UNITED STATES

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

Washington, D.C. 20549

 

Form 10-K

(Mark One)

or

Commission File Number 000-27130

NetApp, Inc.

(Exact name of registrant as specified in its charter)

 

495 East Java Drive,

Sunnyvale, California 94089

(Address of principal executive offices, including zip code)

(408) 822-6000

(Registrant’s telephone number, including area code)

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act:

 

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(g) of the Act:

None

Indicate by check mark if the registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act.  Yes  þ    No  o

Indicate by check mark if the registrant is not required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or Section 15(d) of the Act.  Yes  o    No  þ

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days.  Yes  þ    No  o

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has submitted electronically and posted on its corporate Website, if any, every Interactive Data File required to be submitted and posted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to submit and post such files).  Yes  þ    No  o

Indicate by a check mark if disclosure of delinquent filers pursuant to Item 405 of Regulation S-K (§229.405 of this chapter) is not contained herein, and will not be contained, to the best of registrant’s knowledge, in definitive proxy or information statements incorporated by reference in Part III of this Form 10-K or any amendment to this Form 10-K.  o

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, or a smaller reporting company. See the definitions of “large accelerated filer,” “accelerated filer” and “smaller reporting company” in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act.

 

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a shell company (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act).  Yes  o    No  þ

The aggregate market value of voting stock held by non-affiliates of the registrant, as of October 30, 2015, the last business day of the registrant’s most recently completed second fiscal quarter, was $5,131,692,964 (based on the closing price for shares of the registrant’s common stock as reported by the NASDAQ Global Select Market on that date). Shares of common stock held by each executive officer, director, and holder of 5% or more of the outstanding common stock have been excluded in that such persons may be deemed to be affiliates. This determination of possible affiliate status is not a conclusive determination for other purposes.

On June 10, 2016, 280,080,152 shares of the registrant’s common stock, $0.001 par value, were outstanding.

DOCUMENTS INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE

The information called for by Part III of this Form 10-K is hereby incorporated by reference from the definitive Proxy Statement for our annual meeting of stockholders, which will be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission not later than 120 days after April 29, 2016.

 

 

 

 

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

 

 

 

 

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Cautionary Note on Forward-Looking Statements

 

This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the Exchange Act). Forward-looking statements are all statements (and their underlying assumptions) included in this document that refer, directly or indirectly, to future events or outcomes and, as such, are inherently not factual, but rather reflect only our current projections for the future. Consequently, forward-looking statements usually include words such as “estimate,” “intend,” “plan,” “predict,” “seek,” “may,” “will,” “should,” “would,” “could,” “anticipate,” “expect,” “believe,” or similar words, in each case, intended to refer to future events or circumstances. A non-comprehensive list of the topics including forward-looking statements in this document includes:

All forward-looking statements included in this document are inherently uncertain as they are based on management’s current expectations and assumptions concerning future events, and are subject to numerous known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Therefore, actual events and results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described herein include, but are not limited to:

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Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this document and are based upon information available to us at this time. These statements are not guarantees of future performance. Except as required by law, we disclaim any obligation to update information in any forward-looking statement. Actual results could vary from our forward-looking statements due to the foregoing factors as well as other important factors.

 

 

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PART I

Item 1.  Business

 

Overview

NetApp^®, Inc. (NetApp, we or us) provides software, systems and services to manage and store customer data. We enable enterprises, service providers, governmental organizations, and partners to envision, deploy and evolve their IT environments. Customers benefit from our collaboration with other technology leaders to create the specific solutions they need. We were incorporated in 1992 and created the world’s first networked storage appliance. Today, we offer a portfolio of products and services that satisfy a broad range of customer workloads across different data types and deployment models.

Customer Needs

Customers continue to seek IT solutions that help to improve efficiency, lower risk and position them to respond quickly to growth opportunities. In an increasingly mobile, social and digitally connected world, they also need access to real-time insights and have the ability to personalize the experiences they deliver to their own customers. NetApp provides guidance and innovation to help its customers achieve the right balance of flexibility, cost and data control.

Chief Information Officers are embarking on IT transformations to improve the efficiency of their businesses and better serve their customers. Cloud computing has emerged as a way to more effectively meet rapidly changing business needs. Customers want to seamlessly integrate public cloud resources as an extension of their internal IT environment, an approach known as hybrid cloud. One of the biggest challenges to this vision is data management. While other parts of the IT infrastructure are largely interchangeable and carry no history, once data is created it needs to be protected and managed for its lifetime. As data grows, data and application mobility consume more time and bandwidth. The net result is that data management, NetApp's core competency, has become essential to realizing the promise of the hybrid cloud.

Data management on the hybrid cloud today is essentially a series of isolated siloes. IT organizations need to harmonize the management of data across all cloud providers, as well as on premises. This is what we call the Data Fabric. Our Data Fabric strategy defines the NetApp technology architecture for hybrid cloud. Today, we offer solutions that help customers seamlessly manage their data across their diverse IT resources, spanning flash, disk, and cloud. Customers have the flexibility to choose the right set of resources to meet the needs of their applications and the freedom to change them whenever they want. Customers are entirely in control of their data, regardless of the cloud that it sits on and regardless of the landscape in which it is deployed.

At the same time that customers are navigating through their IT transformations, which leverage modern architectures and hybrid cloud environments, they are also reducing IT budgets, looking for simpler solutions, and rethinking how they consume IT. This evaluation is diverting spending towards transformational projects and architectures like flash, hybrid cloud, converged infrastructure, and software defined storage. It is in these areas that our Data Fabric strategy gives us an advantage.

Flash. Flash plays a key role in customers’ IT transformation efforts as they seek to gain advantage through greater speed, responsiveness, and value from key business applications, while substantially lowering total cost of ownership. All-flash array technology is becoming the de facto technology for primary application workloads as customers look to realize performance and economic benefits by replacing hard disk installations with flash. With a highly differentiated and complete portfolio of all-flash array offerings, NetApp is well positioned to enable customers to accomplish this transition.

Hybrid Cloud. NetApp believes that the hybrid cloud will become the dominant model for enterprise IT for years to come. Customers are attracted by the speed and scale benefits of the public cloud but need new data management capabilities to keep control of data as it moves beyond the walls of the enterprise. Our Data Fabric strategy enables data management that seamlessly connects disparate clouds and data centers. We enable our customers to manage, secure, and protect their data across flash, disk, and public and private cloud resources, all at the scale needed to accommodate the exponential data growth of the digital world.

Converged Infrastructure. Due to budget constraints and skill imbalances, our customers need greater support from their technology partners to evaluate, integrate, deploy and sustain the sophisticated solutions they need to stay competitive. This trend is driving the demand for converged infrastructure solutions that reduce the time of deployment and lower integration risk. NetApp offers compelling business value through our FlexPod^® converged solutions, which reduce risks in ways that cannot be matched by the proprietary stacks offered by server vendors. FlexPod offerings, created in partnership with Cisco, provide a broad range of reference architectures.

Software-defined Storage: As customers replace their traditional storage architectures and transform their data centers, they want scale-out and software-defined storage functionality to both manage data growth efficiently and deliver service provider-like flexibility. Clustered Data ONTAP provides this through a highly efficient, multi-tenant, non-stop shared storage infrastructure to replace legacy, stovepipe architectures for enterprise applications like database, virtualization, VDI, and e-commerce. As customers plan their hybrid cloud architectures, the software defined architecture of clustered ONTAP provides a consistent way to manage data across public and private clouds, regardless of underlying hardware.

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Product, Services and Solutions Portfolio

Our data management and storage offerings help improve business productivity, performance and profitability, while providing investment protection and enhanced asset utilization. We complement our enterprise-class storage solutions with services expertise that maximizes the business benefits our customers gain from deploying our products. In fiscal 2016, we focused on our Data Fabric strategy and the strategic solutions that form the foundation of how we enable customer success in the data-powered digital era.

All Flash Arrays

All Flash FAS

In June 2015, NetApp introduced a new all-flash series, the All Flash FAS, which is the only all-flash system to support seamless data management across flash, disk and cloud resources. This capability makes these systems ideal for customers who want to boost performance in their traditional data centers while mapping out their move to a hybrid cloud model. Built on years of flash innovation and experience, the NetApp All Flash FAS 8000 (AFF) series delivers high I/O at consistent low latency without compromising on core enterprise requirements, such as robust data management, efficient data protection, and flexibility to respond to changing customer needs. These systems are ideal for database, VDI and server virtualization applications.

The AFF series incorporates FlashEssentials software optimizations, which increase flash performance and efficiency. FlashEssentials is included in the ONTAP operating system, which underpins the Data Fabric, AFF models can be ordered as standalone systems and in FlexPod as a converged infrastructure validated designs. Professional services, delivered by NetApp or its partners, help users identify those workloads that are best served by all-flash systems.

Since its introduction, the AFF array line has become one of the fastest growing products in NetApp’s history. We announced a smaller footprint AFF model in September 2015. New software efficiency technology and higher capacity drives for the AFF line were announced in November 2015, making it possible for customers to get the performance of flash at the price of disk.

EF-Series

The NetApp EF560 all-flash array targets applications that demand extremely high levels of performance, reliability, and availability. These systems allow customers to improve the user experience for customer-facing and decision-support systems and reduce their power, footprint and cooling requirements by 95% versus disk-based arrays.

Requiring just 2 units of rack space, the EF560 all-flash array combines extreme IOPS, microsecond response times, and up to 12GBps of bandwidth. Its enterprise-proven availability features include redundant components with automated failover, intuitive storage management with comprehensive tuning functions, and advanced monitoring and diagnostics with proactive repair. Customers can initiate NetApp Snapshot® copies and remote replication for subsecond backup and long-distance recovery.

NetApp SANtricity Plug-Ins for Microsoft, Oracle, Splunk, and VMware provide a consolidated view of the NetApp EF-Series systems, enabling users to monitor and manage their NetApp EF-Series storage from the application. Having such an integrated tool reduces the total cost of ownership by eliminating the need to manually compile critical information from several different tools.

SolidFire

In February 2016, NetApp completed the acquisition of all-flash startup company SolidFire, Inc., which when combined with our existing all-flash offerings, allows us to offer the industry’s broadest portfolio of all-flash solutions. SolidFire systems target a new class of customer who is masterminding the next-generation data center and wants cloud-like capabilities from their on-premises storage for greater flexibility. These users place a priority on the ability to scale simply and seamlessly.

The SolidFire all-flash platform solves the challenges of resource allocation, simplified management, and application predictability at scale. The platform includes SolidFire SF Series hardware and Element OS software, which combine to enable flexible, independent scaling of both capacity and performance so customers can guarantee performance to thousands of applications on one shared storage system.

With SolidFire systems, customers realize the agility, efficiency, and scalability benefits demonstrated from cloud computing in an on-premises system that is highly available and easy to control. They can reduce cost and complexity by safely consolidating mission-critical applications onto a single storage platform. Deep infrastructure integration contributes to greater productivity, while deep automation capabilities enable dynamic, rapid allocation and tear down of storage resources for on-demand provisioning.

Hybrid Arrays

NetApp hybrid flash storage serves customers who want the option to deploy the speed of flash storage where they need it while using more affordable hard disk drives (HDDs) to address capacity requirements. NetApp hybrid arrays include the FAS series of unified storage systems and the E-Series of block storage offerings.

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Converged Infrastructure

Backed by one of the most successful alliances in the industry, FlexPod over the past five years has become the converged infrastructure of choice for many of the largest enterprises around the globe. FlexPod is a portfolio of pre-validated, integrated infrastructure solutions that combine the Cisco Unified Computing System integrated infrastructure and NetApp storage components. Today, customers and partners can choose from more than 100 validated application and infrastructure designs. These solutions are designed and validated to reduce deployment time, project risk, and the cost of IT. The FlexPod portfolio includes FlexPod Datacenter for core enterprise data centers and service providers, FlexPod Express for medium-sized businesses and branch offices, and FlexPod Select for data-intensive workloads. The portfolio is validated with leading hypervisors, operating systems, systems management tools, and cloud management platforms.

Data Management Software

Data ONTAP Storage Operating System

NetApp’s Data ONTAP operating system software is the back bone to building a shared storage infrastructure and Data Fabric for the full breadth of business applications, data storage and protection requirements. NetApp introduced unified storage more than a decade ago with the industry's first unified SAN and NAS scale-out storage software. Today, customers use NetApp clustered Data ONTAP storage operating system as the foundation for data management across flash, disk and cloud storage resources. Customers can maintain control of their data across the hybrid cloud through consistent processes, features, and data management tools, regardless of where their data resides.

In June 2015, NetApp added to the capabilities of clustered Data ONTAP with FlashEssentials, a set of integrated technologies that increase flash performance and efficiency. This includes a flash-optimized read data path, inline compression, and zero-based inline deduplication. In November 2015, new inline deduplication capabilities were announced that extend the life of flash media, especially for customers with VDI workloads. In storage test scenarios, NetApp has demonstrated the ability to reduce capacity requirements by as much as 30:1, enabling customers to transition to flash using less storage and driving down overall cost. This update also included the Copy-free Transition capability, which allows customers to shift from earlier versions of Data ONTAP to clustered Data ONTAP with in-place data conversion.

In early fiscal 2017, we expect to launch the latest release of ONTAP software, which will be called NetApp ONTAP 9. It will simplify customers’ IT transformations to modern data centers and hybrid cloud environments. Customers can choose the architecture of their choice, (engineered systems, software-defined storage, or cloud,) all with industry-leading efficiency, performance, and density for flash environments; rapid and simplified deployment; and greater data protection and security. With this release, we also expect to change the naming framework for our Data ONTAP operating system to a single family name for the product (ONTAP). The ONTAP 9 product, which will run on AFF and FAS systems, will replace what was formerly called clustered Data ONTAP. ONTAP Cloud for AWS will be the new name for Cloud ONTAP. In addition, we expect to introduce NetApp ONTAP Select, a software-defined deployment of ONTAP that will run on commodity servers.

SANtricity Storage Operating System

The NetApp SANtricity operating system provides superior performance, reliability, and data protection for application-driven workloads that run on NetApp EF-Series and E-Series platforms. It allows customers to optimize performance on the fly, with adaptive caching algorithms to achieve high IOPS and throughput. Installed on a million systems worldwide, the SANtricity OS is field-proven. In addition, SANtricity Storage Manager offers a powerful, easy-to-use interface for administering E-Series storage systems. With SANtricity software, storage administrators can achieve maximum performance and utilization of storage through extensive configuration flexibility and custom performance tuning. The newest release of the SANtricity OS, announced in April 2016, is optimized for the new generations of data analytics applications.

SolidFire Element Operating System

The NetApp SolidFire Element OS is at the core of every SolidFire infrastructure and is optimized for the key storage requirements of a next-generation data center. Scale-out functionality enables seamless and granular growth to meet business demands by adding capacity and performance for each new business. Customers have complete control of utilization performance to optimize their infrastructure by managing performance independent of capacity. With automated management, IT organizations can respond to business demands rapidly with on-the-fly adjustments. Helix data protection provides assurance for workload and data consolidation. Always on deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning maximize total cost of ownership by driving down requirements for storage space and power costs.

Object Storage Software

NetApp StorageGRID^® Webscale software allows organizations to store and manage massive amounts of data worldwide, on premises and in the cloud. StorageGRID Webscale is a purpose-built, patented, software-defined storage solution for large archives, media repositories, and web data stores. The sophisticated StorageGRID Webscale policy engine provides automated data placement

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across storage tiers, physical sites, and hybrid clouds. It can be tuned according to customers’ performance and availability requirements and optimized for cost as data ages. Real-time auditing provides continuous and active monitoring for service-level agreement verification and reporting. NetApp enables support for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) as a storage tier to StorageGRID Webscale, providing a scalable, highly durable object storage solution for long-term archives.

Backup and Data Protection Solutions

NetApp offers a range of products to protect customers’ valuable data and applications. These provide optimal availability and IT efficiency while safeguarding data assets.

AltaVault^® Cloud-integrated Solutions

In May 2015, NetApp introduced AltaVault, previously SteelStore, cloud-integrated storage solutions and services, which provide customers with the ability to quickly backup data to any cloud at up to 90 percent less cost than on-premises solutions. AltaVault can send data with ease to NetApp StorageGRID Webscale object storage software and most public and private object stores, providing durable, cost-effective, private cloud archives at web scale. In October 2015, NetApp was one of the first partners to announce support for Amazon S3 storage through integration with AltaVault. This gives customers an affordable option for cloud storage that can be quickly accessed.

With AltaVault, customers have the power to tap into cloud economics while preserving investments in existing backup infrastructure and meeting their backup and recovery service levels. AltaVault is offered in three deployment models to meet customer needs. AltaVault physical appliances are often deployed in the data center to protect large volumes of data. These datasets typically require the highest levels of performance and scalability available. AltaVault virtual appliances, with support for VMware and Hyper-V, are an ideal solution for medium-sized businesses that want to get started with cloud backup or for enterprises that want to protect branch offices and remote offices with the same level of protection they enjoy in the data center. AltaVault cloud-based appliances on AWS and Azure are designed to offer an efficient and secure approach to backing up cloud-based workloads. Companies without a secondary data center or those looking for a low-cost tertiary recovery site also can use them for disaster recovery purposes.

NetApp Integrated Data Protection (IDP) Solutions

NetApp Integrated Data Protection (IDP) Solutions, embedded within the ONTAP operating system, ensure customer data is available when and where it’s needed. Customers can scale their NetApp data protection capabilities across applications, virtual infrastructures, and cloud architectures.

With IDP, customers lower their cost by purchasing and maintaining fewer systems for data protection. They benefit from controlled data access with secure multi-tenancy and military-grade (AES-256) encryption and proven key-management solutions.

In November 2015, NetApp announced SnapCenter software, a new offering that helps enterprises simplify management of application-specific data protection at scale. Enabling efficient copies is a key element of data protection in the hybrid cloud, spanning backup, restore and disaster recovery of primary data. The new software allows customers to consolidate and centralize the backup and cloning of multiple applications and multiple servers into one efficient operations center. In March 2016, we added incremental improvements to support not only SQL applications, but also Oracle Database on Linux.

Business Continuity and High-Availability Solutions include:

·SnapMirror^® data replication technology which provides disaster recovery protection and simplifies the management of data replication. SnapMirror for SVM adds the functionality to replicate NetApp Storage Virtual Machines (SVM), enabling customers to establish consistent replication policies for all volumes within an SVM.

·MetroCluster™ continuous-availability and disaster recovery software which delivers zero data loss, transparent failover protection, and nondisruptive upgrades at distances up to up to 300km.

Disk-to-Disk Backup and Recovery Solutions include:

·SnapVault^® software which speeds and simplifies backup and data recovery, protecting data at the block level.

·SnapRestore^® data recovery software which uses stored Data ONTAP Snapshot copies to recover anything from a single file to multi-terabyte volumes, in seconds.

Application-Aware Backup and Recovery Solutions for Application and Backup Administrators include:

·The SnapManager^® and SnapDrive management software family which streamlines storage management and simplifies configuration, backup, and restore operations with deep application integration.

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Compliance includes:

·SnapLock^® compliance software which is a flexible data permanence solution for meeting strict data retention regulations or internal IT governance policies.

OnCommand^® Management Software and Management Integration Tools

The NetApp OnCommand storage management software portfolio incorporates a broad range of data management tools for NetApp and multivendor storage. These products help our customers’ transition to the hybrid cloud. They improve visibility and allow customers to manage, monitor, and optimize their hybrid cloud environments. The portfolio includes:

·OnCommand Cloud Manager which provides a simplified management interface for NetApp Cloud ONTAP service and NetApp Private Storage (NPS) for Cloud solutions. It allows customers to manage and track cloud resources within AWS, and provision and monitor Cloud ONTAP instances from one central console, including establishing replication relationships.

