or indirect tax collection obligations on businesses like ours that offer subscription services. For example, on June 21, 2018, the Supreme Court held in
South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc.
that states could impose sales tax collection obligations on
sellers even if those sellers lack any physical presence within the states imposing the sales taxes. Under
, a person requires only a “substantial nexus” with the taxing state before the state may subject the person to sales tax collection obligations therein. An increasing number of states (both before and after the publication of
) have considered or adopted laws that attempt to impose sales tax collection obligations on
sellers. The Supreme Court’s
decision has removed a significant impediment to the enactment and enforcement of these laws, and it is possible that states may seek to tax
sellers on sales that occurred in prior tax years, which could create additional administrative burdens for us, put us at a competitive disadvantage if such states do not impose similar obligations on our competitors and decrease our future sales, which could adversely impact our business and results of operations. New taxes could also require us to incur substantial costs to capture data and collect and remit taxes. If such obligations were imposed, the additional costs associated with tax collection, remittance and audit requirements could have an adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
Risks Related to Our Reliance on Third Parties
We depend on data centers operated by us as well as third parties and third-party Internet hosting providers, and any disruption in the operation of these facilities or access to the Internet could adversely affect our business.
We currently serve our customers from our own internal data center located in Costa Mesa, California and two third-party data center hosting facilities located in Lone Mountain, Nevada and Atlanta, Georgia. The third-party owners and operators of these current and future facilities do not guarantee that our customers’ access to our software solutions will be uninterrupted, error-free, or secure. We may experience website disruptions, outages and other performance problems at our data center and third-party data centers. These problems may be caused by a variety of factors, including infrastructure changes, human or software errors, viruses, security attacks (including ransomware attacks), fraud, spikes in customer 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. Data center facilities are vulnerable to damage or interruption from human error, intentional bad acts, power loss, hardware failures, telecommunications failures, fires, wars, terrorist attacks, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, or similar catastrophic events. They also could be subject to
break-ins,
computer viruses, sabotage, intentional acts of vandalism and other misconduct. The occurrence of a natural disaster or an act of terrorism, a decision to close the facilities without adequate notice or terminate our hosting arrangement or other unanticipated problems could result in lengthy interruptions in the delivery of our software solutions, cause system interruptions, prevent our customers’ account holders from accessing their accounts online, reputational harm and loss, corruption, or unavailability of critical data, prevent us from supporting our software solutions or cause us to incur additional expense in arranging for new facilities and support.
We also depend on third-party Internet-hosting providers and continuous and uninterrupted access to the Internet through third-party bandwidth providers to operate our business. As we continue to expand the number of our customers and available solutions, we may not be able to scale our technology to accommodate the increased capacity requirements, which may result in interruptions or delays in service. In addition, the failure of data centers, Internet service providers or other third-party service providers to meet our capacity requirements could result in interruptions or delays in access to our solutions or impede our ability to grow our business and scale our operations. If our third-party infrastructure service agreements are terminated, or there is a lapse of service, interruption of Internet service provider connectivity, or damage to data centers. If we lose the services of one or more of our Internet-hosting or bandwidth providers for any reason or if their services are disrupted, for example due to viruses or denial of service, ransomware or other cybersecurity attacks or other attacks on their systems, or due to human error, intentional bad acts, power loss, hardware failures, telecommunications failures, fires, wars, terrorist attacks, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes or similar catastrophic events, we could experience disruption in our ability to offer our software solutions and adverse perception of our software solutions’ reliability, or we could be required to retain the services of replacement providers, which could cause interruptions in access to our solutions as well as delays and additional expense in arranging new facilities and services and could also increase our operating costs and harm our business and reputation. Additionally, any need to change Internet-hosting service providers would require a significant amount of time and effort by our information technology department. We are working to transition all of our software solutions to the public cloud by the end of 2022 and this migration could introduce risks associated with data and services migration that could affect our business continuity, result in loss, corruption, or compromise of data, and impact the provision of our software solutions. If this planned transition is delayed or impacts the reliability and availability of our software solutions, our customer relationships could be negatively impacted, which could result in a materially and adversely affect our business and results of operations.