About NICE

NICE Ltd. (NICE), a global enterprise software leader, provides cloud platforms for artificial intelligence (AI) -driven digital business solutions that serve two main markets, customer engagement and financial crime and compliance. The company’s solutions are used by organizations of all sizes and are offered in multiple delivery models, including cloud and on-premises. In the Customer Engagement market, the company enables organizations to transform experiences with solutions aimed at meeting consumers wherever they choose to begin their journey, providing digital-centric AI-enabled self-service capabilities, understanding consumers' journeys, creating smarter hyper-personalized connections and guiding continuous omnichannel interactions. The company helps organizations transform their workforce experience with solutions aimed at engaging employees, optimizing operations and automating processes to create a better agent-assisted customer service. For Public Safety and Criminal Justice agencies, the company is digitally transforming the way they manage and share evidence and cases, providing them with single, streamlined view of the truth from incident to court. In the Financial Crime and Compliance market, the company protects financial services organizations, digital banks and their customers’ accounts and transactions, with solutions that identify risks and help prevent money laundering and fraud, as well as help ensure compliance in real-time. With its holistic, data-centric approach to Customer Lifecycle Risk Management (CLRM), the company helps them conquer the dynamic new financial crime threats. Strategy The company’s long-term strategy is to further broaden its industry leadership in both the Customer Engagement and Financial Crime and Compliance market segments. In Customer Engagement, the company intends to continue to leverage CXone, as well as its large customer base, to continue its leadership in the CX market. The company intends to continue to expand its digital reach and self-service innovation to go beyond the contact center, expanding its solutions to address consumer needs across every touch point they choose to start their journey. The company does that through strategic product-launches, fueled by organic developments and acquisitions, with its Customer eXperience Interactions (CXi) offering, aimed at intelligently meeting consumers on their digital channel of choice, enabling resolution through data-driven self-service and preparing agents to successfully resolve any needs event. The company intends to continue to expand into international markets and further increase its position in both the high-end and the mid-low end of the U.S. market. The company intends to continue to expand its AI capabilities, across all its markets, to provide smarter business solutions that are based on its deep domain expertise and its access to unique industry-specific historical and real-time data assets. The company also intends to continue to evolve as one of the leading custom-built AI players in the CX market, and become the standard for any self-service deployment, with both its own end-to-end self-service offering, as well as full integration with any third party solutions. In the Public Safety sector, the company intends to cement its leadership in the digital transformation of the U.S. Justice System, based on its leading Digital Evidence Management System, increasing the number of police departments and district attorneys using its solution across the U.S. In its Financial Crime and Compliance business, the company intends to continue to build its leadership with X-Sight and take its cloud enterprise offering to the high end of the market, and the company intend to further enhance Xceed to be positioned as the premier cloud platform of choice through its suite of solutions for the mid-market. The company intends to leverage the massive digital banking transformation to enlarge its addressable market by launching new solutions and asserting its position as a leader for managing risk in the digital banking era. The company intends to continue leading the market by leveraging several major industry trends and evolving its offering to meet its customers’ current and future needs while focusing on key strategic pillars: Cloud Foundation – The company provides cloud-native open platforms for its Customer Engagement and Financial Crime and Compliance offerings. This allows its customers to facilitate adoption of cloud infrastructure to accelerate innovation and reduce integration, implementation and operational efforts. Complete Suite – The company provides one of the industry’s most comprehensive set of integrated, scalable, world class applications, across all its markets. Digital – The company enables businesses to deliver digital-first omnichannel experiences, responding to consumer needs on their preferred channel of choice wherever their experience journey begins, including the ability to service customers across multiple digital channels, provide secure digital banking and help public safety organizations shift to digital interaction and digital evidence environments. AI – The company accelerates business transformation with AI-embedded natively across its platforms, making its applications and business processes smarter. The company’s domain expertise, advanced technology, and pre-built AI models create industry-leading solutions for all its market