·OnCommand Workflow Automation which improves productivity by automating repeatable manual storage-management processes. It enables users to construct, customize, publish, and activate a broad range of storage workflows, including one-click automation and deployment of applications from VMware^®, Oracle^®, Microsoft^®, SAP^®, Citrix and others. It lowers the cost of storage management while fostering the use of best practices.

·OnCommand Unified Manager which provides a single dashboard to confirm the health of clustered Data ONTAP storage availability, capacity, performance and data protection relationships. It integrates with OnCommand Workflow Automation to automate storage tasks and data protection processes.

·OnCommand System Manager, developed for midsize organizations or smaller environments within larger enterprises and service providers, which delivers device-level management for NetApp AFF, FAS and other ONTAP based storage systems. It is optimized for IT generalists who need streamlined management, an easy-to-use interface, and best-practice workflows.

·OnCommand Insight storage resource management which provides end-to-end multivendor storage management, with a view of performance metrics, including application, datastore, virtual machine, and storage infrastructure performance. It enables customers to improve capacity planning, accelerate consolidation projects, and meet internal business reporting expectations. This innovative tool also allows users to discover orphaned and underutilized storage and detect risks to their environments.

FlexArray^® Storage Virtualization Software

FlexArray software enables FAS8000 systems to virtualize existing EMC, HP, Hitachi, and NetApp E-Series arrays to unify and streamline IT operations. It helps customers implement a software-defined storage strategy across heterogeneous storage assets by accelerating provisioning and data management. Customers can transform existing arrays to create storage that spans private, public, and hybrid clouds. It reduces capacity requirements on arrays by more than 35% and increases the usefulness of current storage.

NetApp Private Storage (NPS) for Cloud

NetApp Private Storage for Cloud is a family of enterprise storage solutions that lets customers use multiple industry-leading clouds and maintain complete control over their data on dedicated storage systems from NetApp. In this approach, customer data resides on NetApp storage “next to”, rather than “in”, the cloud provider’s environment. The customer-owned NetApp system is co-located in data centers managed by our partner, Equinix, which has data centers located next to major networks and in close proximity to major cloud providers including AWS, Microsoft Azure and IBM SoftLayer.

NPS for Cloud eliminates time-consuming, costly data migrations. Customers can turn off connectivity to one cloud and connect to another in minutes, without having to move their data.

OpenStack^® Contributions

NetApp is a Gold Member of the OpenStack Foundation, a global collaboration which supports the creation of an open-source cloud operating system. OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing a ubiquitous open-source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds.

Cloud services based on OpenStack software, in particular those for enterprise applications, require a robust storage infrastructure that is available, efficient, and protected. NetApp storage integration with OpenStack makes deployment of cloud services simpler, faster, and more scalable. NetApp drivers for OpenStack reduce the integration burden for IT departments deploying cloud services and enable high-value services and tight service-level agreements.

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Professional and Support Services

NetApp and our ecosystem of partners deliver a full portfolio of professional and technical services that enable customers to achieve greater business value from NetApp products and solution investments.

Our professional services team and certified services partners have the expertise to assist customers with each phase of their IT lifecycle, from planning next-generation storage systems and deploying new technology to optimizing the operational efficiency of existing infrastructures.

Technical support services ensure our products operate efficiently and benefit from the most up-to-date software to help customers minimize downtime for systems running business-critical applications. Our services organization also provides in-depth guidance and education that include extensive access to our global technical resources and intellectual property. Customers can choose from a number of support options including direct touch, web-based My AutoSupport^® service, training on our product and solutions and an active online community of customers.

NetApp utilizes a global, integrated model to provide consistent service delivery and global support during every phase of the customer engagement, including strategy, assessment and analysis, planning and design, installation, implementation, integration, optimization, ongoing support, and remote management and monitoring.

Sales, Principal Markets, and Distribution Channels

We market and sell our products in numerous countries throughout the world. To increase visibility of NetApp in the broader IT segment, we continue to make investments in our multiyear branding and awareness campaigns.

Our diversified customer base spans industry segments and vertical markets such as energy, financial services, government, high technology, internet, life sciences, healthcare services, manufacturing, media, entertainment, animation, video postproduction, and telecommunications. NetApp focuses primarily on the data management and storage markets. We design our products to meet the needs of our broad customer base – from large enterprises to midsize customers.

NetApp uses a multichannel distribution strategy. We sell our products and services to end-user business customers and service providers through a direct sales force and an ecosystem of partners. We work with a wide range of partners for our customers – including technology partners, value-added resellers, system integrators, OEMs, service providers and distributors. During fiscal 2016, sales through our indirect channels represented 77% of our net revenues. Our global partner ecosystem is critical to NetApp’s growth and success. We are continually strengthening existing partnerships and investing in new ones to ensure we are meeting the evolving needs of our customers.

As of April 29, 2016, our worldwide sales and marketing functions consisted of approximately 5,260 managers, sales representatives, and technical support personnel. We have field sales offices in approximately 45 countries. Sales to customers Arrow Electronics, Inc. and Avnet, Inc., which are distributors, accounted for 22% and 19% of our net revenues, respectively, in fiscal 2016. Information about sales to and accounts receivables from our major customers, segment disclosures, foreign operations, and net sales attributable to our geographic regions is included in Note 16 – Segment, Geographic, and Significant Customer Information of the Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements.

Seasonality

We have historically experienced a decline in revenues in the first quarter of our fiscal year, as the sales organization spends time developing new business after higher close rates in the fourth quarter, and because sales to European customers are historically weaker during the summer months. During the second quarter of our fiscal year, we have historically experienced increased sales, driven by the government sector, concurrent with the end of the U.S. federal government’s fiscal year in September, as well as an increase in business from European markets. We derive a majority of our revenue in any given quarter from orders booked in the same quarter. Bookings and revenues typically follow intra-quarter seasonality patterns weighted toward the back end of the quarter.

Backlog

We manufacture products based on a combination of specific order requirements and forecasts of our customers’ demand. Orders are generally placed by customers on an as-needed basis. A substantial portion of our products is sold on the basis of standard purchase orders that are cancellable prior to shipment without penalty. In certain circumstances, purchase orders are subject to change with respect to quantity of product or timing of delivery resulting from changes in customer requirements. Our business is characterized by seasonal and intra-quarter variability in demand, as well as short lead times and product delivery schedules. Accordingly, backlog at any given time might not be a meaningful indicator of future revenue.

 

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Manufacturing and Supply Chain

We have outsourced manufacturing operations to third parties located in Memphis, Tennessee; San Jose, California; Guadalajara, Mexico; San Antonio, Texas; Schiphol Airport, The Netherlands; Komarom and Tiszaujvaros, Hungary; Wuxi and Tianjin, China; Taoyuan City, Taiwan; and Singapore. These operations include materials procurement, commodity management, component engineering, test engineering, manufacturing engineering, product assembly, product assurance, quality control, final test, and global logistics. We rely on a limited number of suppliers for materials, as well as several key subcontractors for the production of certain subassemblies and finished systems. We use multiple vendors and have our products manufactured in a number of locations wherever possible to mitigate our supply chain risk. Our strategy has been to develop close relationships with our suppliers, maximizing the exchange of critical information and facilitating implementation of joint quality programs. We use contract manufacturers for the production of major subassemblies and final system configuration. This manufacturing strategy minimizes capital investments and overhead expenditures while creating flexibility for rapid expansion.

We were recently recertified to International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001:2008 and ISO 14001:2004 certifications on October 8, 2015, and continue to be ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 certified.

Research and Development

We conduct research and development activities in various locations throughout the world. Total research and development expenses were $861 million, $920 million and $918 million in fiscal 2016, 2015 and 2014, respectively. These costs consist primarily of personnel and related costs incurred to conduct product development activities. Although we develop many of our products internally, we may acquire technology through business combinations or through licensing from third parties when appropriate. We believe that technical leadership is essential to our success, and we expect to continue to commit substantial resources to research and development.

 

Competition

We compete with many companies in the markets we serve, including established public companies, newly public companies with a strong flash focus, and new market entrants addressing the growing opportunity for hyperconverged systems. Some offer a broad spectrum of IT products and services (full-stack vendors) and others offer a more limited set of storage and data management products or services.

Technology trends, such as the emergence of hosted (or cloud) storage, software as a service (SaaS) and flash storage are driving significant changes in storage architectures and solution requirements. Cloud service providers, led by AWS, provide customers storage as an operating expense, rather than storage systems capital expenditure, for the customers’ data centers, which competes with more traditional storage offerings. While the short- and long-term impact of these evolving trends cannot be predicted, NetApp is confident that our customers recognize the value in our cloud strategy. Our strategy includes building relationships with these new classes of providers, and to date, we have established relationships with more than 300 cloud service providers and hyperscaler providers, including AWS, Google, IBM SoftLayer and Microsoft Azure.

The competitive storage landscape was further disrupted in 2015 by the October 2015 announcement that privately held Dell Inc. planned to acquire publicly traded EMC Corporation, one of our primary competitors. As of this filing, that transaction is still pending regulatory and shareholder approvals. Also in October 2015, HP split its business into two entities, one of which, HP Enterprise, continues to focus on the storage marketplace and compete with NetApp. Another competitor, Pure Storage, went public in October 2015.

In addition to the competitors above, we compete against HDS, IBM, Kaminario, Nimble Storage, Nimbus Data, Tegile, Tintri and Violin Memory. In the OEM market we compete against many of those same companies, as well as Seagate. Our current and potential competitors may establish cooperative relationships among themselves or with third parties, including some of our partners. It is possible that new competitors or alliances among competitors might emerge and rapidly acquire significant market share.

We consider innovation and our technology partnerships key to our competitive differentiation. We believe our competitive advantage also includes the nature of the relationships we form with our customers and partners worldwide. We strive to deliver an outstanding experience in every interaction we have with our customers and partners through our product, service, and support offerings, which enable us to provide our customers with a full range of expertise before, during, and after their purchase.

Proprietary Rights

Over the years, NetApp has been widely recognized for its innovation including recognition as one of the “World’s Most Innovative Companies” (Forbes^®), a top 300 United States patent holder (Intellectual Property Owners Association) and one of the best “Quality Over Quantity” patent portfolios in its industry (IEEE Spectrum^®). We generally rely on patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret and contract laws to establish and maintain our proprietary rights in our technology and products. While our intellectual property rights are important to our success, we believe that our business as a whole is not materially dependent on any particular patent, trademark, copyright, license or other intellectual property right. We have been granted or own by assignment

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over 1,900 patents issued by, and have over 680 patent applications pending with, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, as well as a corresponding number of international patents and patent applications. While the durations of our patents vary, we believe that the durations of our patents are adequate relative to the expected lives of our products.

NetApp, the NetApp logo, Active IQ, AltaVault, ASUP, AutoSupport, Campaign Express, Cloud ONTAP, clustered Data ONTAP, Customer Fitness, Data ONTAP, DataMotion, Element, Fitness, Flash Accel, Flash Cache, Flash Pool, FlashRay, FlexArray, FlexCache, FlexClone, FlexPod, FlexScale, FlexShare, FlexVol, FPolicy, Fueled by SolidFire, GetSuccessful, Go Further, Faster, LockVault, Manage ONTAP, Mars, MetroCluster, MultiStore, NetApp Insight, OnCommand, ONTAP, ONTAPI, RAID DP, RAID-TEC. SANtricity, SecureShare, Simplicity, Simulate ONTAP, SnapCenter, Snap Creator, SnapCopy, SnapDrive, SnapIntegrator, SnapLock, SnapManager, SnapMirror, SnapMover, SnapProtect, SnapRestore, Snapshot, SnapValidator, SnapVault, SolidFire, SolidFire Helix, Helix Design, StorageGRID, Tech OnTap, Unbound Cloud, WAFL and other names are trademarks or registered trademarks of NetApp Inc., in the United States and/or other countries.

We generally enter into confidentiality agreements with our employees, resellers, customers, and suppliers. In addition, through various licensing arrangements, we receive certain rights to intellectual property of others. We expect to maintain current licensing arrangements and to secure licensing arrangements in the future, as needed and to the extent available on reasonable terms and conditions, to support continued development and sales of our products and services. Some of these licensing arrangements require or might require royalty payments and other licensing fees. The amount of these payments and fees might depend on various factors, including but not limited to the structure of royalty payments; offsetting considerations, if any; and the degree of use of the licensed technology.

The industry in which we compete is characterized by rapidly changing technology, a large number of patents, and frequent claims and related litigation regarding intellectual property rights, and we may be exposed to various risks related to such claims or legal proceedings. If we are unable to protect our intellectual property, we might be subject to increased competition that could materially and adversely affect our operating results.

 

Environmental Disclosure

We are committed to the success of our customers and partners, to delivering value to our stockholders, and to positively affecting the communities where our employees work and live. We firmly believe that we can accomplish these objectives concurrently with our commitment to sustainability. We are committed to the prevention of pollution; efficient use of natural resources; and minimizing, relative to the growth of the company, the environmental impacts from our operations, products, and services, as well as complying with laws and regulations related to these areas. Our environmental management system provides the framework for setting, monitoring, and continuously improving our environmental goals and objectives.

We are voluntarily measuring, monitoring, and publicly reporting our scope 1 and scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions and participate in the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). The CDP is a global standardized mechanism by which companies report their greenhouse gas emissions to institutional investors. We have established employee commuter programs and education and awareness campaigns, and we continuously seek to optimize the energy efficiency of our buildings, labs, and data centers. At both the global and regional/state levels, various laws and regulations have been implemented or are under consideration to mitigate the effects of climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Environmental laws are complex, change frequently, and have tended to become more stringent over time. It is often difficult to estimate the future impact of environmental matters. Based on current information, we believe that our primary risk related to climate change is the risk of increased energy costs. We are not subject to a cap and trade system or any other mitigation measures that would be material to our operations in the near future. Additionally, we have implemented disaster recovery and business resiliency measures to mitigate the physical risks our facilities, business, and supply chain might face as a consequence of severe weather-/climate-related phenomena such as earthquakes, floods, droughts, and other such natural occurrences.

We are also subject to other federal, state, and local regulations regarding workplace safety and protection of the environment. Various international, federal, state, and local provisions regulate the use and discharge of certain hazardous materials used in the manufacture of our products. Failure to comply with environmental regulations in the future could cause us to incur substantial costs or subject us to business interruptions. We believe we are substantially compliant with all applicable environmental laws. All of our products meet the requirements of the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH); Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE); Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS); and China RoHS directives. We have maintained an environmental management system since December 2004. As part of ISO 14001 requirements, we set local environmental performance goals such as reducing energy use per square foot and minimizing waste generated on site, that are aligned with our overall corporate strategy. We also conduct an annual review and third-party verified audits of our operations, and we monitor environmental legislation and requirements to help make sure we are taking necessary measures to remain in compliance with applicable laws, not only in our operations but also for our products.

 

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Employees

As of April 29, 2016, we had approximately 12,030 employees, (including approximately 1,110 employees who have been notified that their employment is being terminated as part of our March 2016 restructuring plan) of which 5,260 were in sales and marketing, 1,250 were in customer support, 3,050 were in research and development, 190 were in manufacturing operations and 1,170 were in finance and administration. None of our employees are represented by a labor union and we consider relations with our employees to be good. Competition for technical personnel in the industry in which we compete is intense. We believe that our future success depends in part on our continued ability to hire, assimilate, and retain qualified personnel. To date, we believe that we have been successful in recruiting qualified employees, but there is no assurance that we will continue to be successful in the future.

 

 

Executive Officers

Our executive officers and their ages as of June 1, 2016, are as follows:

 

George Kurian was appointed chief executive officer on June 1, 2015 and president on May 20, 2016. He joined our board of directors in June 2015. From September 2013 to May 2015, he was executive vice president of product operations, overseeing all aspects of technology strategy, product and solutions development across our product portfolio. Mr. Kurian joined NetApp in April 2011 as the senior vice president of the storage solutions group and was appointed to senior vice president of the Data ONTAP group in December 2011. Prior to NetApp, from 2002 to 2011, Mr. Kurian held several positions at Cisco Systems, including most recently vice president and general manager of the application networking and switching technology group. From 1999 to 2002, Mr. Kurian was the vice president of product management and strategy at Akamai Technologies. Prior to that, he was a management consultant with McKinsey and Company, and led software engineering and product management teams at Oracle Corporation. Mr. Kurian holds a BS degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University and an MBA from Stanford University.

Ronald J. Pasek joined NetApp in April 2016 as executive vice president and chief financial officer, overseeing the finance, customer leasing, workplace resources, internal audit, and IT functions. Mr. Pasek served as senior vice president, finance and chief financial officer of Altera Corporation, a worldwide provider of programmable logic devices, from December 2009 until its acquisition by Intel in December 2015. Mr. Pasek was previously employed by Sun Microsystems, where he most recently served as vice president and corporate treasurer. In his 19 years at Sun Microsystems, he also held a variety of other positions in finance, including vice president of worldwide field finance, worldwide manufacturing, and U.S. field finance. Mr. Pasek is the Chairman of the board of directors of Spectra7 Microsystems Inc., a Canadian publicly traded consumer connectivity company. Mr. Pasek holds a BS degree from San Jose State University and an MBA from Santa Clara University.

Henri Richard joined NetApp in May 2016 as executive vice president of worldwide field and customer operations, leading NetApp’s global field and customer success operations, which supports the company’s ecosystem of channel, alliance, and service partners and perform customer-facing functions. Before joining NetApp, from April 2013 to May 2016, he was senior vice president of worldwide sales and support at SanDisk Corporation. Prior to SanDisk, Mr. Richard served as senior vice president of worldwide sales and marketing at Freescale Semiconductor from September 2007 to April 2013. Mr. Richard brings 30-years of experience serving in global executive roles at companies including Seagate, IBM, WebGain and AMD. He started his career in IT with Informatique Haute Performance in Paris, France, a company he founded. Mr. Richard is a member of the board of directors of Ultratech Inc., a publicly traded advance packaging and laser processing company. Henri holds a bachelor of science degree from the Ecole Nationale de Radiotechnique et d’Electronique Appliquee in Asnieres, France.

Joel D. Reich joined NetApp in 2002 and was appointed executive vice president of product operations in June 2015. He is responsible for overseeing the strategy, development and manufacturing operations of the NetApp product and solutions portfolio. From April 2011 to June 2015, Mr. Reich served as NetApp’s senior vice president of the Hyperscale Storage Group. Before that time, he served in various NetApp Data ONTAP engineering leadership roles. Before joining NetApp, Joel was vice president of marketing and product operations for HighGround Systems, Inc. He also held the position of director of product management at Data General Corporation and EMC Corporation and was director of sales and marketing for Conner Peripherals Storage Systems Group. Mr. Reich holds a bachelor’s degree from Lehigh University.

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Matthew K. Fawcett joined the company in September 2010 as senior vice president, general counsel, and secretary. Prior to joining NetApp, from 1999 to August 2010, Mr. Fawcett served in various legal positions at JDS Uniphase Corporation, an optical components company, including as senior vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary. Prior to joining JDSU, Mr. Fawcett was counsel at Fujitsu and worked in private practice at Morrison & Foerster LLP. Mr. Fawcett is a member of the boards of the Association of Corporate Counsel and the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley. Mr. Fawcett holds a BA degree from the University of California at Berkeley and a JD degree from the University of California at Los Angeles.

Additional Information

Our Internet address is www.netapp.com. We make available through our Internet website our annual reports on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K, amendments to those reports and other documents filed or furnished pursuant to the Exchange Act of 1934, as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such materials with, or furnish them to, the SEC.

