Risks Related to Our Operations If we are unable to attract, motivate and retain sales, engineering and other key personnel, including our management team, we may not be able to increase our revenue and our business, operating results and financial condition could be harmed. Our ability to increase our revenue depends on our ability to attract, motivate, and retain qualified sales, engineering and other key employees, including our management. These positions may require candidates with specific backgrounds in software and the storage industry, and competition for employees with such expertise is intense. We have from time to time experienced, and we expect to continue to experience, difficulty in hiring and retaining highly skilled employees with appropriate qualifications. To the extent that we are successful in hiring to fill these positions, we may need a significant amount of time to train new employees before they are effective and efficient in performing their jobs. From time to time, there may be changes in our management team, which could create short term uncertainty. All of our employees, including members of our management team and executive officers, are generally employed on an at-will basis, which means that they could terminate their employment with us at any time. If we are unable to attract, motivate and retain qualified sales, engineering and other key employees, including our management or if they are unable to work effectively or at all due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our business and operating results could suffer. If we fail to adequately expand and optimize our sales force, our growth will be impeded. We need to continue to expand and optimize our sales organization in order to grow our customer base and our business. We plan to continue to expand and train our sales force, both domestically and internationally. We must design and implement effective sales incentive programs, and it can take time before new sales representatives are fully trained and productive. We must adapt our sales processes for new sales and marketing approaches, including those required by our shift to subscription services and the changes resulting from the pandemic. If we are unable to hire, develop and retain qualified sales personnel or if new sales personnel are unable to achieve desired productivity levels in a reasonable period of time, we may not be able to realize the expected benefits of these investments or increase our revenue and our business and operating results could suffer. Our company culture has contributed to our success, and if we cannot maintain this culture as we grow, we could lose the innovation, creativity and teamwork fostered by our culture, and our business may be harmed. We believe that our company culture has been a critical contributor to our success. Our culture fosters innovation, creativity, teamwork, passion for customers and focus on execution, and facilitates critical knowledge transfer and knowledge sharing. In particular, we believe that the difference between our sales, support and engineering cultures and those of incumbent vendors, is a key competitive advantage and differentiator for our customers and partners. As we grow and change or are required to adapt to changes in business operations as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, we may find it difficult to maintain these important aspects of our company culture, which could limit our ability to innovate and operate effectively. Any failure to preserve our culture could also negatively affect our ability to retain and recruit personnel, continue to perform at current levels or execute on our business strategy. Our long-term success depends, in part, on sales outside of the United States, which subjects us to costs and risks associated with international operations. We maintain operations outside of the United States, which we have been expanding and intend to continue to expand in the future. As a company headquartered in the United States, conducting and expanding international operations subjects us to costs and risks that we may not generally face in the United States, including: • exposure to foreign currency exchange rate risk; • difficulties in collecting payments internationally; • managing and staffing international operations; • public health pandemics or epidemics, such as the COVID-19 pandemic; • establishing relationships with channel partners in international locations; • increased travel, infrastructure and legal compliance costs associated with international locations; 22