segments. Data - Recognizing the power of data, the company considers data as a key component and a strategic asset across its portfolio and leverage it for creating frictionless experiences for consumes. The company manages its customer data with security and compliance measures while leveraging it to equip its customers with a data-driven approach to manage their business, improve performance and identify customer insights. The key elements of the company’s strategy include strengthening its market leadership; strengthening its market leadership; helping its on premises customers and new customers transform to the cloud; continuing to upsell its full solutions portfolio to its existing customer base; continuing organic innovation and development, while also pursuing acquisitions; maximizing the synergies across its businesses; increasing its footprint in select geographical regions; and expanding its global partnerships. Customer Engagement Business Strategy The company’s strategy is to continue serving as a leader in the contact center as a Service (CCaaS) market and expand its reach beyond the boundaries of the contact center to win the overall Customer eXperience Interaction (CXi) market by fundamentally reinventing the way consumers interact with organizations in digital era. The company is driving a new customer experience standard by intelligently meeting customers wherever they choose to begin their journey, enabling resolution through data driven self-service and preparing agents to successfully resolve any need. The company intends to achieve this by: Offering CXone, the global leading unified cloud customer engagement platform that combines guided journey orchestration for voice and digital channels, and consists of tightly integrated IVR, advance digital capabilities, self-service, bots, proactive conversational AI, knowledge management, agent assist tools, customer journey analytics, leading Workforce Engagement Management and automation solutions. Expanding the company’s capabilities to provide holistic digital and self-service experiences throughout the entire customer journey, starting at the very beginning on search, apps and other digital doorsteps, and continuing through self-service and engagement with the contact center through voice or digital enabling customer service organizations to provide a true omnichannel service experience across all touchpoints. Infusing analytics, AI and automation into every element of the company’s Customer Engagement offerings to enable predictive and proactive service, workforce augmentation and automation. The company leverages insights from an extensive number of interactions, with hundreds of purpose-built CX models to create frictionless customer experiences that are smarter and faster. Enabling the company’s customers to deploy AI-driven intelligent conversational bots, to provide self-service and assisted service capabilities, which improve customer experience, as well as reduce the cost to service consumers. Providing agents with unique unified and native desktop capabilities, including digital collaboration, agent assistants, knowledge management and automation to help them deliver the best customer service. Empowering the company’s customers' workforce through agile Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) that helps organizations dynamically forecast and schedule the complex multi-channel digital native workforce, and understand individual employees' preferences, needs and actions to drive motivation and reduce attrition by providing flexibility. Leading cloud transformation across the entire Customer Engagement portfolio for all market segments and regions to enable rapid innovation, enhance flexibility and agility, and lower operational costs. Offering the company’s customers the ability to extend its solutions through innovative third-party applications provided by its DEVone dedicated partner ecosystem. The company’s customers can self-select these third-party applications from its platform’s CXexchange marketplace. Increasing the company’s market presence across all segments with CXone, enhanced data and AI innovation to help organizations adopt Customer eXperience Interactions (CXi), thus enabling them to adapt to complex consumer expectations, as well as ever changing CX realities. Leveraging the company’s large customer base in all verticals and regions to generate incremental revenue growth through up-selling and cross-selling its Customer Engagement portfolio. Extending the company’s public safety offering to the Public Safety Answering Points (PSAP) to support next generation digital emergency communication, ensuring compliance and enabling enhanced digital evidence collection and investigation. Offering one of the industry’s most leading unified cloud-based Digital Evidence Management and Investigation platform, Evidencentral, that integrates and consolidates all forms of evidence information - data and media from police records and dispatch management systems. Financial Crime and Compliance Business Strategy The company plans to continue extending its market leading position and its addressable market, while further supporting the move to the cloud by financial institutions. The company also plans to leverage its capabilities to facilitate both better financial crime protection and to help its customers realize cost reductions. The company intends to achieve this by focusing on: Delivering integrated