NETSCOUT SYSTEMS INC 10-K

Item 1. Business Overview We are an industry leader with over 35 years of experience in providing service assurance and cybersecurity solutions that are used by customers worldwide to assure and secure their digital business services against disruption while preserving the user experience. Service providers and enterprises, including local, state and federal government agencies, rely on our solutions to achieve the visibility and security necessary to optimize network performance, ensure the delivery of high-quality, mission-critical applications and services, gain timely insight into the end user experience, and protect the network from attack. With our offerings, customers can quickly, efficiently and effectively identify and resolve issues that result in downtime, interruptions to services, poor service quality or compromised security, thereby driving compelling returns on their investments in their network and broader technology initiatives. Some of the more significant technology trends and catalysts for our business include the evolution of customers' digital transformation initiatives such as cloud migration, expanding threats associated with the rapidly evolving cybersecurity threat landscape, the advancement of business intelligence and analytics, and the 5G evolution occurring in both the service provider and enterprise verticals. Our operating results are influenced by a number of factors, including, but not limited to, the mix and quantity of products and services sold, pricing, costs of materials used in our products, growth in employee-related costs, including commissions, and the expansion of our operations. Factors that affect our ability to maximize our operating results include, but are not limited to, our ability to introduce new products and enhance existing products, the marketplace acceptance of those new or enhanced products, continued expansion into international markets, development of strategic partnerships, competition, successful acquisition integration efforts, and our ability to manage expenses and make improvements in a highly competitive industry. Markets Our service assurance solutions are used by enterprises (including government agencies) and service providers to optimize network performance, quickly identify and resolve issues impacting application and service quality and gain insight into the end user experience. Our cybersecurity solutions are used by enterprises and service providers to identify and mitigate advanced, volumetric, and application-specific distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, as well as assist enterprise security teams in rapidly finding and isolating other advanced network threats. Enterprise Market Within the enterprise market, NetScout's nGeniusONE and ISNG offerings enable IT organizations to support a growing range of performance management and cybersecurity use cases including: • Network Performance Management - Our nGeniusONE analytics and our ISNG real-time information platform provide the necessary insight to optimize network performance, restore service and understand the quality of the users’ experience. By integrating certain acquired product lines and product features into our core offerings, our customers can benefit from a consistent view across their traditional wired network infrastructures, remote offices, and wireless networks (WiFi). 3 Table of Contents • Application Performance Management: Data Center Transformation and Cloud Computing - We enable information technology (IT) organizations, from their development operations to their infrastructure teams, to manage the delivery of services across virtual and physical environments, providing a comprehensive, unified real-time view into network, application, server, and user communities' performance. We proactively detect emerging issues with the ability to help analyze both physical and virtual service delivery environments within the data center which enables organizations to optimize datacenter infrastructure investments, protect against service degradations, and simplify the operation of complex, multi-tier application environments in consolidated, state-of-the-art data centers. Our solutions are often used by enterprises to support private cloud computing environments that are aimed at enabling greater, more cost-effective accessibility to applications without compromising the reliability and security of those applications and the network. Our solutions portfolio also includes a range of virtual appliances that can help enterprise customers extend their monitoring of applications deeper into their traditional data centers, confidently migrate applications into public cloud environments and gain a comprehensive, cohesive view into the resulting hybrid cloud environment. • Unified Communications (UC) - We deliver deep application-level unified visibility into voice, data and video services side-by-side in order to understand the interrelationships of all UC services that traverse the network infrastructure and assess quality and performance of the delivery of these services. As a result, our real-time, actionable intelligence helps customers to deliver a high-quality UC experience as users make calls, video conference and engage in instant messaging. We also help desktop, network, telecom, and application teams manage UC through a common platform across complex, geographically dispersed, and multi-vendor environments. • Software-as-a-Service and Infrastructure Performance Management - We also provide enterprise customers with active agent-based offerings that can help them determine availability and performance levels for software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, and gauge the health of servers, routers and switches as well as wireless and virtual infrastructures. As a result, customers can continuously monitor the performance of key business services and the infrastructure used to deliver them, regardless of how applications are deployed or where the user is located. Deployed