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Natural
MicroSystems Corporation
CUSTOMERS
AND MARKET SEGMENTS
Our customers are primarily leading original equipment manufacturers.
Our customers also include system integrators, communications
service providers and international distributors in the networking
and communications equipment industry.
The table
below is a representative list of our customers within each
market segment, together with examples of applications in
each segment. Each of these customers purchased at least $500,000
of our products and services in 1999.
Market
Segment
SALES
AND MARKETING
We focus
our sales and marketing efforts on selling directly to approximately
100 leading suppliers of networking and communications systems.
Customers targeted in our direct sales efforts are divided
into three groups:
- Strategic
accounts, including large, multinational companies with
multiple products, such as Lucent and Ericsson, each of
which is served by a dedicated account team;
- Major
accounts, including original equipment manufacturers with
discrete product lines; and
- Emerging
accounts, including new entrants in high-growth markets.
We intend
to serve all other customers and prospects through indirect
sales-channel partners. This focus allows us to use our resources
on customers that offer us the largest revenue opportunities.
Our sales
and marketing organization consists of 90 employees in 18
sales offices worldwide, of which 9 are in the United States,
5 are in Europe and 4 are in Asia. During 1999, 27.4% of our
revenues were from sales and services to customers based outside
North America.
RESEARCH
AND DEVELOPMENT
We believe
that the extension and enhancement of existing products, the
development of new products and the support of joint product
development activities are critical to our future success.
During 1999, we spent $24.7 million, or 31% of our revenues,
on research and development.
Our current
research and development is conducted by 166 employees located
at our headquarters in Framingham, Massachusetts, and at our
offices in Schaumburg, Illinois, Tustin, California and Le
Plessis Robinson, France. Our current research and development
is focused on developing emerging, high growth technologies,
such as IP traffic management, IP telephony, SS7/IP network
integration and wireless/IP network integration. Our product
development investment is focused on bringing these technologies
to market and on increasing scalability and performance, providing
high availability through CompactPCI, hot swap and related
technologies, and enhancing our software development environment
to facilitate shorter development cycles for our customers
and partners.
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