Financial Crime and Compliance solutions that help financial services organizations identify risks faster and earlier throughout all phases of the customer lifecycle. Expanding the company’s market reach within the mid-tier banks and financial institutions with its Xceed native cloud and AI platform, which provides anti-money laundering (AML) and Fraud solutions in a packaged Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering to smaller organizations, enabling them to benefit from the capabilities previously only afforded to large organizations. Expanding X-Sight, the company’s cloud-native AI platform and solutions for the top tiers of the market to further strengthen and grow its market leadership position. X-Sight combines data and analytics agility and provides it the ability to cross-sell solutions. The company’s cloud platform leverages data, AI, machine learning, advanced automation, and other technologies to help customers reduce the cost of operations, while increasing their adherence to compliance and preventing financial crime. Expanding X-Sight AI, the company’s data driven, machine learning, analytics managed service or do-it-yourself environment to help further optimize analytic models and develop new analytics by leveraging insights across its broad customer base and its market-wide and domain expertise in fraud prevention and anti-money laundering. Offering X-Sight DataIQ, the company’s orchestration and aggregation engine that effortlessly connects to multiple premium and public data sources, turning raw data into the data intelligence to fight financial crimes. Expanding the X-Sight Marketplace, an ecosystem of innovative third-party partners where the company’s customers can select complementary offerings to extend its platforms and products. Offering the company’s solutions to verticals outside of the traditional financial services, such as technology, gaming, energy, insurance, industry regulators, government agencies, as well as to fintech and alternative payments providers. Further expanding the company’s footprint across international geographies and segments while continuing to cross-sell and up-sell into its existing customer base around the world. Expanding the company’s sales channels with world-class systems integrators, consultancies, core banking providers, and other regional reseller firms to identify additional significant opportunities. Offering Overview - Customer Engagement With the growing complexity, demand and urgency of customer service needs, organizations are required to adapt new operating models to maintain a holistic relationship with their customers. These dynamics are challenging organizations to differentiate themselves through efficient, effective and high-quality customer experiences that are digital, including agent-assisted and self-help channels that are smart, consistent and personalized across all touch points. In addition, organizations must find ways to generate business insights, better understand and predict customer intent and create smarter customer connections, as well as provide their employees with the flexibility and balance they seek. Organizations need to accomplish these objectives while containing operational costs and adhering to regulations. To fully accomplish this new era of a holistic relationship between consumers and organizations, and to be able to smartly engage customers wherever they start their journey, the company has extended the reach of its offering and evolved the contact center as a Service (CCaaS) market with CXi. Delivered through CXone and its advanced data and AI platform, Enlighten AI, it redefines the way organizations understand, engage and interact with their customers throughout their entire journey, creating smart, connected, self-service and human-assisted digital interactions. The company enables organizations to create frictionless customer and employee experiences - every time across every touchpoint, and for any need. Platform and Solutions’ Core Capabilities The company’s Cloud Native Open Platform, NICE CXone, is one of the industry’s most comprehensive customer engagement platforms, with best-in-class customer analytics, digital engagement, journey orchestration, knowledge management, voice of the customer, complete workforce engagement, automation and artificial intelligence, all on an open cloud foundation. The company’s leading platform is proven for any size organization, and encompasses its customer-centric expert services, unique domain expertise and extensive ecosystem of partnerships, while meeting the strictest security and uptime standards. In digital world, customer journeys extend well beyond traditional contact center interactions, and CXone is the company’s leading CX platform that provides the benefits of a modern native cloud architecture and delivers a complete suite of customer engagement applications through its CXi offering. It is one of the leading standalone capabilities for self-service, Workforce Engagement Management (WEM), analytics and digital. This multipath approach enables organizations to leverage CXone in many ways, such as a complete open suite, an open suite integrated with third-party Automatic Contact Distributor (ACD) or a hybrid approach that combines native applications with existing premise recording and ACD systems. The company’s custom-built AI engine for CX, Enlighten is embedded across its entire platform and suite of