independently or as part of our broader service assurance solution, these products also play an important role in helping enterprises deliver a superior user experience, achieve outstanding service quality and drive better returns on their application and infrastructure investments. • Application and Desktop Virtualization - We provide clear and actionable insights that help customers fully realize the operational benefits associated with Application and Desktop Virtualization, and reduce the time it takes to identify and resolve service problems. We offer visibility across all virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) tiers including remote access, client, virtualization, web, front-end application, and related database systems, and help customers gain actionable metrics and insight from monitoring and analyzing the consumption and performance of VDI services. • Cybersecurity: DDoS Protection and Cyber Threat Analytics - Computer networks continue to be targeted for cyberattacks, even more aggressively during the COVID-19 pandemic, that are aimed at disrupting, damaging, or otherwise destroying an enterprise’s ability to conduct its business or gaining unauthorized access to corporate applications and stealing valuable information. We provide a range of network security solutions under the NetScout Arbor brand that enable enterprises to protect their networks from high-volume and application-specific DDoS attacks, which are aimed at either overwhelming the network with traffic or over-exercising specific functions or features of a website with the intention to disable those functions or features. We have also developed new cybersecurity solutions for enterprises that provide greater deep-dive forensic capabilities as well as analytics that can provide visibility into anomalous behavior on the network that may be indicative of an advanced threat. These security analytics enable existing enterprise customers to leverage their historical investments in NetScout’s service assurance solutions by using the Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) data already being generated to support service assurance as well as cybersecurity use cases. Government Markets Considered as part of our enterprise vertical, we have built a strong position with federal, state and local government agencies, both in the United States and abroad. Similar to our enterprise customers, government agencies are focused on streamlining and transforming IT into more efficient and more easily managed environments. To accomplish this, agencies are turning to IT solutions that will help simplify managing and assuring their IT environments as well as reduce costs. However, governmental markets differ from enterprise markets primarily due to their purchasing cycles being influenced by potential changes in government administrators, budgetary priorities and allocated funding for key projects. 4 Table of Contents Telecommunication Service Provider Markets Today’s service providers are focused on delivering a compelling set of services and ensuring a high-quality user experience, while also striving to minimize operational complexity, control costs and improve automation. This, coupled with the challenge of internet protocol (IP) transformation activities and complex technologies such as 5G, Long-Term Evolution (LTE), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), Internet Protocol Television (IP-TV), wireless network (WiFi) and cloud services drives the need for a more automated and unified approach to managing service delivery and the subscriber experience. Our service provider solutions support an expanding range of use cases including: • Service Assurance for Mobile, Fixed Line and Cable Operators - The fundamental transformation of the mobile network to all-IP enables mobile operators to build highly-scalable service delivery environments to offer new services to meet the growing subscriber demand for data, voice and video-centric services and to consolidate and simplify network operations. Mobile operators use our offerings to gain real-time, detailed IP packet-level insight and core-to-access visibility, which enables them to ensure services offered over the network and meet certain pre-defined quality levels for an optimal subscriber experience. NetScout’s service assurance solutions help service providers effectively manage capacity, assess overall network quality, take proactive steps to modify the network before issues impact subscribers, and quickly identify and troubleshoot network problems. In addition to improving the overall return on their network infrastructure investments, mobile operators using our solutions also benefit from improved network quality and unique customer insights - both of which contribute to subscriber acquisition, retention, and monetization. The growing demand for high-bandwidth triple-play services, broadband connectivity, content anywhere, IP-TV, on-demand video traffic, new extended WiFi initiatives and carrier Ethernet services presents fixed line and cable multi-system operators with significant revenue opportunities. IP has become the de facto convergence mechanism for access, distribution and core networks, enabling new service offerings and simplifying network operations while reducing total cost of operations. For example, cable operators use our solutions to monitor and manage their local area WiFi connectivity services, ensure the high-quality delivery of video to consumers outside of their homes as well as provide broadband and telephony services targeting small- and medium-sized businesses. • Business Intelligence for Service Providers - Service providers strive to understand how the performance of their networks impact customer experience, subscriber behavior and related usage trends. By combining network traffic data with other information, including support requests, subscriber calling plans, demographic data and other details, service providers can make more timely decisions about their offerings and sales and