The SEC maintains an Internet site (www.sec.gov) that contains reports, proxy and information statements, and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC. The public also may read and copy these filings at the SEC’s Public Reference Room at 100 F Street N.E., Washington, DC 20549. Information about this Public Reference Room is available by calling (800) SEC-0330.

 

 

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The following risk factors and other information included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K should be considered and understood in the context of the following risk factors, which describe circumstances that may materially harm our future business, operating results or financial condition. The following discussion reflects our current judgment regarding the most significant risks we face. These risks can and will change in the future.

 

Our business may be harmed by trends in the storage market or if we are unable to keep pace with rapid industry, technological and market changes.

Our industry and the markets in which we compete have historically experienced significant growth due to the increase in the demand for storage solutions by consumers, enterprises and government bodies around the world, and the resultant purchases of storage solutions to address this demand. However, despite continued data growth, the storage market did not experience growth in calendar years 2013, 2014 or 2015 due to a combination of customers delaying purchases in the face of technology transitions, increased storage efficiency, and changing economic and business environments. At the same time that customers are navigating through their IT transformations, which leverage modern architectures and hybrid cloud environments, they are also reducing IT budgets, looking for simpler solutions, and rethinking how they consume IT. This evaluation is diverting spending towards transformational projects and architectures like flash, hybrid cloud, software as a service, converged infrastructure, and software defined storage. Our business may be adversely impacted if we are unable to keep pace with rapid industry, technological or market changes or if our Data Fabric strategy is not accepted in the marketplace. As a result of these and other factors discussed in the report, our revenue may grow at a slower rate than in past periods, or may decline as it did in fiscal years 2014, 2015 and 2016, on a year-over year basis. The future impact of these trends on both short-term and long-term growth patterns is uncertain. If the general historical rate of industry growth declines, if the growth rates of the specific markets in which we compete decline, and/or if the consumption model of storage changes and our new and existing products and solutions do not receive customer acceptance, our business, operating results and financial condition could suffer.

If we are unable to develop, introduce and gain market acceptance for clustered Data ONTAP-based products or other new products while managing the transition from older products, or if we cannot provide the expected level of quality, service and support for our new products, our business, operating results and financial condition could be harmed.

Our future growth depends upon the successful development and introduction of new hardware and software products. Due to the complexity of storage subsystems and appliances and the difficulty in gauging the engineering effort required to produce new products, such products are subject to significant technical and quality control risks.

We are currently devoting considerable effort and resources to introduce and gain customer acceptance for our clustered Data ONTAP (cDOT)-based products, as well as to develop new generations of our ONTAP products. The cDOT storage operating system is the foundation for data management across flash, disk and cloud storage systems and represents a fundamental and revolutionary change to our solution architecture and to our Data Fabric strategy. Over time, our goal is to replace our Data ONTAP 7-Mode technology with cDOT and new generations of ONTAP. We face considerable challenges as we continue to develop and market cDOT, including, without limitation, cost and complexity associated with migrating customer data and applications from legacy systems to cDOT-based systems, developing additional features for cDOT currently available with Data ONTAP 7-Mode and potentially required by our customers, increasing sales of cDOT through our channel and maintaining service, support and customer relationships as we replace Data ONTAP 7-Mode with cDOT.

If we are unable, for technological, customer reluctance or other reasons, to develop, introduce and gain market acceptance for cDOT and other next-generation ONTAP products, or any new products, as and when required by the market and our customers, our business, operating results and financial condition could be materially and adversely affected.

New or additional product introductions, including new software and flash product offerings, such as Cloud ONTAP, StorageGRID Webscale, all flash FAS, AltaVault, and, with our February 2, 2016 acquisition, SolidFire, subject us to additional financial and operational risks, including our ability to forecast customer preferences and/or demand, our ability to expand production capacity to meet the demand for new products, our ability to successfully manage the transition from older products, and our ability to forecast the impact of customers’ demand for new products or the products being replaced. In addition, as new or enhanced products are introduced, we must also avoid excessive levels of older product inventories and related components and ensure that enough supplies of new products can be delivered to meet customers’ demands. Further risks inherent in new product introductions include the uncertainty of price-performance relative to products of competitors, competitors’ responses to the introductions, delays in sales caused by the desire of customers to evaluate new products for extended periods of time and our partners’ investment in selling our new products. If these risks are not managed effectively, we could experience material risks to our operations, financial condition and business model.

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As we enter new or emerging markets, we will likely increase demands on our service and support operations and may be exposed to additional competition. We may not be able to provide products, service and support to effectively compete for these market opportunities.

Our sales and distribution structure makes forecasting revenues difficult and, if disrupted, could harm our operating results.

Our business and sales models make revenues difficult to forecast. We sell to a variety of customers, with a corresponding variety of sales cycles. In addition, the majority of our sales are made and/or fulfilled indirectly through channel partners, including value-added resellers, systems integrators, distributors, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and strategic business partners. During fiscal 2016, revenues generated from sales through our indirect channel accounted for 77% of net revenues. This structure significantly complicates our ability to forecast future revenue, particularly within any particular fiscal quarter or year. Moreover, our relationships with our indirect channel partners are critical to our success. The loss of one or more of our key indirect channel partners in a given geographic area or the failure of our channel partners to promote our products could harm our operating results, as qualifying and developing new indirect channel partners typically require a significant investment of time and resources before acceptable levels of productivity are met. If we fail to maintain our relationships with our indirect channel partners, if their financial condition, business or customer relationships were to weaken, if they fail to comply with legal or regulatory requirements, or if we were to cease to do business with them for these or other reasons, our business, operating results and financial condition could be harmed.

Continuing uncertain economic and political conditions restrict our visibility and may harm our operating results, including our revenue growth and profitability.

The continuing global economic uncertainty and political and fiscal challenges in the United States (U.S.) and abroad have, among other things, limited our ability to forecast future demand for our products, contributed to increased periodic volatility in the computer, storage, and networking industries at large, as well as the information technology (IT) market, and could constrain future access to capital for our suppliers, customers and partners. The impacts of these circumstances are global and pervasive, and the timing and nature of any ultimate resolution of these matters remain highly uncertain. Consequently, we expect these concerns to challenge our business for the foreseeable future, and cause harm to our operating results. Such conditions have resulted, and may in the future again result, in failure to meet our forecasted financial expectations and to achieve historical levels of revenue growth.

Our quarterly operating results may fluctuate materially, which could harm our common stock price.

Our operating results have fluctuated in the past and will continue to do so, sometimes materially. All of the matters discussed in this Risk Factors section could impact our operating results in any fiscal quarter or year. In addition to those matters, we face the following issues, which could impact our quarterly results:

 

·Seasonality, such as our historical seasonal decline in revenues in the first quarter of our fiscal year and seasonal increase in revenues in the second quarter of our fiscal year, with the latter due in part to the impact of the U.S. federal government’s September 30 fiscal year end on the timing of its orders; and

 

·Linearity, such as our historical intra-quarter bookings and revenue pattern in which a disproportionate percentage of each quarter’s total bookings and related revenue occur in the last month of the quarter.

If our operating results fall below our forecasts and the expectations of public market analysts and investors, the trading price of our common stock may decline.

Our gross margins vary.

Our gross margins reflect a variety of factors, including competitive pricing, component and product design, the volume and relative mix of product, software maintenance, hardware maintenance and other services revenues. Increased component costs, increased pricing pressures, the relative and varying rates of increases or decreases in component costs and product prices, changes in product, software maintenance, hardware maintenance and other services revenue mix or decreased volume could harm our revenues, gross margins or earnings. Our gross margins are also impacted by the cost of any materials that are of poor quality and our sales and distribution activities, including, without limitation, pricing actions, rebates, sales initiatives and discount levels, and the timing of service contract renewals.

The costs of third-party components comprise a significant portion of our product costs. While we generally have been able to manage our component and product design costs, we may have difficulty managing these costs if supplies of certain components become limited or component prices increase. Any such limitation could result in an increase in our product costs. An increase in component or design costs relative to our product prices could harm our gross margins and earnings.

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We often incur expenses before we receive related benefits, and expenses may be difficult to reduce quickly if demand declines.

We base our expense levels in part on future revenue expectations and a significant percentage of our expenses is fixed. It is difficult to reduce our fixed costs quickly, and if revenue levels are below our expectations, operating results could be adversely impacted. During periods of uneven growth or decline, we may incur costs before we realize the anticipated related benefits, which could also harm our operating results. We have made, and will continue to make, significant investments in engineering, sales, service and support, marketing and other functions to support and grow our business. We are likely to recognize the costs associated with these investments earlier than some of the related anticipated benefits, such as revenue growth, and the return on these investments may be lower, or may develop more slowly, than we expect, which could harm our business, operating results and financial condition.

Increasing competition and industry consolidation could harm our business and operating results.

The storage and data management markets are intensely competitive and are characterized by rapidly changing technology and fragmentation. We compete with many companies in the markets we serve, including established public companies, newly public companies with a strong flash focus, and new market entrants addressing the growing opportunity for hyperconverged systems. Some offer a broad spectrum of IT products and services (full-stack vendors) and others offer a more limited set of storage and data management products or services. Technology trends, such as the emergence of hosted (or cloud) storage, software as a service (SaaS) and flash storage are driving significant changes in storage architectures and solution requirements. Cloud service providers, led by AWS, provide customers storage as an operating expense, rather than storage systems capital expenditure, for the customers’ data centers, which meets rapidly evolving business needs and has changed the competitive landscape.

Competitors may develop new technologies or products in advance of us or establish business models or technologies disruptive to us. By extending our flash and software-defined storage offerings, we are competing in new segments with both traditional competitors and new competitors, particularly smaller emerging storage vendors. The longer-term potential and competitiveness of these emerging vendors remains to be determined. In cloud and converged infrastructure, we also compete with large well-established competitors.

For additional information regarding our competitors, see the section entitled “Competition” contained in Item 1 – Business of Part I of this Form 10-K. It is possible that new competitors or alliances among competitors might emerge and rapidly acquire significant market share or buying power. An increase in industry consolidation might result in stronger competitors that are better able to compete as full stack vendors for customers and achieve increased economies of scale in the supply chain. For example, in October 2015, Dell Inc. and EMC Corp. announced their agreement to merge. Also in October 2015, Hewlett-Packard Company split its business into two entities, one of which, HP Enterprise, continues to focus on the storage marketplace and compete with us. In addition, current and potential competitors have established or might establish cooperative relationships among themselves or with third parties, including some of our partners or suppliers.

If we are unable to maintain and develop relationships with strategic partners, our revenues may be harmed.

Our growth strategy includes developing and maintaining strategic partnerships with major third-party software and hardware vendors to integrate our products into their products and also co-market our products with them. A number of these strategic partners are industry leaders that offer us expanded access to segments of the storage and data management markets. However, there is intense competition for attractive strategic partners, and these relationships may not be exclusive, may not generate significant revenues and may be terminated on short notice. For instance, some of our partners are also partnering with our competitors, which may increase the availability of competing solutions and harm our ability to grow our relationships with those partners. Moreover, some of our partners, particularly large, more diversified technology companies, are also competitors, complicating our relationships. If we are unable to establish new partnerships or maintain existing partnerships, if our strategic partners favor their relationships with other vendors in the storage industry or if our strategic partners increasingly compete with us, we could experience lower than expected revenues, suffer delays in product development, or experience other harm to our business, operating results and financial condition.

If we do not achieve forecasted bookings in any quarter, our financial results could be harmed.

We derive a majority of our revenues in any given quarter from orders booked in the same quarter. Bookings typically follow intra-quarter seasonality patterns weighted toward the back end of the quarter. If we do not achieve the level, timing and mix of bookings consistent with our quarterly targets and historical patterns, or if we experience cancellations of significant orders, our financial results could be harmed.

A portion of our revenues is generated by large, recurring purchases from various customers, resellers and distributors. A loss, cancellation or delay in purchases by any of these parties has negatively affected us in the past, and in the future could negatively affect our revenues.

A significant portion of our net revenues are generated through sales to a limited number of distributors. We generally do not enter into binding purchase commitments with our customers, resellers and distributors for extended periods of time, and thus we may not be able to continue to receive large, recurring orders from these customers, resellers or distributors. For example, our reseller agreements generally do not require minimum purchases, and our customers, resellers and distributors can stop purchasing and

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marketing our products at any time. In addition, unfavorable economic conditions may negatively impact the solvency of our customers, resellers and distributors or the ability of such customers, resellers and distributors to obtain credit to finance purchases of our products. If any of our key customers, resellers or distributors changes its pricing practices, reduces the size or frequency of its orders for our products, or stops purchasing our products altogether, our operating results and financial condition could be materially adversely impacted.

We rely on a limited number of suppliers for critical product components.

We rely on a limited number of suppliers for drives and other components utilized in the assembly of our products, including certain single source suppliers, which has subjected us, and could in the future subject us to price rigidity, periodic supply constraints, and the inability to produce our products with the quality and in the quantities demanded. Consolidation among suppliers, particularly within the semiconductor and disk drive industries, has contributed to price rigidity and may in the future create supply constraints. When industry supply is constrained, our suppliers may allocate volumes away from us and to our competitors, all of which rely on many of the same suppliers as we do. Accordingly, our operating results may be harmed.

Any disruption to our supply chain could materially harm our business, operating results and financial condition.

We do not manufacture our products or their components. Instead, we rely on third parties to make our products and critical components, such as disk drives, as well as for associated logistics. Our lack of direct responsibility for, and control over, these elements of our business, as well as the diverse international geographic locations of our manufacturing partners and suppliers, creates significant risks for us, including, among other things:

 

·Limited ability to control the quality, quantity and cost of our products or of their components;

 

·The potential for binding price or purchase commitments with our suppliers that are higher than market rates;

 

·Limited ability to adjust production volumes in response to our customers’ demand fluctuations;

 

·Labor and political unrest at facilities we do not operate or own;

 

·Geopolitical disputes disrupting our supply chain;

 

 

Such risks have in the past and could again in the future subject us to supply constraints, price increases and minimum purchase requirements and our business, operating results and financial condition could be harmed. The risks associated with our out-sourced manufacturing model are particularly acute when we transition products to new facilities or manufacturers, introduce and increase volumes of new products or qualify new contract manufacturers or suppliers, at which times our ability to manage the relationships among us, our manufacturing partners and our component suppliers, becomes critical. New manufacturers, products, components or facilities create increased costs and risk that we will fail to deliver high quality products in the required volumes to our customers. Any failure of a manufacturer or component supplier to meet our quality, quantity or delivery requirements in a cost-effective manner will harm our business, operating results and customer relationships.

Due to the global nature of our business, risks inherent in our international operations could materially harm our business.

A significant portion of our operations are located, and a significant portion of our revenues are derived, outside of the U.S. In addition, a substantial portion of our products are manufactured outside of the U.S., and we have research and development and service centers overseas. Accordingly, our business and our future operating results could be adversely affected by factors affecting our international operations, but not experienced in the U.S., including, among other things, local political or economic conditions, trade protection and export and import requirements, local labor conditions, transportation costs, government spending patterns, acts of terrorism, international conflicts and natural disasters in areas with limited infrastructure. In addition, due to the global nature of our business, we are subject to complex legal and regulatory requirements in the U.S. and the foreign jurisdictions in which we operate and sell our products, including antitrust and anti-competition laws, rules and regulations, and regulations related to data privacy. We are also subject to the potential loss of proprietary information due to piracy, misappropriation, or laws that may be less protective of our intellectual property rights than U.S. laws. Such factors could have an adverse impact on our business, operating results and financial condition.

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We face exposure to adverse movements in foreign currency exchange rates as a result of our international operations. These exposures may change over time as business practices evolve, and they could have a material adverse impact on our financial results and cash flows. We utilize forward and option contracts in an attempt to reduce the adverse earnings impact from the effect of exchange rate fluctuations on certain assets and liabilities as well as certain anticipated foreign currency cash flows on a short-term basis. Our hedging strategies may not be successful, and currency exchange rate fluctuations could have a material adverse effect on our operating results. In addition, our foreign currency exposure on assets and liabilities for which we do not hedge could have a material impact on our operating results in periods when the U.S. dollar significantly fluctuates in relation to unhedged non-U.S. currencies in which we transact business.

Additional risks inherent in our international business activities generally include, among others, longer accounts receivable payment cycles and difficulties in managing international operations.

Moreover, in many foreign countries, particularly in those with developing economies, it is common to engage in business practices that are prohibited by our internal policies and procedures, or U.S. laws and regulations applicable to us, such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. There can be no assurance that all of our employees, contractors and agents, as well as those companies to which we outsource certain of our business operations, will comply with these policies, procedures, laws and/or regulations. Any such violation could subject us to fines and other penalties, which could have a material adverse effect on our business, operating results and financial condition.

Changes in our effective tax rate resulting from adverse outcomes from examination of our income tax returns and/or changes in the tax regimes and related government policies and regulations in the countries in which we operate could adversely affect our results.

Our effective tax rate is influenced by a variety of factors, many of which are outside of our control. These factors include among other things, fluctuations in our earnings and financial results in the various countries and states in which we do business, the outcome of income tax audits and changes to the tax laws in such jurisdictions. Any of these factors could materially impact our operating results.

We receive significant tax benefits from sales to our non-U.S. customers. These benefits are contingent upon existing tax laws and regulations in the U.S. and in the countries in which our international operations are located. Future changes in domestic or international tax laws and regulations could adversely affect our ability to continue to realize these tax benefits. We have not provided for U.S. federal and state income taxes or foreign withholding taxes that may result from future remittances of undistributed earnings of foreign subsidiaries. President Obama and the U.S. Congress have called for comprehensive tax reform which, among other things, might change certain U.S. tax rules impacting the way U.S. based multinationals are taxed on foreign income. Additionally, on October 5, 2015, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an international association of 34 countries, including the U.S., released the final reports from its Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) Action Plans. The BEPS recommendations covered a number of issues, including country-by-country reporting, permanent establishment rules, transfer pricing rules and tax treaties. On October 21, 2015, the European Commission (EC) concluded its investigations into tax ruling practices of certain European Union (EU) member countries. The EC concluded that certain member countries had granted unlawful rulings that artificially reduced tax burdens and has ordered the recovery of the unpaid taxes. Future tax reform resulting from these developments may result in changes to long-standing tax principles, which could adversely affect our effective tax rate or result in higher cash tax liabilities.

We are routinely subject to income tax audits in the U.S. and several foreign tax jurisdictions. The U.S. and foreign tax authorities have questioned our intercompany transfer pricing arrangements during these audits. In recent years, several other U.S. companies have had their transfer pricing arrangements challenged as part of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) examinations, which have resulted in material proposed assessments and/or litigation with respect to those companies. If the ultimate determination of income taxes or at-source withholding taxes assessed under the IRS audits or audits being conducted in any other tax jurisdiction results in an amount in excess of the tax provision we have recorded or reserved for, our operating results, cash flows and financial condition would be adversely affected.

Our effective tax rate could also be adversely affected by different and evolving interpretations of existing law or regulations, which in turn would negatively impact our operating and financial results as a whole. Additionally, our effective tax rate could also be adversely affected if there is a change in international operations, our tax structure and how our operations are managed and structured, and as a result, we could experience harm to our operating results and financial condition.

Our success depends upon our ability to effectively plan and manage our resources and restructure our business in response to changing market conditions and market demand for our products, and such actions may have an adverse effect on our financial and operating results.

Our ability to successfully offer our products and services in a rapidly evolving market requires an effective planning, forecasting, and management process to enable us to effectively scale and adjust our business in response to fluctuating market opportunities and conditions.