applications. It uses historical data to understand CX needs, behaviors and different types of characteristics, analyzes every interaction and allows proactive identification of needs and the ability to act on them in real time. Enlighten AI also leverages conversational data from employee-assisted interactions to discover automation opportunities for self-service. It guides agents in real-time to reduce friction, keeping them informed and prepared, connects people on a personal level to optimize outcomes, and redefines the quality and coaching process to be based on agents’ soft skill behaviors measured on all interactions. The company’s Digital-Entry Points solutions enable organizations to build scalable and effective digital fluency in order to adapt to the changing needs of consumers and deliver smart service on the consumers’ channel of choice. NICE enables organizations to provide a smart start to their customers' journeys and address their consumers' needs right at the digital doorstep of their journey, such as with online search and mobile apps. The company provides knowledge management tools to drive knowledge at any point of the consumers' journey, starting with search, and then proactively reach-out to consumers and present the most relevant offers to them based on analyzing their needs, while guiding them in real-time on their channel of choice through an interactive conversation. The company’s Journey Orchestration solutions empower organizations to connect and route their customers across their entire journey over 30 supported channels, including voice and digital, in a joint, consistent, and smart way by combining every touchpoint, including online search, mobile apps and other digital doorsteps, continuing through to self-service and interacting with the contact center. Customers can easily and effortlessly move between channels, while providing the customer with a full context and a sense of a single consistent journey, as well as a single view of the experience to the organization. The company creates highly personalized interaction experiences by matching the most appropriate agent or bot to deal with the customer's request, connecting them using real time AI-based routing. The company’s Smart Self Service solutions empower organizations to build intelligent automated conversations based on data that indicates what customers need and how they express these needs and deliver the right resolution. The company’s smart self service allows organizations to design data-driven, personalized self-service interactions, using NICE’s purpose-built Enlighten AI Experience Optimization engine, to identify customer needs and automate the right conversations, resulting in fast and satisfying resolutions and offers. This profound understanding of consumers' needs also enables organizations to proactively engage with their consumers to resolve their issues before they occur. The company provides the most intelligent bots that are able to comprehend human conversations through a powerful conversational AI platform that learns and improves over time. The company’s solutions and tools designed for the Empowered Agent enable contact center agents to be engaged in real-time and to be knowledgeable and prepared so they can create the most hyper-personalized, unique interactions that increase customer satisfaction and resolve issues quickly. The company ensures agents have the right content and context delivered to them through smart knowledge management that is available in real-time. The company guide and alerts agents in real time to specific behavioral insights so they can take immediate action to improve resolution, and increase employee potential with a personalized virtual attendant to guide them through next-best-action and robotic automation that completes mundane and manual processes for them. The company’s Complete Performance solutions help capture, understand, analyze and continuously optimize all elements that impact customer experiences. It enables organizations to record structured and unstructured customer interaction and transaction data on any channel, in a secure and compliant way, forecast the complex staffing needs across all channels, including asynchronous digital touch points, and automate intraday schedules with an AI-based Workforce Management suite, while empowering agents with mobility and notifications to engage and maintain their desired work-life balance, taking into consideration their personal attributes and preferences. The company drives better agent behaviors with a leading Quality Management solution, embedded with its AI engine, custom-built for CX, to consistently measure agent soft skills and customer satisfaction indicators in real time. The company analyzes all interactions, across all channels, to identify areas for performance improvement, then take the relevant actions to make these improvements happen, operationalizing analytics-based insights into daily business processes. The company provides employees with a comprehensive Performance Management solution, creating a consolidated view for agent measurements, drive engagements with gamification capabilities and deliver persona-based coaching for constant improvement. Real-time guidance and automation solutions guide agents to the next-best behavior and next-best action they need to take during or after an interaction and obtain customer feedback to analyze their conversations and journeys to