marketing initiatives to acquire, retain and further monetize their subscribers. NetScout’s analytics deliver timely insights into a service provider’s subscribers, services, networks, and applications, as well as easy export capabilities so that this information can be integrated into their data lakes and third-party analytic platforms. • DDoS Protection - Over the past decade, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), including leading telecommunications providers, cable multi-service operators and cloud providers, have seen significant increases in the sophistication, scale and frequency of high-volume and application-specific DDoS attacks on their networks. DDoS attacks are aimed at disrupting the online services of an ISP’s business customer by overwhelming the network with traffic or by over-exercising specific functions or features of a website with the intention to disable those functions or features. NetScout Arbor smart DDoS solutions are used by a wide range of ISPs around the world to help protect their networks against DDoS attacks, and to resell certain DDoS offerings to their enterprise customers. Products Overview Since our founding in 1984, we have been an industry innovator in using IP-based network traffic to help organizations manage and optimize the delivery of services and applications over their networks, improve the end-user experience and protect networks from unwanted cybersecurity threats. Using our patented ASI technology, our solutions instantaneously convert network traffic data, often referred to as wire data, into high-value metadata, or "smart data". Our offerings can help customers quickly identify and troubleshoot network and application performance issues, defend their networks from DDoS and other cybersecurity attacks, and rapidly find and isolate advanced network threats. Our solutions are typically deployed by customers as integrated hardware and software, as software only that is then integrated into commercial off-the-shelf hardware, in a virtualized environment as software only, or as a Software as a Service (SaaS) form factor. Our solutions help our customers meet the increasing demands and ever-changing technology landscape of IP networks, service, applications, and cybersecurity. In recent years, to further elevate our value proposition and address the near- and long-term needs of customers and prospects, we have delivered major product upgrades across our product lines by integrating key functionality from acquired product lines, increasing the deployment flexibility of our solutions, and adding new features and capabilities that enable us to address a broader range of use cases. Our primary products can be categorized as follows: 5 Table of Contents Service Assurance Solutions for Network and Application Performance and Business Intelligence Analytics • nGeniusONE Management Software and Analytic Modules - Our nGeniusONE management software is used to support our service provider, enterprise, and government customers enabling them to predict, preempt, and resolve network and service delivery problems while facilitating the optimization and capacity planning of their network infrastructures. Additionally, we market a range of specialized platforms and analytic modules that can enable our customers to analyze and troubleshoot traffic in radio access network and WiFi networks, as well as gain timely insight into high-value services, applications and systems, and better understand the subscriber’s experience on the network. nGeniusPULSE is an active testing tool that enables enterprises to identify infrastructure performance issues and determine application availability, reliability, and performance. We also market our nGenius Business Analytics solution, which enables service providers to quickly and efficiently analyze their network traffic to gain greater and more timely insights into their subscribers, services, networks, and applications, as well as easily export our smart data into their data lakes and into third-party analytic platforms. • Visibility Products (Probes, Packet Flow Systems and Taps) - Our ISNG platform provides real-time collection and analysis of information-rich, high-volume packet-flow data from across the network that is displayed through the nGeniusONE Service Assurance Solution. The ISNG is an advanced passive network probe that can be deployed as a traditional appliance with integrated hardware and software, as software-only for use in commercial-off-the-shelf hardware or in virtualized or software only form factors. The virtualized form factor version of our intelligent data source, which is marketed as vSTREAM, can be deployed to support NFV environments as well as to cost-effectively monitor application performance in traditional data center, private cloud, and public cloud environments. We also provide comprehensive packet flow systems (also called network packet brokers or network visibility fabric switches), that deliver targeted network traffic access to a range of monitoring and cybersecurity tools and systems, including the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform. Additionally, we market a suite of test access points (TAPs) that enable full, non-disruptive access to network traffic with multiple link type and speed options. Cybersecurity Solutions • DDoS Protection – We provide cybersecurity solutions that enable service providers and enterprises around the world to protect their networks against DDoS attacks under the Arbor brand. Dozens of service provider customers around the world also resell Arbor's solutions as a managed DDoS service to their enterprise customers. Our portfolio of DDoS solutions offers complete deployment flexibility spanning on-premise offerings and cloud-based capabilities to meet a broad array of customer needs, as well as specialized analytics and comprehensive threat intelligence information. Our smart DDoS offerings for service providers include Arbor Sightline for DDoS visibility and threat detection, Arbor Threat Mitigation System