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In response to changes in market conditions and market demand for our products, we have in the past undertaken cost savings initiatives. For example, in March 2014, May 2015 and March 2016 we executed restructuring events designed to streamline our business, reduce our cost structure and focus our resources on key strategic opportunities. As a result, we have recognized substantial restructuring charges. We may in the future undertake initiatives that may include restructuring, disposing of, and/or otherwise discontinuing certain products, or a combination of these actions. Rapid changes in the size, alignment or organization of our workforce, including sales account coverage, could adversely affect our ability to develop, sell and deliver products and services as planned or impair our ability to realize our current or future business and financial objectives. Any decision to take these actions may result in charges to earnings associated with, among other things, inventory or other fixed, intangible or goodwill asset reductions (including, without limitation, impairment charges), workforce and facility reductions and penalties and claims from third party resellers or users of discontinued products. Charges associated with these activities would harm our operating results. In addition to the costs associated with these activities, we may not realize any of the anticipated benefits of the underlying restructuring activities.

If our products are defective, or are perceived to be defective as a result of improper use or maintenance, our gross margins, operating results and customer relationships may be harmed.

Our products are complex. We have experienced in the past, and expect to experience in the future, quality issues. Quality risk is most acute when we are introducing new products. Quality issues have and could again in the future cause customers to experience outages or disruptions in service, data loss or data corruption. If we fail to remedy a product defect, we may experience a failure of a product line, temporary or permanent withdrawal from a product or market, damage to our reputation, loss of revenue, inventory costs or product reengineering expenses and higher ongoing warranty and service costs, and these occurrences could have a material impact on our gross margins, business and operating results. In addition, we exercise little control over how our customers use or maintain our products, and in some cases improper usage or maintenance could impair the performance of our products, which could lead to a perception of a quality issue. Customers and we may experience losses that may result from or are alleged to result from defects in our products, which could subject us to claims for damages, including consequential damages.

If a data center or other third-party who relies on our products experiences a disruption in service or a loss of data, such disruption could be attributed to the quality of our products, thereby causing financial or reputational harm to our business.

Our clients, including data centers, SaaS, cloud computing and Internet infrastructure and bandwidth providers, rely on our products for their data storage needs. Our clients may authorize third-party technology providers to access their data on our systems. Because we do not control the transmissions between our clients, their customers, and third-party technology providers, or the processing of such data by third-party technology providers, we cannot ensure the complete integrity or security of such transmissions or processing. Errors or wrongdoing by clients, their customers, or third-party technology providers resulting in security breaches may be attributed to us.

A failure or inability to meet our clients’ expectations with respect to security and confidentiality through a disruption in the services provided by these third-party vendors, or the loss of data stored by such vendors, could result in financial or reputational harm to our business to the extent that such disruption or loss is caused by, or perceived by our customers to have been caused by, defects in our products. Moreover, the risk of reputational harm may be magnified and/or distorted through the rapid dissemination of information over the Internet, including through news articles, blogs, chat rooms, and social media sites. This may affect our ability to retain clients and attract new business.

If a cybersecurity or other security breach occurs on our systems or on our end user customer systems, or if stored data is improperly accessed, customers may reduce or cease using our solutions, our reputation may be harmed and we may incur significant liabilities.

We store and transmit sensitive and proprietary data related to our products, our employees, customers, clients and partners (including third-party vendors such as data centers and providers of SaaS, cloud computing, and Internet infrastructure and bandwidth), and their respective customers, including intellectual property, books of record and personally identifiable information. It is critical to our business strategy that our infrastructure remains secure and is perceived by customers, clients and partners to be secure. There are numerous and evolving risks to cybersecurity and privacy, including criminal hackers, state-sponsored intrusions, industrial espionage, human error and technological vulnerabilities. Cybersecurity incidents or other security breaches could result in (1) unauthorized access to, or loss or unauthorized disclosure of, such information; (2) litigation, indemnity obligations, government investigations and other possible liabilities; (3) negative publicity; and (4) disruptions to our internal and external operations. Any of these could damage our reputation and public perception of the security and reliability of our products, as well as harm our business and cause us to incur significant liabilities. In addition, a cybersecurity incident or other security breach could result in other negative consequences, including remediation costs, disruption of internal operations, increased cybersecurity protection costs and lost revenues.

Our clients and customers use our platforms for the transmission and storage of sensitive data. We do not monitor or review the information or content that our clients and their customers upload and store, and, therefore, we have no direct control over the substance of the information or content stored within our platforms. If our employees, or our clients, partners or their respective customers use our platforms for the transmission or storage of personally identifiable or other sensitive information and our security

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measures are breached as a result of third-party action, employee error, malfeasance, stolen or fraudulently obtained log-in credentials or otherwise, our reputation could be damaged, our business may be harmed and we could incur significant liabilities.

High-profile security breaches at other companies have increased in recent years, and security industry experts and government officials have warned about the risks of hackers and cyberattacks targeting information technology products and businesses. Because techniques used to obtain unauthorized access or to sabotage systems change frequently and often are not recognized until launched against a target, we may be unable to anticipate these techniques or to implement adequate preventative measures. As we continue to increase our client base and expand our brand, we may become more of a target for third parties seeking to compromise our security systems and we anticipate that hacking attempts and cyberattacks will increase in the future. We cannot give assurance that we will always be successful in preventing or repelling unauthorized access to our systems.

Many jurisdictions have enacted laws requiring companies to notify individuals of data security breaches involving certain types of personal data. These mandatory disclosures regarding security breaches often lead to widespread negative publicity. Moreover, the risk of reputational harm may be magnified and/or distorted through the rapid dissemination of information over the Internet, including through news articles, blogs, chat rooms, and social media sites. Any security breach, whether actual or perceived, could harm our reputation, erode customer confidence in the effectiveness of our data security measures, negatively impact our ability to attract new customers, cause existing customers to elect not to renew their support contracts, or subject us to third-party lawsuits, regulatory fines or other action or liability, which could materially and adversely affect our business and operating results.

There can be no assurance that the limitations of liability in our contracts would be enforceable or adequate or would otherwise protect us from any such liabilities or damages with respect to any particular claim. Our existing general liability insurance coverage and coverage for errors and omissions may not continue to be available on acceptable terms or may not be available in sufficient amounts to cover one or more large claims, or our insurers may deny coverage as to any future claim. The successful assertion of one or more large claims against us that exceeds available insurance coverage, or the occurrence of changes in our insurance policies, including premium increases or the imposition of large deductible or co-insurance requirements, could have a material adverse effect on our business, operating results and financial condition.

If we are unable to attract and retain qualified personnel, our business, operating results and financial condition could be harmed.

Our continued success depends, in part, on our ability to hire and retain qualified personnel and to preserve the key aspects of our corporate culture. Because our future success is dependent on our ability to continue to enhance and introduce new products, we are particularly dependent on our ability to hire and retain qualified engineers. In addition, to increase revenues, we will be required to increase the productivity of our sales force and support infrastructure to achieve adequate customer coverage. Competition for qualified employees, particularly in Silicon Valley, is intense. We have periodically reduced our workforce, including an 11% reduction announced in February 2016, and these actions may make it more difficult to attract and retain qualified employees. Our inability to hire and retain qualified management and skilled personnel, particularly engineers, salespeople and key executive management, could be disruptive to our development efforts, sales results, business relationships and/or our ability to execute our business plan and strategy on a timely basis and could materially and adversely affect our operating results.

Equity grants are a critical component of our current compensation programs. If we reduce, modify or eliminate our equity programs, we may have difficulty attracting and retaining critical employees.

In addition, because of the structure of our cash and equity incentive compensation plans, we may be at increased risk of losing employees at certain times. For example, the retention value of our compensation plans decreases after the payment of annual bonuses or the vesting of equity awards.

A repatriation of cash held by our foreign subsidiaries to fund U.S. operations, strategic opportunities or debt service may subject us to a significant tax liability.

As of April 29, 2016, $4.8 billion of cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments was held by our foreign subsidiaries. Under current law, repatriation of this cash may trigger significant adverse tax consequences in the U.S. As a result, if the cash generated by our domestic operations is not sufficient to fund our domestic operations and our broader corporate initiatives, such as stock repurchases, dividends, acquisitions, and other strategic opportunities, and to service our outstanding indebtedness, we may need to raise additional funds through public or private debt or equity financings, or we may need to obtain new credit facilities to the extent we choose not to repatriate our overseas cash. Such additional financing may not be available on terms favorable to us, or at all, and any new equity financings or offerings would dilute our current stockholders’ ownership. Furthermore, lenders may not agree to extend us new, additional or continuing credit. If adequate funds are not available, or are not available on acceptable terms, we may be forced to repatriate our foreign-held cash and incur a significant tax charge. In any such case, our business, operating results or financial condition could be adversely impacted.

We are continually seeking ways to make our cost structure, business processes and systems more efficient, including by moving activities from higher-cost to lower-cost locations, outsourcing certain business processes and functions, and implementing new

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business information systems. Problems with the execution of these activities could have an adverse effect on our business, operating results and financial condition. In addition, we may not achieve the expected benefits of these initiatives.

We continuously seek to make our cost structure and business processes more efficient, including by moving our business activities from higher-cost to lower-cost locations, outsourcing certain business processes and functions, and implementing changes to our business information systems. These efforts involve a significant investment of financial and human resources and significant changes to our current operating processes. In addition, as we move operations into lower-cost jurisdictions and outsource certain business processes, we become subject to new regulatory regimes and lose control of certain aspects of our operations and, as a consequence, become more dependent upon the systems and business processes of third-parties. If we are unable to move our operations, outsource business processes and implement new business information systems in a manner that complies with local law and maintains adequate standards, controls and procedures, the quality of our products and services may suffer and we may be subject to increased litigation risk, either of which could have an adverse effect on our business, operating results and financial condition. Additionally, we may not achieve the expected benefits of these and other transformational initiatives, which could harm our business, operating results and financial condition.

Our acquisitions may not achieve expected benefits, and may increase our liabilities, disrupt our existing business and harm our operating results.

As part of our strategy, we seek to acquire other businesses and technologies to complement our current products, expand the breadth of our markets, or enhance our technical capabilities. For example, in February 2016, we acquired SolidFire, Inc., and in fiscal 2015 we acquired the SteelStore product line from Riverbed Technology, Inc. The benefits we expect to receive from these and other acquisitions depend on our ability to successfully conduct due diligence, negotiate the terms of the acquisition and integrate the acquired business into our systems, procedures and organizational structure. Any inaccuracy in our acquisition assumptions or any failure to uncover liabilities or risks associated with the acquisition, make the acquisition on favorable terms, integrate the acquired business or assets as and when expected or retain key employees of the acquired company may reduce or eliminate the expected benefits of the acquisition to us, increase our costs, disrupt our operations, result in additional liabilities, investigations and litigation, and may also harm our strategy, our business and our operating results. The failure to achieve expected acquisition benefits may also result in impairment charges for goodwill and purchased intangible assets.

Reduced U.S. government demand could materially harm our business and operating results. In addition, we could be harmed by claims that we have or a channel partner has failed to comply with regulatory and contractual requirements applicable to sales to the U.S. government.

The U.S. government is an important customer for us. However, government demand is uncertain, as it is subject to political and budgetary fluctuations and constraints. Events such as the U.S. federal government shutdown in October 2013 and continued uncertainty regarding the U.S. budget and debt levels, have increased demand uncertainty for our products, and in our fiscal 2014 and fiscal 2016 resulted in lower sales to these customers. In addition, like other customers, the U.S. government may evaluate competing products and delay purchasing in the face of the technology transitions taking place in the storage industry. If the U.S. government or an individual agency or multiple agencies within the U.S. government continue to reduce or shift their IT spending patterns, our revenues and operating results may be harmed.

Selling our products to the U.S. government, whether directly or through channel partners, also subjects us to certain regulatory and contractual requirements. Failure to comply with these requirements by either us or our channel partners could subject us to investigations, fines, and other penalties, which could materially harm our operating results and financial condition. As an example, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and the General Services Administration (GSA) have in the past pursued claims against and financial settlements with IT vendors, including us and several of our competitors and channel partners, under the False Claims Act and other statutes related to pricing and discount practices and compliance with certain provisions of GSA contracts for sales to the federal government. Although the DOJ and GSA currently have no claims pending against us, we could face claims in the future. Violations of certain regulatory and contractual requirements could also result in us being suspended or debarred from future government contracting. Any of these outcomes could have a material adverse effect on our business, operating results and financial condition.

Our failure to pay quarterly dividends to our stockholders and/or to fully consummate our stock repurchase program could cause the market price of our stock to decline significantly.

Our ability to pay quarterly dividends and to continue to execute our stock repurchase program as planned will be subject to, among other things, our financial condition and operating results, available cash and cash flows in the U.S., capital requirements, and other factors. Future dividends are subject to declaration by our Board of Directors, and our stock repurchase program does not obligate us to acquire any specific number of shares. If we fail to meet any expectations related to dividends and/or stock repurchases, the market price of our stock could decline significantly, and could have a material adverse impact on investor confidence. Additionally, price volatility of our stock over a given period may cause the average price at which we repurchase our own stock to exceed the stock’s market price at a given point in time.

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We are exposed to fluctuations in the market values of our investment portfolio and in interest rates, and impairment of our investments could harm our financial results.

We maintain an investment portfolio of various holdings, types, and maturities. A significant part of our investment portfolio consists of U.S. government securities. If global credit experiences prolonged periods of decline, or if there is a downgrade of U.S. government debt, our investment portfolio may be adversely impacted and we could determine that some of our investments have experienced an other-than-temporary decline in fair value, requiring impairment charges that could adversely affect our financial results.

If we default under our debt obligations, including our Senior Notes, our business, operating results and financial condition will be harmed. Moreover, covenants associated with our Senior Notes and credit facilities may unduly restrict our business.

We have Senior Notes outstanding as of April 29, 2016 in an aggregate principal amount of $1.5 billion that mature at specific dates in calendar 2017, 2021 and 2022. We have also established a revolving credit facility under which we may borrow an aggregate amount outstanding at any time of $300 million, under which we had no borrowings outstanding as of April 29, 2016. On February 2, 2016, we entered into an $870 million unsecured term loan, the proceeds of which were used to finance our acquisition of SolidFire, Inc., under which we had borrowings of $850 million principal amount outstanding as of April 29, 2016. We may fail to pay these obligations, as and when required. Specifically, if we are unable to generate sufficient cash flows from operations or to borrow sufficient funds in the future to service or refinance our debt, our business, operating results and financial condition will be harmed.

In addition, all of our debt and credit facility arrangements subject us to continued compliance with restrictive and financial covenants. If we do not comply with these covenants or otherwise default under the arrangements, we may be required to repay any outstanding amounts borrowed under these agreements. Moreover, compliance with these covenants may restrict our strategic or operational flexibility in the future, which could harm our business, operating results and financial condition.

We are exposed to the credit and non-payment risk of our customers, resellers and distributors, especially during times of economic uncertainty and tight credit markets, which could result in material losses.

Most of our sales to customers are on an open credit basis, with typical payment terms of 30 days. We may experience losses due to a customer’s inability to pay. Beyond our open credit arrangements, some of our customers have entered into recourse and non-recourse financing leasing arrangements using third-party leasing companies. Under the terms of recourse leases, which are generally three years or less, we remain liable for the aggregate unpaid remaining lease payments to the third-party leasing companies in the event of end-user customer default. During periods of economic uncertainty, our exposure to credit risks from our customers increases. In addition, our exposure to credit risks of our customers may increase further if our customers and their customers or their lease financing sources are adversely affected by global economic conditions.

Our failure to adjust to emerging standards in the storage industry may harm our business.

Emerging standards in the storage and data management markets may adversely affect the UNIX^®, Windows^® and the World Wide Web server markets upon which we depend. For example, we provide our open access data retention solutions to customers within the financial services, healthcare, pharmaceutical and government market segments, industries that are subject to various evolving governmental regulations with respect to data access, reliability and permanence in the U.S. and in the other countries in which we operate. If our products do not meet and continue to comply with these evolving governmental regulations in this regard, customers in these market and geographical segments will not purchase our products, and we may not be able to expand our product offerings in these market and geographical segments at the rates which we have forecasted.

Some of our products are subject to U.S. export control laws and other laws affecting the countries in which our products and services may be sold, distributed, or delivered; any violation of these laws could have a material and adverse effect on our business, operating results and financial condition.

Due to the global nature of our business, we are subject to import and export restrictions and regulations, including the Export Administration Regulations administered by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) and the trade and economic sanctions regulations administered by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). The U.S., through the BIS and OFAC, places restrictions on the sale or export of certain products and services to certain countries and persons. Violators of these export control and sanctions laws may be subject to significant penalties, which may include significant monetary fines, criminal proceedings against them and their officers and employees, a denial of export privileges, and suspension or debarment from selling products to the federal government. Our products could be shipped to those targets by third parties, including potentially our channel partners, despite our precautions.

If we were ever found to have violated U.S. export control laws, we may be subject to various penalties available under the laws, any of which could have a material and adverse impact on our business, operating results and financial condition. Even if we were not found to have violated such laws, the political and media scrutiny surrounding any governmental investigation of us could cause us significant expense and reputational harm and distract senior executives from managing our normal day-to-day operations. Such collateral consequences could have a material adverse impact on our business, operating results and financial condition.

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Changes in regulations relating to our products or their components, or the manufacture, sourcing, distribution or use thereof, may harm our business and operating results.

The laws and regulations governing the manufacturing, sourcing, distribution and use of our products have become more complex and stringent over time. For example, in addition to various environmental laws relating to carbon emissions and the use and discharge of hazardous materials, the SEC has recently adopted regulations concerning the supply of certain minerals originating from the conflict zones of the Democratic Republic of Congo or adjoining countries. We may incur costs to comply with the new disclosure requirements of this law and may realize other costs relating to the sourcing and availability of minerals used in our products. Further, since our supply chain is complex, we may face reputational harm if our customers or other stakeholders conclude that we are unable to verify sufficiently the origins of the minerals used in the products we sell. As the laws and regulations governing our products continue to expand and change, our costs are likely to rise, and the failure to comply with any such laws and regulations could subject us to business interruptions, litigation risks and reputational harm.

Our failure to protect our intellectual property could harm our business, operating results and financial condition.

Our success depends significantly upon developing, maintaining and protecting our proprietary technology. We rely on a combination of patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, confidentiality procedures and contractual provisions with employees, resellers, strategic partners and customers, to protect our proprietary rights. We currently have multiple U.S. and international patent applications pending and multiple U.S. and international patents issued. The pending applications may not be approved, and our existing and future patents may be challenged. If such challenges are brought, the patents may be invalidated. We may not be able to develop proprietary products or technologies that are patentable, and patents issued to us may not provide us with any competitive advantages and may be challenged by third parties. Further, the patents of others may materially and adversely affect our ability to do business. In addition, a failure to obtain and defend our trademark registrations may impede our marketing and branding efforts and competitive condition. Litigation may be necessary to protect our proprietary technology. Any such litigation may be time-consuming and costly. Despite our efforts to protect our proprietary rights, unauthorized parties may attempt to copy aspects of our products or obtain and use information that we regard as proprietary. In addition, the laws of some foreign countries do not protect proprietary rights to as great an extent as do the laws of the U.S. Our means of protecting our proprietary rights may not be adequate or our competitors may independently develop similar technology, duplicate our products, or design around patents issued to us or other intellectual property rights of ours.

We are subject to intellectual property infringement claims. We may, from time to time, receive claims that we are infringing third parties’ intellectual property rights. Third parties may in the future claim infringement by us with respect to current or future products, patents, trademarks or other proprietary rights. We expect that companies in the network storage and data management markets will increasingly be subject to infringement claims as the number of products and competitors in our industry segment grows and the functionality of products in different industry segments overlaps. Any such claims could be time consuming, result in costly litigation, cause product shipment delays, require us to redesign our products, or require us to enter into royalty or licensing agreements, any of which could materially and adversely affect our operating results. Such royalty or licensing agreements, if required, may not be available on terms acceptable to us or at all.

