncertainties. These statements reflect the current views of our senior management with respect to future events and our financial performance. These forward-looking statements include statements with respect to our business, expenses, strategies, losses, growth plans, product and customer initiatives, market growth projections, and our industry. Statements that include the words “expect,” “intend,” “plan,” “believe,” “project,” “forecast,” “estimate,” “may,” “should,” “anticipate” and similar statements of a future or forward-looking nature identify forward-looking statements for purposes of the federal securities laws or otherwise.
Forward-looking statements address matters that involve risks and uncertainties. Accordingly, there are or will be important factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those indicated in these statements. These factors include the information set forth under the caption “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in this report, including the following:
The foregoing factors should not be construed as exhaustive and should be read together with the other cautionary statements included in this report. If one or more of these or other risks or uncertainties materialize, or if our underlying assumptions prove to be incorrect, our actual results may differ materially from what we anticipate. You should not place undue reliance on our forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statements you read in this report reflect our views as of the date of this report with respect to future events and are subject to these and other risks, uncertainties and assumptions relating to our operations, results of operations, growth strategy and liquidity. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made in this report to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this report or to reflect new information or the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law.
Overview
Five9 is a pioneer and leading provider of cloud software for contact centers. 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 over three billion interactions 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 barrier to entry.
Based on our current product offering and historical average annual recurring revenue per seat, we believe that the market for our solution is approximately $22 billion annually worldwide. Gartner estimates that there were 14.5 million contact center agents worldwide in 2012 and forecasts that cloud penetration of the contact center market in North America will more than double from 5% of total contact center agents in 2012 to 13% in 2016. 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 contact center systems every 8-10 years, which provides an opportunity for cloud solutions to replace legacy on-premise contact center systems when these replacement decisions arise.
Cloud contact center software solutions are replacing legacy on-premise contact center systems. 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.
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 interface. 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.