for removing DDoS attack traffic from the network without disruption to key network services and Arbor Insight for advanced analytical and forensic information. Our smart DDoS offerings for enterprises include Arbor Edge Defense, a perimeter-based appliance for identifying and blocking incoming DDoS attacks and outbound malicious communications, and Arbor Cloud, a global, cloud-based traffic scrubbing service that quickly removes DDoS attack traffic. We plan to further enhance and expand these capabilities in ways that will enable greater adoption of our solutions by service provider and enterprise customers. • Advanced Threat Detection – We are actively expanding our enterprise cybersecurity offerings to better leverage the investment that our enterprise customers have made in our traditional service assurance solutions. By collecting network traffic via our probes, we can expand our value proposition by providing specialized analytics for both service assurance and security. We have introduced and will continue to advance solutions such as new packet forensic capabilities, such as Omnis Cyber Investigator, designed specifically for security operations teams as well as new anomalous behavior analytics that security teams can use to identify and investigate potential advanced network threats. Integration with Third-Party Solutions To have greater operational impact on assuring performance of applications and service delivery, we have integrated our technology with third-party management consoles and business service management systems. This integration allows organizations to receive alarms on impending performance problems and to link into the nGenius Service Assurance solution in order to perform detailed problem analysis and troubleshooting. The third-party solution providers that we have integrated our solutions with include Cisco Systems, Cisco Sourcefire, Citrix Systems, Dell Technologies, Hewlett-Packard Company, IBM Tivoli, and VMWare. In addition, we have embedded NetScout Arbor DDoS mitigation capabilities on a blade within Cisco's market-leading ASR9000 router and will continue to evaluate partnership opportunities to integrate its smart DDoS capabilities within other network equipment platforms. 6 Table of Contents Growth Strategy The following are key elements in our growth strategy for fiscal year 2022: • Drive Innovation - In order to support our customers' near-term and longer-term requirements, we plan to continue innovating by enhancing and expanding our product portfolio. In particular, we continue to invest in research and development, and leverage the strong technical and domain expertise across our organization. Our engineering teams are focused on advancing technical innovation across our broad product portfolio. By capitalizing on our extensive experience with global enterprise, service provider and government organizations with IP-based networks, we remain well positioned to cross-leverage our technology development across all major platforms and relevant technologies to address the evolving demands of current and prospective customers. • Deliver Pervasive Visibility - By making our visibility products available in multiple form factors, including software that can be deployed with commercial off-the-shelf servers and as virtual appliances, we believe that it is easier and more affordable for customers to deploy our technology more broadly across their hybrid network and IT infrastructures. By offering more cost-effective instrumentation options, we are well positioned to help existing and new customers gain greater visibility into more places across their end-to-end network environments and address an even broader range of service assurance and cybersecurity use cases. • Extension into Adjacent Markets - By enhancing and expanding our product portfolio and driving product integration via internal development and acquisitions, we have expanded our reach into complementary adjacent markets such as application performance management, infrastructure performance management, big data analytics, and cybersecurity. We believe that this element of our strategy is integral to gaining access to larger budgets, increasing spending from existing customers, attracting new customers, and increasing our total addressable market. In particular, we are broadening our cybersecurity solutions beyond the DDoS market with enterprise security offerings that can help our customers extract more value from the network traffic that we are already collecting to support service assurance use cases. • Fortify and Expand Existing Customer Relationships - We have an expansive, global customer base of service providers and enterprises that have purchased our products in support of major technology and network initiatives that they have implemented over the past decade. As a result, we believe we are well positioned to expand the scope of many of these relationships as well as acquire new customer relationships as we identify new opportunities to support new network, cybersecurity, and broader technology projects. • Expand our Customer Base - The investments we have made over the past several years to expand our product portfolio and support greater deployment flexibility also positions us to win new customers in established geographic markets where we can leverage our global direct sales organization and an extensive network of value-added resellers and systems integrators. • Increase Market Relevance and Awareness - We plan to continue to implement marketing campaigns aimed at generating high-quality sales opportunities with both current and prospective enterprise and service provider customers, promoting thought leadership and building the NetScout brand. • Extend our Technology Partner Alliance Ecosystem - We plan to continue to develop and fortify alliances with complementary solutions providers that can help us support a larger, more global and more diverse customer base. We also plan to continue to enhance our technology value, product capabilities and customer