identify points of friction to help optimize their experience. NICE Evidencentral: The company’s Digital Evidence Management and Investigation Platform for public safety emergency communications, law enforcement and criminal justice transforms how digital evidence and data are managed. Public safety and criminal justice agencies spend precious time managing digital evidence and data- collecting, storing, copying, analyzing, sharing and even physically transporting it. Evidencentral helps overcome these obstacles by breaking down data silos, applying analytics and workflow automation to processes, and by connecting public safety and criminal justice agencies together, so justice can flow smoothly, from incident to court. Evidencentral help agencies get control of digital evidence and data, so they can get emergency response right, be a greater force for good, ensure safer communities, and provide timelier justice for victims. Offering Overview - Financial Crime and Compliance NICE Actimize provides the market-leading AI-based platforms and applications for fighting financial crime and ensuring compliance, with proven capabilities for real-time and cross-channel fraud prevention, anti-money laundering and capital markets compliance, and enterprise-wide investigation and case management. Platforms’ and Solutions’ Core Capabilities The company’s cloud platform for the high-end of the market, X-Sight, is an open and flexible AI-cloud platform for Financial Crime and Compliance, enabling top-tier financial services organizations to leverage market-leading solutions and services that meet their sophisticated and unique needs with security, scalability and speed. X-Sight provides global customers with immediate access to new innovations, removing expensive and lengthy system integrations and product lifecycles by leveraging the unified modern cloud architecture. The company offers configuration and customization through APIs and available services and leverage elastic cloud computing for massive scalability, so the largest global financial institutions have the flexibility to configure their controls and financial crime programs to meet their unique needs. The company’s cloud platform for the mid-market, Xceed, brings together powerful AI, data intelligence, machine learning, and insights for comprehensive AML and fraud prevention for small and mid-sized organizations. The solutions on Xceed provide the protection that larger organizations receive but are packaged and connect directly with core banking providers for smaller organizations to realize immediate value. The company’s cloud platforms provide financial services organizations with the agility required to quickly adapt to changing regulatory and threat landscapes. With machine learning, predictive analytics, and embedded AI, organizations are able to proactively prevent crime faster, leading to higher customer satisfaction, lower losses, and reduced risk of regulatory enforcement action or reputational damage. The company’s platforms and solutions enable organizations to have a more comprehensive understanding of their customers’ activities and risk, as well as the organization’s risk exposure. The company’s data intelligence solutions enable organizations to turn raw data into comprehensive actionable intelligence to prevent and detect financial crimes and enable better and faster decisions. With effortless access to data and the company’s X-Sight Marketplace ecosystem of complementary partner offerings, its solutions deliver comprehensive real-time intelligence to fuel analytics and enrich investigations. The company’s AI and Analytics innovative technologies, its deep domain expertise, and the insights it receives by working collaboratively and collectively with its large world-class client base provide rich intelligence to its solutions. This allows the company to provide market leading solutions to its customers, addressing numerous business use cases across risk domains and coverage areas. All Financial Crime and Compliance solutions are infused with Always on AI, the company’s multi-layered approach that injects AI, machine learning, automation, Natural Language Processing, and other advanced technologies throughout the financial crime and compliance value chain. This provides financial services organizations with innovative and patented technologies which fuel automation and analytic precision to detect and prevent financial crimes in real-time and provides secure and frictionless customer experiences. The company’s complete coverage solutions enable organizations to detect market manipulations and prevent money laundering and fraud while helping them adhere to compliance regulations. With broad coverage for compliance around regulations and financial crime risks, including account takeover, social engineering scams and many other financial crimes, the solutions include hundreds of out-of-the-box engineered models for current risk topologies across global regulatory regimes, as well as emerging risk types, including cryptocurrencies and cannabis-related risks to name a couple. Organizations gain holistic coverage to reduce risk, mitigate losses and protect their organizations and customers. The company’s intelligent investigations solutions serve hundreds of thousands of analysts and investigators across the globe enabling them to make better, faster decisions. The rich and robust, purpose-built solutions include out-of-the-box