Our business could be materially and adversely affected as a result of natural disasters, terrorist acts or other catastrophic events.

We depend on the ability of our personnel, inventories, equipment and products to move reasonably unimpeded around the world. Any political, military, terrorism, global trade, world health or other issue that hinders this movement or restricts the import or export of materials could lead to significant business disruptions. Furthermore, any economic failure or other material disruption caused by natural disasters, including fires, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanoes; power loss or shortages; environmental disasters; telecommunications or business information systems failures or break-ins and similar events could also adversely affect our ability to conduct business. If such disruptions result in cancellations of customer orders or contribute to a general decrease in economic activity or corporate spending on IT, or directly impact our marketing, manufacturing, financial and logistics functions, or impair our ability to meet our customer demands, our operating results and financial condition could be materially adversely affected. In addition, our headquarters and one of our major data centers are located in Northern California, an area susceptible to earthquakes. If any significant disaster were to occur, our ability to operate our business and our financial condition could be impaired.

Changes in financial accounting standards may cause adverse unexpected fluctuations and affect our reported operating results.

A change in accounting standards or practices and varying interpretations of existing accounting pronouncements, the increased use of fair value measures, changes to revenue recognition, lease accounting, financial instruments and other accounting standards could have a significant effect on our reported financial results or the way we conduct our business. Implementation of accounting regulations and related interpretations and policies, particularly those related to revenue recognition, could cause us to defer recognition of revenue or recognize lower revenue, which may affect our operating results.

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Not applicable.

 

 

We own approximately 1.1 million square feet of facilities at our Sunnyvale, California headquarters. The Sunnyvale site supports research and development, corporate general administration, sales and marketing, global services and operations.

We own approximately 0.8 million square feet of facilities in Research Triangle Park (RTP), North Carolina, of which we occupy approximately 0.5 million square feet. In addition, we own 65 acres of undeveloped land. The RTP site supports research and development, global services and sales and marketing.

We own forty acres of land and approximately 0.3 million square feet of facilities in Wichita, Kansas. This site supports sales and marketing, research and development, and global services.

We lease and occupy approximately 0.4 million square feet of facilities in Bangalore, India. In addition, we own 15 acres of land and 1.0 million square feet of facilities under construction. The Bangalore site supports research and development, marketing and global services.

We lease other sales offices and research and development facilities throughout the U.S. and internationally. We expect that our existing facilities and those being developed worldwide are suitable and adequate for our requirements over at least the next two years and that additional space will be available as needed.

 

 

None.

 

 

Not applicable.

 

 

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PART II

 

 

The Company’s common stock is traded on the NASDAQ Stock Market LLC (“NASDAQ”) under the symbol NTAP.

Price Range of Common Stock

The price range per share of common stock presented below represents the highest and lowest intraday sales prices for the Company’s common stock on the NASDAQ during each quarter of our two most recent fiscal years.

 

Holders

As of June 10, 2016 there were 511 holders of record of our common stock.

Dividends

The Company paid cash dividends of $0.18 per outstanding common share in each quarter of fiscal 2016 for an aggregate of $210 million, and $0.165 per outstanding common share in each quarter of fiscal 2015 for an aggregate of $208 million.

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Performance Graph

The following graph shows a comparison of cumulative total shareholder return, calculated on a dividend reinvested basis, of an investment of $100 for the Company, the S&P 500 Index, the S&P Information Technology Index and the S&P 1500 Technology Hardware & Equipment Index for the five years ended April 29, 2016. The comparisons in the graphs below are based upon historical data and are not indicative of, nor intended to forecast, future performance of our common stock. The graph and related information shall not be deemed “soliciting material” or be deemed to be “filed” with the SEC, nor shall such information be incorporated by reference into any past or future filing with the SEC, except to the extent that such filing specifically states that such graph and related information are incorporated by reference into such filing.

COMPARISON OF FIVE YEAR CUMULATIVE TOTAL RETURN

Among NetApp, Inc., the S&P 500 Index, the S&P Information Technology Index and the S&P 1500 Technology Hardware & Equipment Index*

 

 *$100 invested on April 29, 2011 in stock or index, including reinvestment of dividends. Data points are the last day of each fiscal year for the Company’s common stock and each of the indexes.

 

 

We believe that a number of factors may cause the market price of our common stock to fluctuate significantly. See Item 1A. – Risk Factors.

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Purchases of Equity Securities by the Issuer and Affiliated Purchasers

The following table provides information with respect to the shares of common stock repurchased by us during the three months ended April 29, 2016:

 

In May 2003, our Board of Directors approved a stock repurchase program. As of April 29, 2016, our Board of Directors has authorized the repurchase of up to $9.6 billion of our common stock. During fiscal 2016, we repurchased and retired 33 million shares of our common stock for an aggregate purchase price of $960 million. Since inception of the program through April 29, 2016, we repurchased a total of 247 million shares of our common stock for an aggregate purchase price of $8.1 billion. Under this program, we may purchase shares of our outstanding common stock through open market and privately negotiated transactions at prices deemed appropriate by our management. The stock repurchase program may be suspended or discontinued at any time.

 

 

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The following selected consolidated financial data set forth below was derived from our historical audited consolidated financial statements and should be read in conjunction with, Item 7 – Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations and Item 8 – Financial Statements and Supplementary Data, and other financial data included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Our historical results of operations are not indicative of our future results of operations.

 

 

 

 

 

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The following discussion of our financial condition and results of operations should be read together with the financial statements and the accompanying notes set forth under Item 8. – Financial Statements and Supplementary Data. The following discussion also contains trend information and other forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. The Risk Factors set forth in Item 1A. – Risk Factors are hereby incorporated into the discussion by reference.

Executive Overview

Our Company

We are a leading global provider of software, systems and services to manage and store customer data. We enable enterprises, service providers, governmental organizations, and partners to envision, deploy and evolve their information technology (IT) environments and to reduce costs and risk while driving growth and success for their organizations.

Data management on the hybrid cloud today is essentially a series of isolated siloes. IT organizations need to harmonize the management of data across all cloud providers, as well as on premises. This is what we call the Data Fabric. Our Data Fabric strategy defines the NetApp technology architecture for hybrid cloud. We offer solutions that help customers seamlessly manage their data across their diverse IT resources, spanning flash, disk, and cloud. Customers have the flexibility to choose the right set of resources to meet the needs of their applications and the freedom to change them whenever they want. Customers are entirely in control of their data, regardless of the cloud that it sits on, regardless of the landscape in which it is deployed.

Our data management and storage offerings help improve business productivity, performance and profitability, while providing investment protection and enhanced asset utilization. We complement our enterprise-class storage solutions with services expertise that maximizes the business benefits our customers gain from deploying our products. In fiscal 2016, we focused on our Data Fabric strategy and the strategic solutions that form the foundation of how we enable customer success in the data-powered digital era.

Our unified scale-out fabric-attached storage (FAS) platform is designed to meet the demanding requirements of shared infrastructures and cloud environments. Our FAS storage platform uses the NetApp Data ONTAP storage operating system to deliver integrated data protection, comprehensive data management, and built-in efficiency software for virtualized, shared infrastructures, cloud computing, and mixed workload business applications. We offer hybrid and all-flash configurations of both FAS and E-Series platforms. Our E-Series high-performance storage area network platform is designed to meet demanding performance and capacity requirements of dedicated workloads, while retaining simplicity and an optimized price to performance ratio.

In February 2016, NetApp completed the acquisition of all-flash startup company SolidFire, Inc., which when combined with our existing all-flash offerings, allows us to offer the industry’s broadest portfolio of all-flash solutions. SolidFire systems target a new class of customer who is masterminding the next-generation data center and wants cloud-like capabilities from their on-premises storage for greater flexibility. These users place a priority on the ability to scale simply and seamlessly.

Our configured systems consist of (1) entry level product platform, which consists of our FAS2000 systems, (2) mid-range product platform, which consists of our legacy FAS3000 systems and our new FAS8020 and FAS8040 systems, and (3) high-end product platform, which consists of our legacy FAS6000 systems and our new FAS8060 and FAS8080 systems.

In addition to our products, we provide a variety of services including software maintenance, hardware maintenance and other services including professional services, global support solutions, and customer education and training to help customers most effectively manage their data.

We employ a multichannel distribution strategy, selling products and services to end users and service providers through a direct sales force and through channel partners, including value-added resellers, system integrators, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and distributors.

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Financial Results and Key Performance Metrics Overview

The following table provides an overview of some of our key financial metrics for each of the last three fiscal years (in millions, except per share amounts, percentages and days sales outstanding):

 

 

 

Acquisition of SolidFire

On February 2, 2016, we acquired all of the outstanding shares of privately-held SolidFire, Inc. (“SolidFire”), a maker of all-flash storage systems based in Colorado, for $850 million in cash. This acquisition extends our position in the all-flash array market by adding new flash offerings that will enhance our ability to deliver customers all-flash storage with a webscale architecture that simplifies data center operations and enables rapid deployments of new applications. In connection with this acquisition, we entered into an $870 million short-term loan that we expect to repay in full with our global earnings by the beginning of our third quarter of fiscal 2017.

Stock Repurchase Program and Dividend Activity

During fiscal 2016, we repurchased 33 million shares of our common stock at an average price of $28.80 per share, for an aggregate of $960 million. We also declared cash dividends of an aggregate of $0.72 per share in fiscal 2016, for which we paid an aggregate of $210 million.

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Restructuring Events

In February 2016, we committed to a restructuring and reduction in workforce to streamline our business and reduce operating expenses. In connection with these actions, we reduced our worldwide headcount by approximately 11%, and incurred $80 million of employee severance charges in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2016. The reduction in workforce will be executed through the end of the second quarter of fiscal 2017.

In May 2015, we committed to a restructuring event and reduction in workforce of approximately 3% of our worldwide headcount, for which we recognized charges of $28 million, primarily in the first quarter of fiscal 2016. These activities were substantially completed in the second quarter of fiscal 2016.

Real Estate Transactions

 

On April 19, 2016, we sold certain buildings and land in Sunnyvale, California which had a net book value of $118 million at the time of sale, for $250 million in cash. Certain of the properties did not qualify as sales under accounting standards due to continuing involvement related to leaseback arrangements. The remaining properties, which had a net book value of $51 million and related sales proceeds of $102 million, were recognized as sales, resulting in a gain of $51 million.

 

 

Critical Accounting Policies and Estimates

Our consolidated financial statements have been prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles in the United States of America (GAAP), which require management to make judgments, estimates and assumptions that affect the reported amounts of assets, liabilities, net revenues and expenses, and the disclosure of contingent assets and liabilities. Our estimates are based on historical experience and various other assumptions that we believe to be reasonable under the circumstances, the results of which form the basis for making judgments about the carrying values of assets and liabilities. We believe that the accounting estimates employed and the resulting balances are reasonable; however, actual results may differ from these estimates and such differences may be material.

The summary of significant accounting policies is included in Note 1 – Description of Business and Significant Accounting Policies of the Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements. An accounting policy is deemed to be critical if it requires an accounting estimate to be made based on assumptions about matters that are highly uncertain at the time the estimate is made, if different estimates reasonably could have been used, or if changes in the estimate that are reasonably possible could materially impact the financial statements. The accounting policies described below reflect the significant judgments, estimates and assumptions used in the preparation of the consolidated financial statements.

Revenue Recognition, Reserves and Allowances

We recognize revenue when persuasive evidence of an arrangement exists, delivery has occurred, the fee is fixed or determinable and collection is reasonably assured. Revenue from the sale of hardware systems and software components essential to the functionality of the hardware systems is recognized in accordance with general revenue recognition accounting guidance. Our product revenues also include revenues from the sale of non-essential software products, which generally includes a perpetual license to our software. Non-essential software sales are subject to industry specific software revenue recognition accounting guidance. Software maintenance and hardware maintenance services revenues are recognized ratably over their contractual terms, generally from one to five years.

For multiple element arrangements, we allocate revenue to the software deliverables and the non-software deliverables as a group based on the relative selling prices of all of the deliverables in the arrangement. For our non-software deliverables, we allocate the arrangement consideration based on the relative selling price of the deliverables using estimated selling price (ESP). For our software maintenance services, we generally use vendor-specific objective evidence of selling price (VSOE). When we are unable to establish VSOE for our software maintenance services, we use ESP in our allocation of arrangement consideration.

The selling price for each element is based upon the following selling price hierarchy: VSOE if available, third party evidence (TPE) if VSOE is not available, or ESP if neither VSOE nor TPE are available. Generally, we are not able to determine TPE because our go-to-market strategy differs from that of our peers and our offerings contain a significant level of differentiation such that the comparable pricing of products with similar functionality cannot be obtained.

We record reductions to revenue for estimated sales returns at the time of shipment. We also maintain a separate allowance for doubtful accounts for estimated losses based on our assessment of the collectability of specific customer accounts.

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The following are the key estimates and assumptions and corresponding uncertainties for recognizing revenue:

 

Inventory Valuation and Purchase Order Accruals

Inventories consist primarily of purchased components and finished goods and are stated at the lower of cost or market, which approximates actual cost on a first-in, first-out basis. A provision is recorded when inventory is determined to be in excess of anticipated demand or obsolete in order to adjust inventory to its estimated realizable value. The following are the key estimates and assumptions and corresponding uncertainties for estimating the value of our inventories:

 

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Goodwill and Purchased Intangible Assets

We allocate the purchase price of acquisitions to identifiable assets acquired and liabilities assumed at their acquisition date fair values based on established valuation techniques. Goodwill represents the residual value as of the acquisition date, which in most cases is measured as the excess of the purchase consideration transferred over the net of the acquisition date fair values of the assets acquired and liabilities assumed.

The carrying values of purchased intangible assets are reviewed whenever events and circumstances indicate that the net book value of an asset may not be recovered through expected future cash flows from its use and eventual disposition. We periodically review the estimated remaining useful lives of our intangible assets. This review may result in impairment charges or shortened useful lives, resulting in charges to our consolidated statements of operations.

We review goodwill for impairment annually and whenever events or changes in circumstances indicate the carrying amount of a reporting unit may be less than its fair value. The provisions of the accounting standard for goodwill allow us to first assess qualitative factors to determine whether it is necessary to perform the two-step quantitative goodwill impairment test. For our annual goodwill impairment test in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2016, we performed a quantitative test at the reporting unit level and determined the fair value substantially exceeded the carrying amount of each reporting unit and, therefore, found no impairment of goodwill.

The following are the key estimates and assumptions and corresponding uncertainties for estimating the value of our goodwill and purchased intangible assets:

 

Product Warranties

Estimated future hardware and software warranty costs are recorded as a cost of product revenues at the time of product shipment. We assess the adequacy of our warranty accrual each quarter and adjust the amount as considered necessary.

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The following are the key estimates and assumptions and corresponding uncertainties for product warranties:

 

Valuation of Investment Securities

Our investments in debt securities are reported at fair value and are subject to periodic impairment review. Unrealized gains and losses related to changes in the fair value of these securities are recognized in accumulated other comprehensive income, net of tax, unless they are determined to be other-than-temporary impairments. The ultimate value realized on these securities is subject to market price volatility until they are sold.

The following are the key estimates and assumptions and corresponding uncertainties for the valuation of our investment securities:

 

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Income Taxes

We are subject to income taxes in the United States and numerous foreign jurisdictions. We compute our provision for income taxes using the asset and liability method, under which deferred tax assets and liabilities are recognized for the expected future tax consequences of temporary differences between the financial reporting and tax bases of assets and liabilities, and for operating losses and tax credit carryforwards. Deferred tax assets and liabilities are measured using the currently enacted tax rates that apply to taxable income in effect for the years in which those tax assets are expected to be realized or settled. The Company records a valuation allowance to reduce deferred tax assets to the amount that is believed more likely than not to be realized.

The following are the key estimates and assumptions and corresponding uncertainties for our income taxes:

 

New Accounting Standards

See Note 3 – Recent Accounting Standards Not Yet Effective of the Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements for a full description of new accounting pronouncements, including the respective expected dates of adoption and effects on our financial statements.

 

 

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Results of Operations

Our fiscal year is reported on a 52- or 53-week year that ends on the last Friday in April. An additional week is included in the first fiscal quarter approximately every six years to realign fiscal months with calendar months. Our fiscal year 2016 ended on April 29, 2016 and was a 53-week year. Our fiscal years 2015 and 2014 ended on April 24, 2015 and April 25, 2014, respectively, and were each 52-week years. Unless otherwise stated, references to particular years, quarters, months and periods refer to the Company’s fiscal years ended in April and the associated quarters, months and periods of those fiscal years.

The following table sets forth certain Consolidated Statements of Operations data as a percentage of net revenues for the periods indicated:

 

 

Percentages may not add due to rounding

Discussion and Analysis of Results of Operations

Overview — Net revenues for fiscal 2016 were $5,546 million, a decrease of $577 million, or 9%, compared to fiscal 2015, reflecting lower product revenues, partially offset by an increase in software and hardware maintenance and other services revenues. Net revenues for fiscal 2015 were $6,123 million, down $202 million, or 3%, compared to fiscal 2014, reflecting a decrease in product and software maintenance revenues, partially offset by an increase in hardware maintenance and other services revenues.

Gross profit as a percentage of net revenues decreased 2 percentage points during fiscal 2016 compared to fiscal 2015, reflecting lower margins on product revenues. Gross profit margins on product revenues in fiscal 2016 decreased compared to fiscal 2015 primarily due to higher discounting and product promotions which resulted in the decline in ASPs that outpaced the decline in unit materials costs. Gross profit as a percentage of net revenues increased 1 percentage point during fiscal 2015 compared to fiscal 2014, reflecting higher gross margins on hardware maintenance contract and other services revenues. Gross profit margins on product revenues in fiscal 2015 were relatively flat compared to fiscal 2014 primarily due to lower ASPs for configured systems being offset by lower unit materials cost due to changes in product mix.

Sales and marketing, research and development, and general and administrative expenses for fiscal 2016 totaled $2,960 million, an increase of 3 percentage points as a percentage of net revenues compared to fiscal 2015, primarily due to a lower revenue denominator, partially offset by the benefits of our cost reduction initiatives. Sales and marketing, research and development, and general and administrative expenses for fiscal 2015 totaled $3,117 million, up 2 percentage points as a percentage of net revenues compared to fiscal 2014, primarily due to a slight decrease in costs on a lower revenue denominator.

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Net Revenues (in millions, except percentages):

 

 

The decrease in net revenues for fiscal 2016 was primarily due to a decrease of $669 million in product revenues, partially offset by $92 million increase in total software maintenance and hardware maintenance and other services revenues. Product revenues comprised 54% of net revenues for fiscal 2016, compared to 60% of net revenues for fiscal 2015.

The decrease in net revenues for fiscal 2015 was primarily due to a reduction of $289 million in product revenues, partially offset by $103 million increase in hardware maintenance and other services revenues. Product revenues comprised 60% of net revenues for fiscal 2015, compared to 62% of net revenues for fiscal 2014.

Sales through our indirect channels represented 77%, 78% and 79% of net revenues in fiscal 2016, 2015 and 2014, respectively.

The following customers, each of which is a distributor, accounted for 10% or more of net revenues:

 

Product Revenues (in millions, except percentages):

 

 

Product revenues consist of sales of configured systems, which include bundled hardware and software products, and non-configured products, which consist primarily of add-on storage, OEM products and add-on hardware and software products.