relevance through the continued integration of our products into technology partner products. • Pursue Strategic Acquisitions - We have completed many acquisitions since our inception that have helped broaden our capabilities, enhance our products and technologies, enable us to expand into adjacent markets and better position us to meet the needs of a larger base of customers and prospects. • Improve Cost Structure and Drive Efficiencies - We plan to balance our investments in key technology, product development, sales and marketing, and other initiatives that will enable us to drive long-term profitable growth with an ongoing focus on managing costs and driving efficiencies. Support Services Customer satisfaction is a key driver of our success. Our support programs offer customers various levels of high-quality support services to assist in the deployment and use of our solutions. We have support personnel strategically deployed across the globe to deliver 24/7 support to our premium customers. Certain support services, such as on-site support activities, are provided by qualified third-party support partners. In addition, many of our certified resellers provide Partner Enabled Support to our end users. This is especially prevalent in international locations where time zones and language, among other factors, make it more efficient for end users to have the reseller provide initial support functions. Our support also includes updates to 7 Table of Contents our software and firmware at no additional charge, if and when such updates are developed and made generally available to our commercial customer base. If ordered, support commences upon shipment or expiration of the standard warranty for software. For software, which also includes firmware, the standard warranty commences upon shipment and expires 60 to 90 days thereafter. With regard to hardware, the standard warranty commences upon shipment and expires 60 days to 12 months thereafter. We believe our warranties are consistent with commonly accepted industry standards. We expect to continue to provide support services for the acquired platforms under existing agreements and plan to explore opportunities to further simplify and standardize our support obligations over the coming years. Manufacturing Our manufacturing operations consist primarily of final product assembly, configuration, and testing. We purchase components and subassemblies from suppliers and construct our hardware products in accordance with NetScout standard specifications. We inspect, test and use process controls to ensure the quality and reliability of our products. We maintain an ISO 9001 quality systems registration, a certification showing that our corporate procedures and manufacturing facilities comply with standards for quality assurance and process control. We also maintain an ISO 9001:2000 quality systems registration, a certification showing that our corporate procedures comply with standards for continuous improvement and customer satisfaction. We generally use standard parts and components for our products, which can be sourced from various suppliers. We have generally been able to obtain adequate supplies of components in a timely manner from current suppliers. While certain components, such as computer network interface cards, are currently purchased from a single supplier, we have identified alternate suppliers that we believe can be qualified relatively quickly to fulfill our needs should an issue arise with the existing supplier. Our reliance on single source suppliers is further described in Item 1A "Risk Factors." We manufacture our products based upon near-term demand estimates resulting from sales forecasts and historical fulfillment information. However, since these forecasts have a high degree of variability because of factors that include time of year, overall economic conditions and sales employee incentives, we believe it is prudent to maintain inventory levels in advance of receipt of firm orders to ensure that we have sufficient stock t o satisfy incoming orders. Our inventory management system has thus far enabled us to minimize the effects of the disruption caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic from a supply chain perspective. The potential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our business is further described in Item 1A "Risk Factors." Sales and Marketing Sales We sell our products, support and services through a direct sales force and an indirect reseller and distribution channel. Our direct sales force generally uses a "high-touch" sales model that consists of face-to-face meetings with customers to understand and identify their unique business challenges and requirements. In the current global pandemic environment, our sales teams have been successful in engaging customers virtually to understand their requirements and effectively design solutions. Our sales teams translate our customers' requirements into tailored business solutions that allow the customer to maximize the performance of its infrastructure and service delivery environment. Due to the complexity of the systems and the capital expenditures involved, our sales cycles typically take between three and twelve months. We build strategic relationships with our customers by continually enhancing our solution to help them address their evolving service delivery management challenges. In addition to providing a comprehensive solution to meet these needs, we continually provide software enhancements to our customers as part of their maintenance contracts with us. These enhancements are designed to provide additional and ongoing value to our existing customers to promote loyalty and the expansion of their deployment of our products. Existing customer growth is also driven by the expansion and changes in their networks as they add new infrastructure elements, new users, new locations, new applications, experience increasing service traffic volumes or encounter incremental cyber threats. We also maintain an indirect reseller