workflows and audits for the regulated industry to intelligently route alerts and cases and track all activity for quick, accurate and transparent investigations. With built-in automation and interactive visual displays, organizations can empower their teams with comprehensive intelligence to optimize efficiency. The company’s Self-Service solutions provide organizations with customization and self-development capabilities powered by APIs and intuitive tools for 24/7 access to smart self-service. Strategic Alliances The company sells its Customer Engagement and Financial Crime and Compliance platforms and solutions worldwide, primarily directly to customers and indirectly through selected partners to better serve its global customers. The company partners with companies in a variety of sales channels, including service providers, system integrators, consulting firms, distributors, value-added resellers and complimentary technology vendors. These partners form a vital network for selling and supporting its solutions and platforms. The company has established a cross-organization business partner program to support its ever-growing eco-system, providing a full range of tools and benefits to help promote the NICE offerings and drive mutual revenue growth and success. The company’s strategic technology partnerships ensure full integration with the NICE offerings, delivering value added capabilities that enable them to provide its customers with an improved set of solutions and services. The company’s DEVone program, comprising more than 200 partners, allows third-party software providers to integrate with its CXone platform and extend its functionality. Devon partner offerings are listed on the company’s CXexchange Marketplace. The company’s Actimize X-Sight Marketplace hosts market leading vendors in the AML and Fraud domains that complement the Financial Crime and Compliance solution suite. The company’s Evidencentral Marketplace hosts an expanding ecosystem of technology vendors that integrate with its Evidencentral platform to extend its functionality and make it simpler and faster for Emergency Communications, Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice agencies to bring a high volume of multimedia evidence together, accelerate case building, unearth hidden evidence and address evidence disclosure challenges. Professional Service and Support The NICE Professional Services and Support organization enables the company’s customers to derive sustainable business value from its solutions. The Professional Service and Support offerings include a variety of services - both standalone and bundled with the company’s products. The company addresses all stages of the technology lifecycle, including defining requirements, planning, design, implementation, customization, optimization, proactive maintenance and ongoing support. Enabling Value Solution Delivery optimizes solution delivery to the company’s customers and enables them to achieve their specific business and organizational goals, on time and on budget. NICE solutions are delivered by certified project managers, technical experts, and application specialists. The company follows a proven methodology that includes business discovery to map solutions to business processes. Value Realization Services (VRS) ensure quick, deep and sustained adoption of the NICE solutions. These services enable the company’s customers to leverage the features and functionalities of its solutions to drive immediate & long-term results, aligned to their specific business case, accelerating their return on investment. The services are specifically designed to address the top short and long-term business concerns the company heard through working with hundreds of customers across the globe. VRS teams work with customers during all phases of solution implementation – before, during and after go-live. The company begins working with customer teams as soon as the project is kicked off, when the solution goes live, and for months after the solution is implemented. The company’s experience has shown that its customers benefit greatly from access to NICE VRS resources once they begin using the solution. This post-implementation engagement allows the company to build skill and ownership within customer teams, embed changes within the customer organization and determine return over investment from the solution. Managed Services empowers organizations to meet short term objectives, such as reducing handle time or improving sales rates, along with achieving long term goals, such as customer retention. The company’s team of experienced practitioners work with customers, guiding the process of collecting interactions, prioritizing subjects to study, conducting analysis and most importantly, developing plans that put the results of the analysis into action. Customer Education Services provide users with the necessary knowledge and skills to operate NICE solutions and to leverage their capabilities to meet customer needs. These services are offered both before and after the deployment of NICE solutions. Sustaining Value Customer Success means working hand-in-hand with the company’s customers to identify areas where they can maximize business value and minimize complications, ensuring continued delivery of business benefits. Cloud Operations ensure that solutions deployed on the NICE cloud run optimally and allow more simplified software upgrades, maximizing