Total configured system revenues of $1,885 million decreased by $328 million, or 15%, and systems unit volume decreased by 3% in fiscal 2016, compared to fiscal 2015. Revenues and unit volume decreased from FAS entry level and mid-range systems, partially offset by an increase in revenues and unit volume from FAS high-end systems and E-Series systems (which include our all flash EF systems). ASPs decreased across all FAS systems and E-Series systems platforms due primarily to a combination of higher discounting and product promotions introduced in fiscal 2016. ASPs were also impacted by unfavorable foreign exchange rates, which had an unfavorable impact of approximately 4%, and unfavorable customer and product mix. As a result, overall ASPs of configured systems were lower in fiscal 2016 compared to fiscal 2015.

Non-configured product revenues of $1,101 million decreased by $341 million, or 24%, during fiscal 2016 compared to fiscal 2015. This decrease was primarily due to a decrease of 32% and 36% in add-on storage and OEM revenues, respectively. The decrease in add-on storage reflects higher discounting and unfavorable product mix, as well as the unfavorable impact of foreign exchange rates. The decrease in OEM revenues reflects our move away from OEM products.

Total configured system revenues of $2,213 million decreased by $74 million, or 3%, in fiscal 2015, compared to fiscal 2014. Revenues decreased in FAS entry level, mid-range and high-end systems, partially offset by an increase in E-Series systems. Total configured systems unit volume increased 5% primarily due to a unit volume increase in FAS mid-range, high-end systems and E-Series systems platforms, partially offset by a decrease in unit volume in FAS entry level systems. These changes in unit volume reflect a shift in customer demand to our newer FAS mid-range and high-end systems and higher demand for our E-Series systems, and away from our older FAS entry level systems. ASPs decreased across all FAS systems and E-Series systems platforms due to a combination of newer lower priced products within their respective platforms and unfavorable foreign exchange rates, which had an aggregate negative impact of approximately 2% on configured systems revenues in fiscal 2015 compared to fiscal 2014. As a result, overall ASPs of configured systems were lower in fiscal 2015 compared to fiscal 2014.

Non-configured product revenues of $1,442 million decreased by $215 million, or 13%, during fiscal 2015 compared to fiscal 2014. This decrease was primarily due to a decrease of 32% in add-on storage revenues and a decrease of 20% in OEM revenues, partially offset by a 133% increase in add-on software. The decrease in add-on storage and increase in add-on software are largely due to the change in our pricing strategy that was effective in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2014, whereby we now charge for operating system software for storage capacity but have lowered prices on storage hardware. Non-configured systems revenues were negatively impacted by 1% as a result of unfavorable foreign exchange rates in fiscal 2015, compared to fiscal 2014.

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Our systems are highly configurable to respond to customer requirements in the open systems storage markets that we serve. This can cause a wide variation in product configurations that can significantly impact revenues, cost of revenues and gross profits. Pricing changes, discounting practices, product competition, foreign currency, unit volumes, customer mix, natural disasters and product materials costs can also impact revenues, cost of revenues and/or gross profits. Disk drive and flash storage materials are a significant component of our storage systems. While our sales price per terabyte historically declines over time, improved system performance, increased capacity and software to manage this increased capacity have an offsetting favorable impact on product revenues.

Software Maintenance Revenues (in millions, except percentages):

 

 

Software maintenance revenues are associated with contracts which entitle customers to receive unspecified product upgrades and enhancements on a when-and-if-available basis, bug fixes and patch releases, as well as internet and telephone access to technical support personnel located in our global support centers.

The fluctuations in software maintenance revenues reflect fluctuations in the aggregate contract value of the installed base under software maintenance contracts, which is recognized as revenue ratably over the terms of the underlying contracts. Our software maintenance revenues were favorably impacted by a change in our pricing strategy, effective in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2014, such that we now charge for software maintenance services on the storage capacity sold in our configured systems and add-on storage products. We expect this change to continue to result in favorable trends in our software maintenance revenues as a percentage of total revenues. Software maintenance revenues were also favorably impacted by the additional week of deferred revenue amortization in the first quarter of fiscal 2016.

Hardware Maintenance and Other Services Revenues (in millions, except percentages):

 

 

Hardware maintenance and other services revenues include hardware maintenance, professional services and educational and training services revenues.

Hardware maintenance contract revenues were $1,316 million, $1,253 million and $1,130 million in fiscal 2016, 2015 and 2014, respectively. These revenues increased 5% during fiscal 2016 compared to fiscal 2015 and increased 11% during fiscal 2015 compared to fiscal 2014. These increases are a result of increases in the installed base and aggregate contract values under hardware maintenance contracts, due largely to higher levels of shorter term contract renewals from our existing contract base, as well as in fiscal 2016 the favorable impact of an additional week of deferred revenue amortization in the first quarter. Professional services and educational and training services revenues aggregated to $295 million, $317 million and $336 million in fiscal 2016, 2015 and 2014, respectively.

Revenues by Geographic Area:

 

 

Percentages may not add due to rounding

 

Americas revenues consist of sales to Americas commercial and United States (U.S.) public sector markets. During fiscal 2016, we experienced declining revenues in all geographic areas, with the largest percentage decline in the Americas U.S. public sector market. During fiscal 2015, Americas revenues were favorably impacted by an increase in revenues from U.S. public sector markets, but unfavorably impacted by lower Americas commercial revenues. EMEA revenues were unfavorably impacted by foreign exchange rates in fiscal 2015 compared to fiscal 2014. During fiscal 2014, Americas revenues were unfavorably impacted by a decrease in sales to the U.S. public sector market.

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Cost of Revenues

Our cost of revenues consists of three elements: (1) cost of product revenues, which includes the costs of manufacturing and shipping our storage products, amortization of purchased intangible assets, inventory write-downs, and warranty costs, (2) cost of software maintenance, which includes the costs of providing software maintenance and third-party royalty costs and (3) cost of hardware maintenance and other services revenues, which includes costs associated with providing support activities for hardware maintenance, global support partnership programs, professional services and educational and training services.

Cost of Product Revenues (in millions, except percentages):

 

 

The changes in cost of product revenues consisted of the following (in percentage points of the total change):

 

 

Cost of product revenues represented 52%, 45% and 45% of product revenues for fiscal 2016, 2015 and 2014, respectively.

Materials cost represented 85%, 85% and 84% of product costs for fiscal 2016, 2015 and 2014, respectively.

Materials cost decreased $85 million in fiscal 2016 compared to fiscal 2015. Materials costs were impacted by a decrease of 3% unit volume for configured systems in fiscal 2016 compared to fiscal 2015. Partially offsetting this impact was an increase in overall materials unit cost for configured systems due to an increase in the average unit materials costs in entry level and high-end FAS configured systems platforms, partially offset by lower average unit materials costs in mid-range FAS systems, due to changes in product mix. The decrease in materials costs also reflects lower add-on storage and OEM product volume.

Materials cost decreased $82 million in fiscal 2015 compared to fiscal 2014. Materials costs were impacted by a 5% unit volume increase in configured systems in fiscal 2015 compared to fiscal 2014. Overall materials unit cost for configured systems decreased due to a decrease in the average unit materials costs in all of our configured systems platforms, except our FAS entry level systems, which increased slightly, due to changes in product mix. The decrease in materials costs also reflects lower OEM product volume and lower costs of add-on storage. Cost of product revenues were also favorably impacted by a $35 million decrease in hardware-related warranty expense due to a combination of a lower installed base subject to warranty and lower estimated warranty cost per unit.

Cost of Software Maintenance Revenues (in millions, except percentages):

 

 

Cost of software maintenance revenues were relatively flat in fiscal 2016 compared to fiscal 2015. Cost of software maintenance revenues increased in fiscal 2015 compared to fiscal 2014 primarily due to higher third-party royalties. Cost of software maintenance revenues represented 4%, 4% and 3% of software maintenance revenues for fiscal 2016, 2015 and 2014, respectively.

Cost of Hardware Maintenance and Other Services Revenues (in millions, except percentages):

 

 

Cost of hardware maintenance and other services revenues decreased in fiscal 2016 compared to fiscal 2015 due to the favorable impact of cost savings initiatives. Cost of hardware maintenance and other services revenues were relatively flat in fiscal 2015

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compared to fiscal 2014. Costs represented 36%, 38% and 41% of hardware maintenance and other services revenues for fiscal 2016, 2015 and 2014, respectively.

 

 

Operating Expenses

Sales and Marketing, Research and Development and General and Administrative Expenses

Compensation costs comprise the largest component of operating expenses. Included in compensation costs are salaries, benefits, other compensation-related costs, stock-based compensation expense and employee incentive compensation plan costs.

Total compensation costs included in operating expenses decreased $57 million, or 3% during fiscal 2016 compared to fiscal 2015, primarily due to lower salaries and incentive compensation costs, reflecting a 5% decrease in average headcount, lower operating performance against goals and the favorable impact of foreign exchange rate fluctuations.

Total compensation costs included in operating expenses decreased $18 million, or 1% during fiscal 2015 compared to fiscal 2014, primarily due to a decrease in incentive compensation costs, reflecting lower operating performance against goals, and lower stock-based compensation expense.

Sales and Marketing (in millions, except percentages):

 

 

Sales and marketing expenses consist primarily of compensation costs, commissions, outside services, allocated facilities and IT costs, advertising and marketing promotional expense and travel and entertainment expense. The changes in sales and marketing expenses consisted of the following:

 

 

The decrease in sales and marketing expenses in fiscal 2016 reflects the approximately 4% favorable impact of fluctuations in foreign exchange rates. Additionally, the decrease in compensation costs during fiscal 2016 reflects lower average headcount from the prior year. Facilities and IT support costs decreased during fiscal 2016 primarily due to cost reduction initiatives.

The decrease in compensation costs during fiscal 2015 is primarily due to lower stock-based compensation and salaries expense, reflecting lower compensation cost per headcount that was partially offset by a 5% increase in headcount. In addition, foreign exchange rate changes resulted in a favorable impact of approximately 2% during fiscal 2015.

Research and Development (in millions, except percentages):

 

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Research and development expenses consist primarily of compensation costs, allocated facilities and IT costs, depreciation, equipment and software related costs, prototypes, non-recurring engineering charges and other outside services costs. Changes in research and development expense consisted of the following:

 

 

The decrease in compensation costs during fiscal 2016 was primarily due to lower salaries and incentive compensation costs, reflecting a 6% decrease in average headcount. Facilities and IT support costs decreased during fiscal 2016 primarily due to cost reduction initiatives.

Research and development expenses were relatively flat in fiscal 2015 compared to fiscal 2014.

General and Administrative (in millions, except percentages):

 

 

General and administrative expenses consist primarily of compensation costs, professional and corporate legal fees, outside services and allocated facilities and IT support costs. Changes in general and administrative expense consisted of the following:

 

 

The increase in compensation costs in fiscal 2016 was primarily due to higher stock-based compensation, salaries and benefit costs. The increase in professional and legal fees and outside services expense in fiscal 2016 was primarily due to higher spending levels on consulting fees and projects. Facilities and IT support costs decreased during fiscal 2016 primarily due to cost reduction initiatives.

The decrease in compensation costs during 2015 is primarily due to lower incentive compensation costs, stock-based compensation and benefits expenses, partially offset by higher salaries due to a 5% increase in headcount. The increase in professional and legal fees and outside services during 2015 reflects higher spending levels on contractors and professional services.

 Restructuring and Other Charges (in millions, except percentages):

 

 

NM - Not Meaningful

In response to changes in market conditions and market demand for our products, in March 2016, May 2015, March 2014 and May 2013, we initiated business realignment plans designed to streamline our business, reduce our cost structure and focus our resources on key strategic opportunities, resulting in aggregate reductions of our global workforce of approximately 14% and 11% in fiscal 2016 and 2014, respectively, for which we recognized aggregate charges of $108 million and $88 million, consisting primarily of employee severance costs. We have completed all activities under our restructuring plans with the exception of the March 2016 plan, which we expect to complete in the first half of fiscal 2017 with no significant additional costs. See Note 13 – Restructuring and Other Charges of the Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements for more details regarding our restructuring plans.

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Acquisition-related Expense (in millions, except percentages):

 

NM - Not Meaningful

During fiscal 2016, we incurred $8 million of acquisition costs, primarily related to legal and consulting fees, employee severance costs, and asset impairments associated with our acquisition of SolidFire.

Gain on Sale of Properties (in millions, except percentages):

 

 

NM - Not Meaningful

In fiscal 2016, we sold certain properties, which had a net book value of $51 million and related sales proceeds of $102 million, resulting in a gain of $51 million.

Other Income (Expense), Net (in millions, except percentages)

The components of other income (expense), net were as follows:

 

 

NM - Not Meaningful

Interest income increased during fiscal 2016 compared to fiscal 2015, and fiscal 2015 compared to fiscal 2014, primarily due to a shift in our investment portfolio to higher-yielding investments.

 

Interest expense, including the amortization of debt discount and issuance costs, is primarily related to our Senior Notes. In addition, in fiscal 2014, we also incurred interest expense related to our Convertible Notes that matured in June 2013.

Provision for Income Taxes (in millions, except percentages):

 

 

Our effective tax rate for fiscal 2016 was 33.6% compared to an effective tax rate of 21.5% for fiscal 2015, and an effective tax rate of 13.9% for fiscal 2014. Our effective tax rates reflect our corporate legal entity structure and the global nature of our business with a significant amount of our profits generated and taxed in foreign jurisdictions at rates below the U.S. statutory tax rate. The effective tax rates for fiscal 2014 through fiscal 2016 were favorably impacted by the geographic mix of profits. Our effective tax rate for fiscal 2016 increased compared to the prior year primarily as a result of a $64 million income tax charge associated with the integration of SolidFire into our worldwide operations, as well as $20 million in charges related to the settlements of income tax audits, as further discussed below.

The effective tax rate of 33.6% in fiscal 2016 included a benefit of $81 million, or 23.5 percentage points, from foreign profits taxed at effective tax rates lower than the U.S. federal statutory rate of 35%. Other key components of our effective tax rate for the year included a charge of $64 million, or 18.6 percentage points, related to the integration of SolidFire intellectual property into our tax structure, charges of $20 million, or 5.8 percentage points, in connection with the settlement of income tax audits, a benefit of $14 million, or 4.1 percentage points, related to current and prior year research and development credits, a tax charge of $13 million, or 3.8 percentage points, attributable to non-deductible stock-based compensation and a benefit of $10 million, or 2.9 percentage points, related to the domestic production activities deduction.

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The effective tax rate of 21.5% in fiscal 2015 included a benefit of $141 million, or 19.8 percentage points, from foreign profits taxed at effective tax rates lower than the U.S. federal statutory rate of 35%. Other key components of our effective tax rate for the year included a benefit of $14 million, or 1.9 percentage points, related to current and prior year research and development credits, a benefit of $5 million, or 0.7 percentage points, related to the domestic production activities deduction, and charges of $46 million, or 6.5 percentage points, in connection with income tax audits.

The effective tax rate of 13.9% in fiscal 2014 included a benefit of $163 million, or 22.0 percentage points, from foreign profits taxed at effective tax rates lower than the U.S. federal statutory rate of 35%. Other key components of our effective tax rate for the year included a benefit of $9 million, or 1.2 percentage points, related to current year research and development credits and a charge of $10 million, or 1.3 percentage points, attributable to non-deductible stock-based compensation and a benefit of $6 million, or 0.8 percentage points, related to the domestic production activities deduction.

In December 2015, the enactment of the Protecting Americans from Tax Hikes Act of 2015 permanently extended the federal research credit which had previously expired on December 31, 2014. As a result of the extension, during fiscal 2016, we recorded a benefit of $10 million related to the current year research credit and a benefit of $4 million related to a prior year credit that we retroactively claimed.

In December 2014, the Tax Increase Prevention Act of 2014 extended the federal research credit for amounts paid or incurred after December 31, 2013 and before January 1, 2015. As a result of the extension, in fiscal 2015 we recorded a benefit of $10 million related to the fiscal 2015 research credit and a benefit of $4 million related to a prior year credit that was retroactively claimed.

In June 2015, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) signed a closing agreement with respect to transfer pricing arrangements and, in October 2015, completed the examination of our fiscal 2008 to 2010 income tax returns. During fiscal 2016, we recorded a tax charge of $23 million attributable to transfer pricing and other audit settlements and the related re-measurement of uncertain tax positions for tax years subject to future audits.

In July 2014, the IRS completed the examination of our fiscal 2005 to 2007 income tax returns upon approval by the Joint Committee of Taxation. During fiscal 2015, we recorded a tax charge of $47 million attributable to the audit settlement and related re-measurements of uncertain tax positions for tax years subject to future audits.

We are currently undergoing federal income tax audits in the United States and several foreign tax jurisdictions. Transfer pricing calculations are key issues under audits in various jurisdictions, and are often subject to dispute and appeals. Our open years in U.S. federal jurisdictions are fiscal 2012 and later years. In addition, we are effectively subject to federal tax examination adjustments for tax years ended on or after fiscal year 2001, in that we have tax attribute carryforwards from these years that could be subject to adjustments in the tax years of utilization.

On September 17, 2010, the Danish Tax Authorities issued a decision concluding that distributions declared in 2005 and 2006 from our Danish subsidiary were subject to Danish at-source dividend withholding tax. We do not believe that our Danish subsidiary is liable for withholding tax and filed an appeal with the Danish Tax Tribunal to that effect. On December 19, 2011, the Danish Tax Tribunal issued a ruling that our Danish subsidiary was not liable for Danish withholding tax. The Danish tax examination agency appealed to the Danish High Court in March 2012. In February 2016, the Danish High Court referred the case to the European Court of Justice.

We continue to monitor the progress of ongoing tax controversies and the impact, if any, of the expected expiration of the statute of limitations in various taxing jurisdictions. We engage in continuous discussion and negotiation with taxing authorities regarding tax matters in multiple jurisdictions. We believe that within the next 12 months, it is reasonably possible that either certain audits will conclude, certain statutes of limitations will lapse, or both. Based on current information, we do not expect significant changes to our existing unrecognized tax benefits as of April 29, 2016.

 

 

Liquidity, Capital Resources and Cash Requirements

 

 

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The following is a summary of our cash flow activities:

 

 

Cash Flows

As of April 29, 2016, our cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments totaled $5.3 billion, reflecting a minimal decrease of $23 million from April 24, 2015. The decrease was primarily due to $960 million in cash paid for the repurchase of our common stock and $210 million in cash used for the payment of dividends, partially offset by $974 million of cash provided by operating activities, $102 million from the sale of properties and $148 million in proceeds from sale-leaseback transactions of certain of properties. Additionally, $870 million of cash was obtained through a short-term loan, which was primarily used to acquire SolidFire. Accounts receivable DSO was 54 days for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2016 compared to 46 days for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2015 reflecting seasonal shipment linearity. Working capital decreased by $1.3 billion to $2.8 billion as of April 29, 2016 primarily as a result of the short-term loan.

Cash Flows from Operating Activities

During fiscal 2016, we generated cash from operating activities of $974 million, reflecting net income of $229 million, adjusted by non-cash depreciation and amortization of $279 million, stock-based compensation of $260 million, partially offset by adjustments for a deferred income tax provision of $113 million and a gain on sale of properties of $51 million.

Changes in assets and liabilities during fiscal 2016 included the following:

During fiscal 2015, we generated cash from operating activities of $1.3 billion. The primary sources of cash from operating activities during fiscal 2015 consisted of net income of $560 million, adjusted by non-cash depreciation and amortization of $307 million and stock-based compensation of $259 million.

Changes in assets and liabilities during fiscal 2015 included the following:

We expect that cash provided by operating activities may materially fluctuate in future periods as a result of a number of factors, including fluctuations in our operating results, shipment linearity, accounts receivable collections performance, inventory and supply chain management, tax benefits or charges from stock-based compensation, and the timing and amount of compensation and other payments.