and distribution channel. Sales to customers outside the United States are primarily export sales through channel partners. Our channel partners assist us by improving our reach to customers, extending our presence in new markets, and marketing and selling our products to a broad array of organizations globally. We sell through a range of channel partners including value-added resellers, value-added distributors, resellers, and system integrators, to our enterprise, service provider and government customers. Historically and currently, we have used indirect distribution channels principally as intermediaries on contractual terms for customers with whom we do not have a contract. Our sales force meets with end user customers to present our products and solutions, conduct demonstrations, provide evaluation equipment, recommend detailed product solutions, develop product deployment designs and timelines, and assist in establishing financial and other justifications for the proposed solution. During this selling process, a channel partner, who has contracts with both the end customer and us, may be brought in to facilitate the transaction and to provide fulfillment services. In the case of 8 Table of Contents international channel partners, those services usually also include currency translation and support. In the U.S., fulfillment services are usually limited to invoicing and cash collection. Under this approach, we have limited dependence upon channel partners for the major elements of the selling process. In many cases, there are multiple channel partners with the required contractual relationships, so dependence on any single channel partner is not significant. During the fiscal yea rs ended March 31, 2021, 2020 and 2019 , no direct customers or indirect channel partners accounted for more than 10% of our total revenue. Marketing Our marketing organization drives our market research, strategy, product positioning and messaging, and produces and manages a variety of programs such as customer forums, trade shows, industry events, advertising, public and analyst relations, social media, direct mail, seminars and webinars, sales promotions and other online marketing programs. These programs are focused on promoting the sale and acceptance of our solutions to further build the NetScout brand as well as the ASI, nGenius, Arbor and other applicable product brand names in the marketplace. Key elements of our marketing strategy focus on thought leadership, market positioning, market education, go to market strategies, reputation management, demand generation, and the acceleration of our strategic selling relationships with local and global resellers, systems integrators, and our technology alliance partners. During fiscal year 2021, we continued to invest in the promotion of the NetScout brand as well as the nGenius and Arbor brands as core solution-level brands in their respective markets. We expect to continue these initiatives during fiscal year 2022. Research and Development Our continued success depends significantly on our ability to anticipate and create solutions that will meet emerging customer requirements. We work closely with our largest enterprise and service provider customers to better understand and address their near-term and longer-term requirements. By better understanding the key, time-sensitive needs of our global customer base, we believe our development programs will continue to result in enhanced products that are able to meet the increasing challenges of an increasingly complex and dynamic global network environment. We have invested significant financial resources and personnel into the development of our products and technology. Our continued investment in research and development is crucial to our business and our continued success in the market. We have assembled a team of highly skilled engineers with expertise in various technologies associated with our business and the technologies being deployed by our customers. We plan to continue to enhance and expand our product offerings and capabilities in the near future while integrating key capabilities from acquired product lines as appropriate. As a result, we plan to continue to invest and dedicate significant resources to our research and development activities for both our enterprise and service provider customers. We predominantly develop our products internally, with some limited third-party contracting. We have also acquired developed technology through business acquisitions. To promote industry standards and manifest technology leadership, we participate in and support the activities and recommendations of industry standards bodies, and we also engage in close and regular dialogue with our key customers and alliance partners. These activities provide early insight into the direction of network and application performance requirements and the changing cybersecurity landscape that impacts current and emerging technologies. Seasonality We have experienced, and expect to continue to experience, quarterly variations in our order bookings as a result of a number of factors, including the length of the sales cycle, complexity of customer environments, new product introductions and their market acceptance and seasonal factors affected by customer projects and typical IT buying cycles. Due to these factors, we historically have experienced stronger bookings during our fiscal third and fourth quarters than in our fiscal first and second quarters. Customers We sell our products to enterprises, service providers and local, state, and federal governmental agencies with large-and medium-sized high-speed IP computer networks. Our enterprise customers cover a wide variety of industries, such as financial services, technology, manufacturing, healthcare, utilities, education, transportation and retail as well as government and associated agencies. Our telecommunications service provider customer group includes mobile operators, wireline operators, cable operators, internet service providers, and cloud providers. 