availability, performance and quality, while ensuring the security of customer information. This is delivered by using sophisticated proprietary utilities and automations that operate in a proactive manner, providing the means to avoid impacting customer and business operations. This includes: Cloud architecture teams that design cloud service delivery and operation architectures; Cloud Security teams help ensure that the company sets and meets the required Security certifications; Cloud Infrastructure teams that manage both virtual and physical infrastructure requirements; Cloud DevOps teams that implement the utilities and automations while working with its product development teams to optimize its solutions for the cloud environment; and the 7X24 Cloud Application Support teams that monitor and manage the solutions for its customers, ensuring world class up-time, performance, scalability and security. The NICE Cloud utilizes multiple underlying technologies to give the company’s customers many paths to the cloud – these include Physical Data Centers and Public Cloud providers, such as AWS and Azure. NICE maintains multiple Cloud Certifications, including SOC 2 Type II – Applications; HITRUST; ISO:27001 and PCI. Customer Support and Maintenance responds to customer requests for support on a 24/7 basis, using advanced tools and methodologies. NICE offers flexible service level agreements to meet the company’s customers’ needs. The company’s solutions are generally sold with a warranty for repairs of software defects or malfunctions. Software maintenance includes an enhancement program with (in the majority of cases) an ongoing delivery of ‘like-for-like’ upgrade releases, service packs and hot fixes. NICE also offers a Technical Account Management service or TAM. The TAM is a designated manager responsible for escalation management and overall customer care services. Proactive Maintenance addresses issues before they can significantly impact the company’s customers’ businesses. These offerings include: Advanced Services – Technical experts perform system-level audits to ensure ongoing compliance with operational specifications, as well as specific product customizations tailored to the requirements of the customer. Application Performance Services – A 24/7 function that proactively monitors NICE-hosted and customer-premises environments with triage, resolution and escalation of system alarms. Managed Technical Services (Technical and Operation) – NICE offers a suite of managed technical and operation services that enable the customer to fully outsource all necessary responsibilities and functions required in order to manage the NICE solutions. This service includes dedicated onsite and remote support engineers, system management, system operation, updates and upgrades. Information Security – the company has established information security management policies and procedures to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of its data while providing value to the way the company conducts its business. The company has security measures, internal policies, and procedures in place to protect its customers’ information and ensure that proper measures are taken in connection with its customers’ and their end users’ information. Additionally, the company ensures that information security controls are designed and implemented throughout its products and services development lifecycle. The company’s privacy information management policies and procedures comply with worldwide accepted standards, such as ISO 27001. Intellectual Property The company holds 475 U.S. patents and 32 patents issued in additional countries covering substantially the same technology as the U.S. patents. The company has 206 patent applications pending in the United States and other countries. The company owns the following trademarks and/or registered trademarks in different countries: Actimize, Actimize logo, NICE Adaptive WFO, NICE WFM, NICE Voice of the Customer, NICE Work Force Management, NICE Incentive Compensation, NICE Real Time Solutions, NICE Trading Recording, NICE Uptivity, NICE Air, NICE Communication Surveillance, Customer Engagement Analytics, Decisive Moment, Fizzback, IEX, inContact, inContact Logo, NICE inContact, Last Message Replay, NICE, NICE Analyzer, NICE Engage, NICE Engage Platform, NICE Interaction Management, NICE Sentinel, NICE Inform, NICE Inform Lite, NICE Performance Compliance, NICE Inform Media Player, NICE Inform Verify, NICE Logo, NICE Incentive Compensation Management, NICE Real Time Solutions, NICE Trading Recording, NICE Proactive Compliance, NICE Security Recording, NICE SmartCenter, NICE, NICELog, Nexidia, Nexidia ((!)) Logo, Nexidia Interaction Analytics, Nexidia Advanced Interaction Analytics, Nexidia Search Grid, Neural Phonetic Speech Analytics, Own the Decisive Moment, Scenario Replay, Syfact, Syfact Investigator, inContact Cloud Center Solutions, Supervisor on-the-go, VAAS, Voice as a Service, Personal Connection, InTouch, Echo, inCloud, CXone, CXone Logo, NICE inContact CXone, NICE Performance Management, inContact Automatic Contact Distributor, inContact Personal Connection, inContact Interactive Voice Response, inContact Work Force Management, Mattersight, Mattersight Logo, Mattersight See What Matters, Chemistry of Conversation, Net Promoter, Satmetrix, NPX, NPS, Fraudmap, Guardian Analytics, Evidence Lake, Alacra, Free your business, Resolve, Brand Embassy and