Cash Flows from Investing Activities

During fiscal 2016, we generated $982 million from maturities and sales of investments, net of purchases, expended $842 million of cash on the SolidFire acquisition, net of cash acquired, paid $160 million for capital expenditures and received $102 million of proceeds from the sale of properties.

During fiscal 2015, we used $645 million for purchases of investments, net of maturities and sales, and paid $175 million for capital expenditures. In addition, we expended $85 million of cash on acquisitions.

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Cash Flows from Financing Activities

During fiscal 2016, we borrowed $870 million under a short-term loan which was used primarily to fund the acquisition of SolidFire. We used $960 million for the repurchase of 33 million shares of our common stock, $210 million for the payment of dividends and received $148 million of proceeds under sale-leaseback transactions.

During fiscal 2015, we generated $495 million, net, from the issuance of long-term debt and used $1.2 billion for the repurchase of 30 million shares of our common stock and $208 million for the payment of dividends.

Key factors that could affect our cash flows include changes in our revenue mix and profitability, our ability to effectively manage our working capital, in particular, accounts receivable and inventories, the timing and amount of stock repurchases and payment of cash dividends, the impact of foreign exchange rate changes, our ability to effectively integrate acquired products, businesses and technologies, and the timing of repayments of our debt. Based on past performance and our current business outlook, we believe that our sources of liquidity, including potential future issuances of debt, equity or other securities, will satisfy our working capital needs, capital expenditures, investment requirements, stock repurchases, cash dividends, contractual obligations, commitments, principal and interest payments on our debt and other liquidity requirements associated with operations and meet our cash requirements for at least the next 12 months. However, in the event our liquidity is insufficient, we may be required to curtail spending and implement additional cost saving measures and restructuring actions or enter into new financing arrangements. We cannot be certain that we will continue to generate cash flows at or above current levels or that we will be able to obtain additional financing, if necessary, on satisfactory terms, if at all.

Liquidity

Our principal sources of liquidity as of April 29, 2016 consisted of cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments, as well as cash we expect to generate from operations.

Cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments consisted of the following (in millions):

 

 

As of April 29, 2016 and April 24, 2015, $4.8 billion and $4.7 billion, respectively, of cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments were held by various foreign subsidiaries and were generally based in U.S. dollar-denominated holdings, while $0.5 billion and $0.6 billion, respectively, were available in the U.S. Most of the amounts held outside the U.S. can be repatriated to the U.S. but, under current law, would be subject to U.S. federal, state income and foreign withholding taxes. If we were to repatriate foreign earnings to fund cash requirements in the U.S., we would incur U.S. federal and state income taxes reduced by the current amount of our U.S. federal and state tax credit carryforwards. However, our intent is to keep these funds permanently reinvested outside of the U.S., and our current plans do not contemplate a need to repatriate them to fund our U.S. operations. Our principal liquidity requirements are primarily to meet our working capital needs, support ongoing business activities, fund research and development, meet capital expenditure needs, and invest in critical or complementary technologies, and service interest and principal payments on our debt.

The principal objectives of our investment policy are the preservation of principal and maintenance of liquidity. We attempt to mitigate default risk by investing in high-quality investment grade securities, limiting the time to maturity and monitoring the counter-parties and underlying obligors closely. We believe our cash equivalents and short-term investments are liquid and accessible. We are not aware of any significant deterioration in the fair value of our cash equivalents or investments from the values reported as of April 29, 2016.

Our investment portfolio has been and will continue to be exposed to market risk due to trends in the credit and capital markets. We continue to closely monitor current economic and market events to minimize the market risk of our investment portfolio. We utilize a variety of planning and financing strategies in an effort to ensure our worldwide cash is available when and where it is needed. Based on past performance and current expectations, we believe our cash and cash equivalents, investments, cash generated from operations, and ability to access capital markets and committed credit lines will satisfy, through at least the next 12 months, our liquidity requirements, both in total and domestically, including the following: working capital needs, capital expenditures, stock repurchases, cash dividends, contractual obligations, commitments, principal and interest payments on debt, and other liquidity requirements associated with our operations. We routinely monitor our financial exposure to both sovereign and non-sovereign borrowers and counterparties.

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Senior Notes

The following table summarizes the principal amount of our Senior Notes as of April 29, 2016 (in millions):

 

 

Interest on the Senior Notes is payable semi-annually. For further information on the underlying terms, see Note 10 – Financing Arrangements of the Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements.

Short-Term Loan

In February 2016, in connection with our acquisition of SolidFire, we entered into a short-term loan that matures on November 2, 2016, that we expect to repay using funds generated by our global operations. As of April 29, 2016, $850 million of the loan principal remained outstanding. The loan is subject to the same covenants as our credit facility described below.

Credit Facility

Our credit facility, under which we may borrow up to $300 million, provides another potential source of liquidity. The credit facility is an unsecured five-year revolving credit facility that terminates on December 21, 2017 if no extensions have been requested by that time, and contains financial covenants requiring us to maintain a maximum leverage ratio and a minimum interest coverage ratio. We may also, subject to certain requirements, request an increase in the facility up to an additional $50 million and request two additional one-year extensions, subject to certain conditions. As of April 29, 2016, no borrowings were outstanding under the facility and we were in compliance with all covenants associated with the facility.

We also have an automatic shelf registration statement on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We may in the future offer an additional unspecified amount of debt, equity and other securities.

Capital Expenditure Requirements

We expect to fund our capital expenditures, including our commitments related to facilities, equipment, operating leases and internal-use software development projects over the next few years through existing cash, cash equivalents, investments and cash generated from operations. The timing and amount of our capital requirements cannot be precisely determined and will depend on a number of factors, including future demand for products, changes in the network storage industry, hiring plans and our decisions related to the financing of our facilities and equipment requirements. We anticipate capital expenditures for fiscal 2017 to be between $150 million and $200 million.

Dividends and Stock Repurchase Program

On May 25, 2016, we declared a cash dividend of $0.19 per share of common stock, payable on July 27, 2016 to holders of record as of the close of business on July 18, 2016.

As of April 29, 2016, our Board of Directors has authorized the repurchase of up to $9.6 billion of our common stock under our stock repurchase program. Under this program, we can purchase shares of our outstanding common stock through open market and privately negotiated transactions at prices deemed appropriate by our management. The stock repurchase program may be suspended or discontinued at any time. Since the May 13, 2003 inception of this program through April 29, 2016, we repurchased a total of 247 million shares of our common stock at an average price of $32.85 per share, for an aggregate purchase price of $8.1 billion. As of April 29, 2016, the remaining authorized amount for stock repurchases under this program was $1.5 billion with no termination date, which we plan to complete by May 2018.

The timing and amount of stock repurchase transactions and future dividends will depend on market conditions, corporate business and financial considerations and regulatory requirements.

March 2016 Restructuring Plan

In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2016, we initiated a restructuring plan to streamline our business and reduce operating expenses. We expect to incur approximately $45 million of additional cash expenditures in connection with this plan in the first two quarters of fiscal 2017.

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Contractual Obligations

The impact of contractual obligations on our liquidity and capital resources in future periods should be analyzed in conjunction with the factors that impact our cash flows from operations discussed previously. The following table summarizes our contractual obligations at April 29, 2016 (in millions):

 

 

 

Some of the amounts in the table above are based on management’s estimates and assumptions, including the commitment duration, the possibility of renewal or termination, anticipated actions by management and third parties and other factors. Because these estimates and assumptions are subjective, our actual future obligations may vary from those reflected in the table.

Sale-leaseback Transaction

In fiscal 2016 we entered into sale-leaseback arrangements of certain of our land and buildings, under which we leased back certain of our properties rent free over lease terms ending at various dates ranging from March 31, 2017 to December 31, 2017, unless terminated early by us. Due to the existence of a prohibited form of continuing involvement, these properties did not qualify for sale-leaseback accounting and as a result they have been accounted for as financing transactions under lease accounting standards. Under the financing method, the assets, which had a net book value of $67 million at the date of the transactions, will remain on our consolidated balance sheets and proceeds received by us from these transactions of $148 million are reported as financing obligations. At the end of each respective leaseback period, or when our continuing involvement under the leaseback agreements ends, each transaction will be reported as a non-cash sale of land and buildings and extinguishment of financing obligations, and the difference between the then net book value of the properties and the unamortized balance of the financing obligations will be recognized as a gain on sale of properties. These financing obligations are reflected as non-cash obligations in the preceding commitments table.

Financial Guarantee Instruments

In the ordinary course of business, we provide standby letters of credit or other guarantee instruments to third parties as required for certain transactions initiated either by us or our subsidiaries. As of April 29, 2016, our financial guarantees of $14 million that were not recorded on our consolidated balance sheets consisted primarily of standby letters of credit and surety bonds.

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Financing Guarantees

While most of our arrangements for sales include short-term payment terms, from time to time we provide long-term financing to creditworthy customers. We have generally sold receivables financed through these arrangements on a non-recourse basis to third party financing institutions within 10 days of the contracts’ dates of execution, and we classify the proceeds from these sales as cash flows from operating activities in our consolidated statements of cash flows. We account for the sales of these receivables as “true sales” as defined in the accounting standards on transfers of financial assets, as we are considered to have surrendered control of these financing receivables. Provided all other revenue recognition criteria have been met, we recognize product revenues for these arrangements, net of any payment discounts from financing transactions, upon product acceptance. We sold $243 million and $197 million of receivables during fiscal 2016 and 2015, respectively.

In addition, we enter into arrangements with leasing companies for the sale of our hardware systems products. These leasing companies, in turn, lease our products to end-users. The leasing companies generally have no recourse to us in the event of default by the end-user and we recognize revenue upon delivery to the end-user customer, if all other revenue recognition criteria have been met.

Some of the leasing arrangements described above have been financed on a recourse basis through third-party financing institutions. Under the terms of recourse leases, which are generally three years or less, we remain liable for the aggregate unpaid remaining lease payments to the third-party leasing companies in the event of end-user customer default. These arrangements are generally collateralized by a security interest in the underlying assets. Where we provide a guarantee for recourse leases, we defer revenues subject to the industry-specific software revenue recognition guidance and recognize revenues for non-software deliverables in accordance with our multiple deliverable revenue arrangement policy. In connection with certain recourse financing arrangements, we receive advance payments associated with undelivered elements that are subject to customer refund rights. As of April 29, 2016 and April 24, 2015, the aggregate amount by which such contingencies exceeded the associated liabilities was not significant. To date, we have not experienced material losses under our lease financing programs or other financing arrangements.

We have entered into service contracts with certain of our end-user customers that are supported by third-party financing arrangements. If a service contract is terminated as a result of our non-performance under the contract or our failure to comply with the terms of the financing arrangement, we could, under certain circumstances, be required to acquire certain assets related to the service contract or to pay the aggregate unpaid payments under such arrangements. As of April 29, 2016, we have not been required to make any payments under these arrangements, and we believe the likelihood of having to acquire a material amount of assets or make payments under these arrangements is remote. The portion of the financial arrangement that represents unearned services revenue is included in deferred revenue and financed unearned services revenue in our consolidated balance sheets.

Indemnification Agreements

We enter into indemnification agreements with third parties in the ordinary course of business. Generally, these indemnification agreements require us to reimburse losses suffered by the third-parties due to various events, such as lawsuits arising from patent or copyright infringement. These indemnification obligations are considered off-balance sheet arrangements under accounting guidance.

Legal Contingencies

We are subject to various legal proceedings and claims which arise in the normal course of business. See further details on such matters in Note 18 – Commitments and Contingencies of the Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements.

 

 

We are exposed to market risk related to fluctuations in interest rates, market prices, and foreign currency exchange rates. We use certain derivative financial instruments to manage foreign currency exchange risks. We do not use derivative financial instruments for speculative or trading purposes. All financial instruments are used in accordance with management-approved policies.

Market Risk and Market Interest Risk

Investment and Interest Income — As of April 29, 2016, we had debt investments of $2.4 billion. Our investment portfolio primarily consists of investments with original maturities greater than three months at the date of purchase, which are classified as available-for-sale investments. These investments, which consist primarily of corporate bonds, U.S. Treasury and government debt securities, commercial paper, and certificates of deposit, are subject to interest rate and interest income risk and will decrease in value if market interest rates increase. Conversely, declines in interest rates, including the impact from lower credit spreads, could have a material adverse impact on interest income for our investment portfolio. A hypothetical 100 basis point increase in market interest rates from levels as of April 29, 2016 would have resulted in a decrease in the fair value of our fixed-income securities of approximately $28 million. Volatility in market interest rates over time will cause variability in our interest income. We do not use derivative financial instruments in our investment portfolio.

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Our investment policy is to limit credit exposure through diversification and investment in highly rated securities. We further mitigate concentrations of credit risk in our investments by limiting our investments in the debt securities of a single issuer and by diversifying risk across geographies and type of issuer. We actively review, along with our investment advisors, current investment ratings, company-specific events and general economic conditions in managing our investments and in determining whether there is a significant decline in fair value that is other-than-temporary. We monitor and evaluate our investment portfolio on a quarterly basis for any other-than-temporary impairments.

Debt — As of April 29, 2016, we have outstanding $1.5 billion aggregate principal amount of Senior Notes. We carry these instruments at face value less unamortized discount on our consolidated balance sheets. Since these instruments bear interest at fixed rates, we have no financial statement risk associated with changes in interest rates. However, the fair value of these instruments fluctuates when interest rates change. See Note 10 – Financing Arrangements of the Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements for more information.

Credit Facility and Short-term Loan — We are exposed to the impact of changes in interest rates in connection with our $300 million five-year revolving credit facility and our short-term loan. Borrowings under these arrangements accrue interest at rates that vary based on certain market rates and our credit rating on our Senior Notes. Consequently, our interest expense would fluctuate with any changes in these market interest rates or in our credit rating if we were to borrow any amounts under these arrangements. As of April 29, 2016, no amounts were outstanding under the credit facility and $850 million was outstanding under the short-term loan.

Foreign Currency Exchange Rate Risk

We hedge risks associated with foreign currency transactions to minimize the impact of changes in foreign currency exchange rates on earnings. We utilize foreign currency exchange forward and option contracts to hedge against the short-term impact of foreign currency fluctuations on certain foreign currency denominated monetary assets and liabilities. We also use foreign currency exchange forward contracts to hedge foreign currency exposures related to forecasted sales transactions denominated in certain foreign currencies. These derivatives are designated and qualify as cash flow hedges under accounting guidance for derivatives and hedging.

We do not enter into foreign currency exchange contracts for speculative or trading purposes. In entering into foreign currency exchange forward and option contracts, we have assumed the risk that might arise from the possible inability of counterparties to meet the terms of the contracts. We attempt to limit our exposure to credit risk by executing foreign currency exchange contracts with creditworthy multinational commercial banks. All contracts have a maturity of less than six months. See Note 12 – Derivatives and Hedging Activities of the Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements for more information regarding our derivatives and hedging activities.

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INDEX TO CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS AND SUPPLEMENTARY DATA

 

 

 

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NETAPP, INC.

CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEETS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See accompanying notes to consolidated financial statements.

 

 

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NETAPP, INC.

CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF OPERATIONS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See accompanying notes to consolidated financial statements.

 

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NETAPP, INC.

CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF COMPREHENSIVE INCOME

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See accompanying notes to consolidated financial statements.

 

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NETAPP, INC.

CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF CASH FLOWS

 

 

See accompanying notes to consolidated financial statements.

 

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NETAPP, INC.

CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF STOCKHOLDERS’ EQUITY

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See accompanying notes to consolidated financial statements.

 

 

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NETAPP, INC.

NOTES TO CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS

 

 

1. Description of Business and Significant Accounting Policies

Description of Business —NetApp, Inc. (we, us, or the Company) provides software, systems and services to manage and store computer data. We enable enterprises, service providers, governmental organizations, and partners to envision, deploy and evolve their information technology environments and to reduce costs and risk while driving growth and success for their organizations.

Fiscal Year — Our fiscal year is reported on a 52- or 53-week year ending on the last Friday in April. An additional week is included in the first fiscal quarter approximately every six years to realign fiscal months with calendar months. Fiscal year 2016, ended on April 29, 2016, was a 53-week year. Our fiscal years 2015 and 2014, ended on April 24, 2015 and April 25, 2014, respectively, were each 52-week years. Unless otherwise stated, references to particular years, quarters, months and periods refer to the Company’s fiscal years ended on the last Friday of April and the associated quarters, months and periods of those fiscal years.

Principles of Consolidation — The consolidated financial statements include the Company and its subsidiaries. Intercompany accounts and transactions are eliminated in consolidation.

Accounting Change — During fiscal 2016, we adopted an accounting standard that simplified the presentation of deferred taxes by requiring deferred tax assets and liabilities to be classified as noncurrent in a classified statement of financial position. We adopted this accounting standard prospectively. Accordingly, the prior period amounts in our consolidated balance sheets within this Annual Report on Form 10-K were not adjusted to conform to the new accounting standard. The adoption of this accounting standard was not material to our consolidated financial statements.

Use of Estimates — The preparation of the consolidated financial statements in conformity with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America (GAAP) requires management to make estimates and assumptions that affect the reported amounts of assets and liabilities and disclosure of contingent assets and liabilities at the date of the financial statements and the reported amounts of revenues and expenses during the reporting periods. Such estimates include, but are not limited to, revenue recognition, reserves and allowances; inventory valuation and purchase order accruals; valuation of goodwill and intangibles; restructuring reserves; product warranties; employee benefit accruals; stock-based compensation; loss contingencies; investment impairments; income taxes and fair value measurements. Actual results could differ materially from those estimates.

Cash Equivalents — We consider all highly liquid debt investments with original maturities of three months or less at the time of purchase to be cash equivalents.

Available-for-Sale Investments — We classify our investments in debt securities as available-for-sale investments. Debt securities primarily consist of corporate bonds, U.S. Treasury and government debt securities and certificates of deposit. These available-for-sale investments are primarily held in the custody of a major financial institution. A specific identification method is used to determine the cost basis of debt securities sold. These investments are recorded in the consolidated balance sheets at fair value.

Unrealized gains and temporary losses, net of related taxes, are included in accumulated other comprehensive income (loss) (AOCI). Upon realization, those amounts are reclassified from AOCI to earnings. The amortization of premiums and discounts on the investments are included in our results of operations. Realized gains and losses on our available-for-sale investments are calculated based on the specific identification method.

We classify our investments as current or noncurrent based on the nature of the investments and their availability for use in current operations.

Other-than-Temporary Impairments on Investments — All of our available-for-sale investments are subject to periodic impairment review. When the fair value of a debt security is less than its amortized cost, it is deemed impaired, and we assess whether the impairment is other-than-temporary. An impairment is considered other-than-temporary if (i) we have the intent to sell the security, (ii) it is more likely than not that we will be required to sell the security before recovery of the entire amortized cost basis, or (iii) we do not expect to recover the entire amortized cost basis of the security. If impairment is considered other-than-temporary based on condition (i) or (ii) described above, the entire difference between the amortized cost and the fair value of the debt security is recognized in the results of operations. If an impairment is considered other-than-temporary based on condition (iii) described above, the amount representing credit losses (defined as the difference between the present value of the cash flows expected to be collected and the amortized cost basis of the debt security) is recognized in earnings, and the amount relating to all other factors is recognized in other comprehensive income (OCI).

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Inventories — Inventories are stated at the lower of cost or market, which approximates actual cost on a first-in, first-out basis. We write down excess and obsolete inventory based on the difference between the cost of inventory and the estimated net realizable value based upon assumptions about future demand forecasts and market conditions. At the point of a loss recognition, a new, lower cost basis for that inventory is established, and subsequent changes in facts or circumstances do not result in the restoration or increase in that newly established basis. In addition, we record a liability for firm, non-cancelable and unconditional purchase commitments with contract manufacturers and suppliers for quantities in excess of our future demand forecasts consistent with our valuation of excess and obsolete inventory.