9 Table of Contents Backlog We produce our products on the basis of our forecast of near-term demand and maintain inventory in advance of receipt of firm orders from customers. We configure our products to customer specifications and generally deliver products shortly after receipt of the purchase order. Service engagements are also included in certain orders. Customers generally may reschedule or cancel orders with little or no penalty. We believe that our backlog at any particular time is not meaningful because it is not necessarily indicative of future sales levels. Our combined product backlog at March 31, 2021 was $27.9 million compared to $29.4 million at March 31, 2020. A majority of the backlog relates to customization and integration projects and radio frequency propagation modeling. In some cases, we have begun these projects but have not yet hit billable milestones. A majority of revenue for these projects is expected to be recognized into revenue throughout fiscal year 2022. Competition We compete with many companies in the markets we serve. The service assurance market, including the infrastructure, network, and application performance management markets, is highly competitive, rapidly evolving, and fragmented with overlapping technologies and a wide range of competitors, both large and small, who may deliver certain elements of our solution. Consequently, there are a number of companies who have greater name recognition and substantially greater financial, management, marketing, service, support, technical, distribution and other resources than we do. Additionally, certain competitors, either due to their size and resources or due to their technological strengths, may be able to respond more effectively than we can to new or changing opportunities, technologies, standards and customer requirements. Principal competitive factors in our service assurance market include scalability; ability to address a large number of applications, locations and users; product performance; the ability to easily deploy into existing network environments; the ability to offer virtualized solutions; and the ability to administer and manage the solution. While we face multiple competitors within the service assurance industry, we believe that we compete favorably on the basis of the following factors: • we provide a comprehensive service delivery management solution that is capable of addressing the needs of both enterprise and service provider customers and can be scaled to meet the challenges of today's dynamic service delivery environments; • we believe that our solutions provide superior data and compete favorably on a broad range of metrics including the ability to recognize and track a large number of applications; • we believe our solutions possess the scalability to support high and increasing levels of data and network traffic; • our solutions look at both data and control plane traffic across an entire network; and • our ASI technology is optimized to provide real-time information about service performance and real-time alerts to emerging service problems whereas traditional solutions are inherently latent, supporting only forensic-trouble shooting after an issue has occurred. In the enterprise market, our competitors include companies who provide network performance management, application performance management, infrastructure performance management and other related solutions such as CA Technologies (a Broadcom Inc. business), Cisco Systems, Dynatrace, Datadog, ExtraHop, IBM, Infovista, Keysight, Viavi, Gigamon, New Relic, Riverbed Technology, Splunk and SolarWinds. In addition, we both compete with and partner with large enterprise management vendors, such as HP and IBM, who offer performance management solutions. We also compete with smaller, privately held competitors who often focus on specific vertical markets. In the service provider market, we compete with traditional probe vendors, network equipment manufacturers, big data and analytics vendors, and virtualization vendors. These vendors include Anritsu, Cisco, Ericsson, Dell Technologies, EXFO, Huawei, IBM, Infovista, Niksun, Polystar (an Elisa Oyj business), Radcom, Splunk, Nokia and Viavi. We face additional competitive threats from startups and new entrants that seek to offer innovative solutions in an industry characterized by rapid technological change. In the cybersecurity market, we face a range of competitors, including those that may have greater name recognition and substantially greater financial, management, marketing, service, support, technical, distribution and other resources than we do. We believe that the scalability of our solutions, flexible deployment, and price-performance of our cybersecurity solutions positions us well to compete against both larger network equipment and security companies and smaller niche security solutions vendors. 10 Table of Contents In the DDoS solutions market, we compete under the NetScout Arbor brand with a broad range of vendors including Radware, Akamai, F5 Networks, A10 Networks, Fortinet, Fastly, Cloudflare and Corero Network Security. In the market for specialized threat analysis, packet forensics and protection solutions used to identify advanced network threats, we compete with a range of vendors including Darktrace, Vectra Networks, FireEye, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, RSA and other specialist providers. Our ability to sustain a competitive advantage depends on our ability to deliver continued technology innovation and adapt to meet the evolving needs of our customers. Competitive factors in our industry are further described in Item 1A "Risk Factors." Intellectual Property Rights We rely on patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret laws and contract rights to establish and maintain our rights in our technology and products. While our intellectual property rights are an important element in our success, our business as a whole does not depend on any one particular patent, trademark, copyright, trade