Hiperos, ContactEngine, ContactEngine Logo, GoMoxie, FluenCX, TRUTH DEPENDS ON IT, MindTouch, NICE ElevateAI, ElevateAI and the NICE Smile design logo. Research and Development The company’s net research and development expenses included $306.1 million in 2022. Seasonality In previous years the majority of the company’s business operated under an on-premises enterprise software model, which was characterized, in part, by uneven business cycles throughout the year, with a significant portion of customer orders received in the fourth quarter (year ended December 31, 2022) of each calendar year. This was due primarily to year-end capital purchases by customers and holiday season spending. In recent years, the company’s business has been shifting more and more to the cloud, which is characterized by more evenly distributed business, which balances the impact of being heavily weighted towards the fourth quarter. While the seasonality associated with the company’s cloud business is less impactful, it continues to have a second half fiscal year which typically results in higher usage of its solutions stemming primarily from the retail and insurance verticals. Many other factors, including general economic conditions, also have an impact on the company’s business and financial results. Regulation The company is subject to applicable data privacy and cyber-related security restrictions in countries in which its customers and their end-users are located, including the United States, Israel and the E.U., mostly in relation to the company’s SaaS, hosting and cloud offering, as well as other outsourced services. The company is also subject to domestic data privacy laws, such as the Israeli Privacy Law and the regulations promulgated thereunder (Israeli Privacy Law), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) and the United Kingdom Data Protection Act 2018. As part of its effort to comply with such regulations and mitigate any future risks related to data privacy and cyber-security, the company has adopted certain internal policies and procedures, such as its Information Security Policies, Cyber & Information Security Incident Response Policies, Business Continuity Plans, Risk Assessment Procedures and Vendor Management Policies. In addition, the company received the ISO 27001:2013 information security management certification, ISO 27701:2019 privacy management and SOC2 Type II, PCI, Hitrust and FedRamp certifications were provided to the relevant business lines (as required). Furthermore, the company continually evaluates its policies and procedures in light of the regulations related to cyber-security and its customers' needs. The company’s European activities require it to comply with the Directive 2011/65/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council on the Restriction of the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment and the Commission Delegated Directive (EU) 2015/863 (together RoHS). RoHS provides, among other things, that producers of electrical and electronic equipment may not place new equipment containing certain materials, in amounts exceeding certain maximum concentration values, on the market in the E.U. The company is also required to comply with Regulation (EC) 1907/2006 of the European Parliament and of the Council Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH, SVHC-205), which requires producers to manage the risks from chemicals used in their products and to provide safety information on the substances found in their products. The company products meet the requirements of the RoHS and REACH directives, and it is making every effort in order to maintain compliance, without adversely affecting the quality and functionalities of its products. The company’s European activities also require it to comply with Directive 2012/19/EU of the European Parliament on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE). Competition The company competes against WFO players, such as Alvaria, Calabrio, Genesys and Verint. In the CCaaS market, which is a part of the Contact Center Infrastructure market that is still mainly held by traditional on-premises players, the company competes against Amazon-connect, Avaya, Cisco, Five9, Genesys and TalkDesk, as well as other niche vendors. The company also competes against certain Unified Cloud Communications vendors (UCaaS) and Collaboration Software vendors, such as 8x8, Vonage and Zoom, which offer basic CCaaS capabilities, and certain digital engagement vendors, such as LivePerson, which offer digital engagement and self-service capabilities for contact centers. The company competes against niche vendors that provide one subset of functionality to protect against a specific risk and against vendors that provide a more comprehensive offering. In the Anti-Fraud market, the company competes against vendors, such as SAS, FICO, Featurespace and Feedzai. In the Anti-Money Laundering market, the company competes against vendors, such as SAS, Oracle and Quantexa. In the Financial Markets Compliance market, the company competes against vendors, such as SMARTS, Oracle and SAS. In the Mid-market segment, the company competes mainly against Verafin. History The company was founded under the laws of the state of Israel in 1986. It was formerly known as NICE Neptun Intelligent Computer Engineering Ltd. and changed its name to NICE Systems Ltd. in 1991. Further, the company changed its name to NICE Ltd. in 2016.