secret, license, or other intellectual property right. We use contracts, statutory laws, domestic and foreign intellectual property registration processes, and international intellectual property treaties to police and protect our intellectual property portfolio and rights from infringement. From a contractual perspective, we use license agreements and non-disclosure agreements to control the use of our intellectual property and protect our trade secrets from unauthorized use and disclosure. In addition to license agreements, we rely on U.S. and international copyright law to protect against unauthorized copying of software programs in the U.S. and abroad. We have obtained U.S. and foreign trademark registrations to preserve and protect certain trademarks and trade names. We have also filed and obtained U.S. patents and international counterparts to protect certain unique NetScout inventions from being unlawfully exploited by other parties. However, there is no assurance that pending or future patent applications will be granted, that we will be able to obtain patents covering all of our products, or that we will be able to license, if needed, patents from other companies on favorable terms or at all. Our proprietary rights are subject to other risks and uncertainties described under Item 1A "Risk Factors." Employees As of March 31, 2021, we had 2,421 employees worldwide – over 99% of whom were full time employees. Our employees are in over 35 countries with 64% of our employees located in the United States. Compensation and Benefits We offer a competitive compensation and benefits package to attract, retain and motivate our employees. Our compensation package includes market-competitive pay, incentive compensation, restricted stock unit grants (RSU’s), an Employee Stock Purchase Plan, retirement benefits, health benefits, paid time off and leave benefits. Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are the cornerstones of our organizational excellence and complement our core values of performing with integrity, compassion, collaboration, and innovation. We embrace and encourage our employees' differences in age, color, disability, ethnicity, family or marital status, gender identity or expression, language, national origin, physical and mental ability, political affiliation, race, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, veteran status, and other characteristics that make our employees unique. As such, we strive to demonstrate our commitment to DEI at the highest levels. Educating our employees about our DEI initiatives is a priority. In addition, we recently chartered a DEI team to ensure transparent and equitable processes for employee engagement, onboarding, learning and development, policy making, and career planning. Culture & Values We believe that our company culture is critical to our success and growth. Our culture complements and acts as a multiplier to our technology, exceptional talent, and forward-thinking innovation. As a result of our philosophy, we have pledged to be considerate, loyal and appreciative of our employees while also enacting decision-making processes and business strategies that result in efficient business outcomes. We take seriously our mission as Guardians of the Connected World. We recently launched our internal NETSCOUT WITHOUT BORDERS initiative, of which a key component is an employee engagement program to continuously 11 Table of Contents communicate our mission and goals to all of our global employees through a series of town hall meetings that provide direct interaction with the CEO, in-depth focus groups, and follow-on development programs. This is a significant investment to stay connected with all employees, and to ensure everyone is equipped with the knowledge and tools and aligned with our mission. COVID-19 Response During the COVID-19 pandemic, our top priority has been the safety and well-being of our employees and their families to ensure that they continue to be productive and keep our customers and the world connected. As the severity and scope of the pandemic became known in early calendar year 2020, we curtailed travel and required all employees, in all locations, to work from home, with only a limited numbers of employees with business-critical tasks provided access to our facilities. For those employees who needed to be on-site, we established multiple protective measures to ensure the safety of our employees. Throughout the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were able to maintain our unique culture, support our employees with well-being programs and uninterrupted salary and benefits, and maintain our market presence and unfailingly superior service levels to our customers. Corporate Information Our corporate headquarters are located at 310 Littleton Road, Westford, Massachusetts, and our telephone number is (978) 614-4000. We were incorporated in Delaware in 1984. Our internet address is http://www.NetScout.com. Our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K and amendments to reports filed pursuant to Sections 13(a) and 15(d) of the Exchange Act, are made available free of charge on or through our website at ir.netscout.com as soon as reasonably practicable after such reports are filed with, or furnished to, the SEC. None of the information posted on our website is incorporated by reference into this Report. We webcast our earnings calls and certain events we participate in or host with members of the investment community. They are made available on our investor relations website at ir.netscout.com//investors/events-and-presentations/events-calendar/default.aspx . Additionally, we provide notifications of news or announcements regarding our financial performance, including SEC filings, investor events, press and earnings releases, as part of our investor relations website. The contents of these sections of our investor relations website are not intended to be incorporated by reference into this report or in any other report or document we file with the SEC.