Property and Equipment — Property and equipment are recorded at cost.

Depreciation and amortization is computed using the straight-line method, generally over the following periods:

 

 

Construction in progress will be depreciated over the estimated useful lives of the respective assets when they are ready for use. We capitalize interest on significant facility assets under construction and on significant software development projects.

Software Development Costs — The costs for the development of new software products and substantial enhancements to existing software products are expensed as incurred until technological feasibility has been established, at which time any additional costs would be capitalized in accordance with the accounting guidance for software. Because our current process for developing software is essentially completed concurrently with the establishment of technological feasibility, which occurs upon the completion of a working model, no costs have been capitalized for any of the periods presented.

Internal-Use Software Development Costs — We capitalize qualifying costs, which are incurred during the application development stage, for computer software developed or obtained for internal-use and amortize them over the software’s estimated useful life.

Business Combinations — We recognize identifiable assets acquired and liabilities assumed at their acquisition date fair values. Goodwill as of the acquisition date is measured as the excess of consideration transferred over the net of the acquisition date fair values of the assets acquired and the liabilities assumed. While we use our best estimates and assumptions as a part of the purchase price allocation process to accurately value assets acquired and liabilities assumed at the acquisition date, our estimates are inherently uncertain and subject to refinement. As a result, during the measurement period, which may be up to one year from the acquisition date, we record adjustments to the assets acquired and liabilities assumed, with the corresponding offset to goodwill to the extent that we identify adjustments to the preliminary purchase price allocation. Upon the conclusion of the measurement period or final determination of the values of assets acquired or liabilities assumed, whichever comes first, any subsequent adjustments are recorded to our consolidated statements of operations.

Goodwill and Purchased Intangible Assets — Goodwill is recorded when the consideration paid for an acquisition exceeds the fair value of net tangible and intangible assets acquired. Purchased intangible assets with finite lives are amortized on a straight-line basis over their economic lives of three to six years for developed technology, two to eight years for customer contracts/relationships, two to three years for covenants not to compete and two to seven years for trademarks and trade names as we believe this method most closely reflects the pattern in which the economic benefits of the assets will be consumed. In-process research and development is accounted for as an indefinite lived intangible asset and is assessed for potential impairment annually until development is complete or when events or circumstances indicate that their carrying amounts might be impaired. Upon completion of development, in-process research and development is accounted for as a finite-lived intangible asset.

The carrying value of goodwill is tested for impairment on an annual basis in the fourth quarter of our fiscal year, or more frequently if we believe indicators of impairment exist. Triggering events for impairment reviews may be indicators such as adverse industry or economic trends, restructuring actions, lower projections of profitability, or a sustained decline in our market capitalization. The performance of the test involves a two-step process. The first step requires comparing the fair value of each of our reporting units to its carrying amount, including goodwill. We have three reporting units, the fair values of which are determined based on an allocation of our entity level market capitalization, as determined through quoted market prices. A potential impairment exists if the fair value of a reporting unit is lower than its carrying amount. The second step of the process is only performed if a potential impairment exists, and it involves determining the difference between the fair value of the reporting unit’s net assets other than goodwill and the fair value of the reporting unit. If that difference is less than the net book value of goodwill, an impairment

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exists and is recorded. We have not been required to perform this second step of the process because the fair values of each of our reporting units have substantially exceeded their respective carrying amounts in all periods presented.

Impairment of Long-Lived Assets — We review the carrying values of long-lived assets whenever events and circumstances, such as reductions in demand, lower projections of profitability, significant changes in the manner of our use of acquired assets, or significant negative industry or economic trends, indicate that the net book value of an asset may not be recovered through expected future cash flows from its use and eventual disposition. If this review indicates that there is an impairment, the impaired asset is written down to its fair value, which is typically calculated using: (i) quoted market prices and/or (ii) expected future cash flows utilizing a discount rate. Our estimates regarding future anticipated cash flows, the remaining economic life of the products and technologies, or both, may differ from those used to assess the recoverability of assets. In that event, impairment charges or shortened useful lives of certain long-lived assets may be required, resulting in charges to our consolidated statements of operations when such determinations are made.

Derivative Instruments — Our derivative instruments, which are carried at fair value in our consolidated balance sheets, consist of foreign currency exchange contracts as described below:

Balance Sheet Hedges — We utilize foreign currency exchange forward and option contracts to hedge against the short-term impact of foreign currency exchange rate fluctuations related to certain foreign currency denominated monetary assets and liabilities, primarily intercompany receivables and payables. These derivative instruments are not designated as hedging instruments and do not subject us to material balance sheet risk due to exchange rate movements because the gains and losses on these contracts are intended to offset the gains and losses in the underlying foreign currency denominated monetary assets and liabilities being hedged, and the net amount is included in earnings.

Cash Flow Hedges — We utilize foreign currency exchange forward contracts to hedge foreign currency exchange exposures related to forecasted sales transactions denominated in certain foreign currencies. These derivative instruments are designated and qualify as cash flow hedges and in general, closely match the underlying forecasted transactions in duration. The effective portion of the contracts’ gains and losses resulting from changes in fair value is recorded in AOCI until the forecasted transaction is recognized in the consolidated statements of operations. When the forecasted transactions occur, we reclassify the related gains or losses on the cash flow hedges into net revenues. If the underlying forecasted transactions do not occur, or it becomes probable that they will not occur within the defined hedge period, the gains or losses on the related cash flow hedges are reclassified from AOCI and recognized immediately in earnings. We measure the effectiveness of hedges of forecasted transactions on a monthly basis by comparing the fair values of the designated foreign currency exchange forward purchase contracts with the fair values of the forecasted transactions. Any ineffective portion of the derivative hedging gain or loss, as well as changes in the fair value of the derivative’s time value (which are excluded from the assessment of hedge effectiveness), are recognized in earnings.

Factors that could have an impact on the effectiveness of our hedging programs include the accuracy of forecasts and the volatility of foreign currency markets. These programs reduce, but do not entirely eliminate, the impact of currency exchange movements. Currently, we do not enter into any foreign currency exchange forward contracts to hedge exposures related to firm commitments. Cash flows from our derivative programs are included under operating activities in the consolidated statements of cash flows.

Revenue Recognition — We recognize revenue when:

·Persuasive evidence of an arrangement exists. Customarily we have a purchase order and/or contract prior to recognizing revenue on an arrangement from our end users, customers, value-added resellers or distributors.

·Delivery has occurred. Our product is physically delivered to our customers. We typically do not allow for restocking rights with any of our value-added resellers or distributors. Products shipped with acceptance criteria or return rights are not recognized as revenue until all criteria are achieved. We do not recognize revenue if undelivered products or services exist that are essential to the functionality of the delivered product in an arrangement.

·The fee is fixed or determinable. Arrangements with payment terms extending beyond our standard terms, conditions and practices are not considered to be fixed or determinable. Revenue from such arrangements is recognized at the earlier of customer payment or when the fees become due and payable. We typically do not allow for price-protection rights with any of our value-added resellers or distributors.

·Collection is reasonably assured. If there is considerable doubt surrounding the creditworthiness of a customer at the outset of an arrangement, the associated revenue is deferred and recognized upon cash receipt.

The hardware systems and software components essential to the functionality of the hardware systems are considered non-software deliverables and therefore are not subject to industry-specific software revenue recognition guidance.

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Our product revenues also include revenues from the sale of non-essential software products. Non-essential software sales generally include a perpetual license to our software. Non-essential software sales are subject to the industry-specific software revenue recognition guidance.

Our multiple element arrangements may include our systems, software maintenance, hardware maintenance and other services. Software maintenance contracts entitle our customers to receive unspecified product upgrades and enhancements on a when-and-if-available basis, and patch releases. Hardware maintenance services include contracts for extended warranty, technical support and minimum response times. Other services include professional services and customer education and training services. Revenues from software maintenance and hardware maintenance services are recognized ratably over the contractual term, generally from one to five years. We also offer extended warranty contracts (which extend our standard parts warranty and may include premium hardware maintenance) at the end of the original warranty term; revenues from these contracts are recognized ratably over their respective contract term. We sell professional services either on a time and materials basis or under fixed price projects; we recognize revenue for these services as they are performed.

For multiple element arrangements, we allocate revenue to the software deliverables and the non-software deliverables as a group based on the relative selling prices of all of the deliverables in the arrangement. The selling price for each element is based upon the following selling price hierarchy: vendor specific objective evidence of selling price (VSOE) if available, third party evidence (TPE) if VSOE is not available, or estimated selling price (ESP) if neither VSOE nor TPE are available. ESP is generally evidenced by a majority of historical transactions falling within a reasonable price range. We also consider multiple factors, including, but not limited to, cost of products, gross margin objectives, historical pricing practices, type of customer and distribution channels. For our non-software deliverables, we generally allocate the arrangement consideration based on the relative selling price of the deliverables using ESP. For our software maintenance services, we generally use VSOE. When we are unable to establish VSOE for our software maintenance services, we use ESP in our allocation of arrangement consideration.

VSOE is based upon the normal pricing and discounting practices for those services when sold separately. VSOE is generally evidenced by a substantial majority of historical stand-alone transactions falling within a reasonably narrow range. In addition, we consider major service type, customer type, and other variables in determining VSOE.

When VSOE cannot be established, we attempt to establish the selling price of each element based on third party evidence of selling price (TPE). Generally, we are not able to determine TPE because our go-to-market strategy differs from that of our peers and our offerings contain a significant level of differentiation such that the comparable pricing of products with similar functionality cannot be obtained.

We regularly review VSOE, TPE, and ESP and maintain internal controls over the establishment and updates of these estimates.

For our software deliverables, we use the residual method to recognize revenue when an arrangement includes one or more elements to be delivered at a future date and VSOE of all undelivered elements exists. Typically, only software maintenance, hardware maintenance and/or other services remain undelivered after the product is delivered. Under the residual method, the fair value of the undelivered elements is deferred and the remaining portion of the consideration is recognized as product revenues for delivered elements. If evidence of the fair value of one or more undelivered elements does not exist, all revenue is generally deferred until the earlier of when delivery of those elements occurs or when fair value can be established. In instances where the only undelivered element without fair value is software maintenance, the entire arrangement is recognized ratably over the maintenance period.

We record reductions to revenue for estimated sales returns at the time of shipment. Sales returns are estimated based on historical sales returns, current trends, and our expectations regarding future experience. We monitor and analyze the accuracy of sales returns estimates by reviewing actual returns and adjust them for future expectations. Additionally, distributors and retail partners participate in various marketing and other programs, and we record estimated accruals and allowances for these programs. We accrue for these programs based on contractual terms and historical experience. Sales and value added taxes collected from customers and remitted to governmental authorities are presented on a net basis in the accompanying consolidated statements of operations.

Product Warranties — Estimated future hardware and software warranty costs are recorded as a cost of product revenues at the time of product shipment, based on historical and projected warranty claim rates, historical and projected cost-per-claim and knowledge of specific product failures that are outside our typical experience. Factors that affect our warranty liability include the number of installed units subject to warranty protection, product failure rates, and estimated materials, distribution and labor costs. We assess the adequacy of our warranty accrual each quarter and adjust the amount as considered necessary.

Foreign Currency Translation — For international subsidiaries whose functional currency is the local currency, gains and losses resulting from translation of these foreign currency financial statements into U.S. dollars are recorded in AOCI. For subsidiaries where the functional currency is the U.S. dollar, gains and losses resulting from the process of remeasuring foreign currency financial statements into U.S. dollars are included in other income (expense), net.

Benefit Plans — We have a postretirement health care plan and various international defined benefit plans for certain of our employees. We record actuarial gains and losses within AOCI and amortize net gains or losses in excess of 10 percent of the greater of

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the market value of plan assets or the plans' projected benefit obligation on a straight-line basis over the remaining estimated service life of plan participants. The measurement date for all defined benefit plans is our fiscal year end.

Stock-Based Compensation — We measure and recognize stock-based compensation for all stock-based awards, including employee stock options, restricted stock units (RSUs), including time-based RSUs and performance-based RSUs (PBRSUs), and rights to purchase shares under our employee stock purchase plan (ESPP), based on their estimated fair value, and recognize the costs in our financial statements using the single option straight-line approach over the requisite service period for the entire award.

The fair value of employee time-based RSUs is equal to the market value of our common stock on the grant date of the award, less the present value of expected dividends during the vesting period, discounted at a risk-free interest rate. The fair value of PBRSUs is measured using a Monte Carlo simulation model on the date of grant.

The fair value of each award is estimated on the grant date and is not remeasured as a result of subsequent stock price fluctuations. Our expected term assumption is based primarily on historical exercise and post-vesting forfeiture experience. Our stock price volatility assumption is based on a combination of our historical and implied volatility. The risk-free interest rates are based upon United States Treasury bills with equivalent expected terms, and the expected dividends are based on our history and expected dividend payouts.

We estimate the number of stock-based awards that will be forfeited due to employee turnover. Our forfeiture assumption is primarily based on historical experience.

Income Taxes — Deferred income tax assets and liabilities are provided for temporary differences that will result in tax deductions or income in future periods, as well as the future benefit of tax credit carryforwards. A valuation allowance reduces tax assets to their estimated realizable value.

We recognize the tax liability for uncertain income tax positions on the income tax return based on the two-step process prescribed in the interpretation. The first step is to determine whether it is more likely than not that each income tax position would be sustained upon audit. The second step is to estimate and measure the tax benefit as the amount that has a greater than 50% likelihood of being realized upon ultimate settlement with the tax authority. Estimating these amounts requires us to determine the probability of various possible outcomes. We evaluate these uncertain tax positions on a quarterly basis. We recognize interest and penalties related to unrecognized tax benefits within the income tax expense line in the accompanying consolidated statements of operations.

Tax attributes related to the exercise of employee stock options are not realized until they result in a reduction of taxes payable. We do not include unrealized stock option attributes as components of our gross deferred tax assets and corresponding valuation allowance disclosures.

Net Income per Share — Basic net income per share is computed by dividing income available to common stockholders by the weighted-average number of common shares outstanding. Diluted net income per share is computed giving effect to all dilutive potential shares that were outstanding during the period. Potential dilutive common shares consist primarily of outstanding stock options, shares to be purchased under our employee stock purchase plan and unvested RSUs.

Treasury Stock — We account for treasury stock under the cost method. Upon the retirement of treasury stock, we allocate the value of treasury shares between common stock, additional paid-in capital and retained earnings.

2. Concentration of Risk

Financial instruments that potentially subject us to concentrations of credit risk consist primarily of cash equivalents, investments, foreign currency exchange contracts and accounts receivable. Cash equivalents and short-term investments consist primarily of corporate bonds, U.S. Treasury and government debt securities and certificates of deposit, all of which are considered high investment grade. Our policy is to limit the amount of credit exposure through diversification and investment in highly rated securities. We further mitigate concentrations of credit risk in our investments by limiting our investments in the debt securities of a single issuer and by diversifying risk across geographies and type of issuer.

By entering into foreign currency exchange contracts, we have assumed the risk that might arise from the possible inability of counterparties to meet the terms of their contracts. The counterparties to these contracts are major multinational commercial banks, and we do not expect any losses as a result of counterparty defaults.

We sell our products primarily to large organizations in different industries and geographies. We do not require collateral or other security to support accounts receivable. In addition, we maintain an allowance for potential credit losses. To reduce credit risk, we perform ongoing credit evaluations on our customers’ financial condition. We establish an allowance for doubtful accounts based upon factors surrounding the credit risk of customers, historical trends and other information and, to date, such losses have been within management’s expectations. Concentrations of credit risk with respect to trade accounts receivable are limited due to the wide variety of customers who are dispersed across many geographic regions.

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There are no concentrations of business transacted with a particular market that would severely impact our business in the near term. However, we rely on a limited number of suppliers for certain key components and a few key contract manufacturers to manufacture most of our products; any disruption or termination of these arrangements could materially adversely affect our operating results.

 

3. Recent Accounting Standards Not Yet Effective

In May 2014 the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) issued an accounting standards update related to the recognition and reporting of revenue that establishes a comprehensive new revenue recognition model designed to depict the transfer of goods or services to a customer in an amount that reflects the consideration the entity expects to receive in exchange for those goods or services. The guidance allows for the use of either the full or modified retrospective transition method. This new standard, as amended, will be effective for us in our first quarter of fiscal 2019, although adoption in our first quarter of fiscal 2018 is permitted. We are currently evaluating the impact of this new standard on our consolidated financial statements, as well as which transition method and our planned adoption date.

In February 2016, the FASB issued an accounting standards update on financial reporting for leasing arrangements, including requiring lessees to recognize an operating lease with a term greater than one year on their balance sheet as a right-of-use asset and corresponding lease liability, measured at the present value of the lease payments. This new standard will be effective for us in our first quarter of fiscal 2020, although early adoption is permitted. Upon adoption, lessees must apply a modified retrospective transition approach for leases existing at, or entered into after, the beginning of the earliest comparative period presented in the financial statements. We are currently evaluating the impact of this new standard on our consolidated financial statements, as well as our planned adoption date.

In March 2016, the FASB issued an accounting standards update that impacts several aspects of the accounting for stock-based awards, including the income tax consequences, classification of awards as either equity or liabilities, and classification of activity in the statement of cash flows. The standard also provides for the ability to make an entity-wide accounting policy election to either estimate forfeitures, consistent with current GAAP, or to account for forfeitures as they occur. This new standard will be effective for us in our first quarter of fiscal 2018, although early adoption is permitted with a requirement that all amendments be adopted in the same period. We are currently evaluating the impact of this new standard on our consolidated financial statements, our planned adoption date, and the method of adoption for each amendment.

 

4. Statements of Cash Flows Additional Information

Non-cash investing activities and supplemental cash flow information are as follows (in millions):

 

 

5. Business Combinations

SolidFire Acquisition

On February 2, 2016, we acquired all of the outstanding shares of privately-held SolidFire, Inc. (SolidFire), a maker of all-flash storage systems based in Colorado, for $850 million in cash. This acquisition extends our position in the all-flash array market by adding new flash offerings that will enhance our ability to deliver customers all-flash storage with a webscale architecture that simplifies data center operations and enables rapid deployments of new applications.

The acquired assets and assumed liabilities were recorded at their estimated fair values. We determined the estimated fair values with the assistance of valuations and appraisals performed by third party specialists and estimates made by management. We expect to realize revenue synergies, leverage and expand the existing SolidFire sales channels and product development resources, and utilize the existing workforce. We also anticipate opportunities for growth through the ability to leverage additional future products and

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capabilities. These factors, among others, contributed to a purchase price in excess of the estimated fair value of SolidFire’s identifiable net assets acquired, and as a result, we have recorded goodwill in connection with this acquisition. The U.S. goodwill is not deductible for income tax purposes.

The preliminary fair values of assets acquired and liabilities assumed on the closing date are summarized as follows (in millions):

 

 

The components of intangible assets acquired were as follows (in millions, except useful life):

 

 

N/A - Not applicable

 

In-process research and development was valued with input from valuation specialists using the multi-period excess earnings method under the income approach by discounting forecasted cash flows directly related to the products expected to result from the associated project, net of returns on contributory assets. The in-process development project acquired related to a major new generation of the SolidFire technology platform.

The following unaudited pro forma condensed combined financial information gives effect to the acquisition of SolidFire as if it had been consummated on April 26, 2014. The unaudited pro forma condensed combined financial information is presented for informational purposes only, and is not intended to represent or be indicative of the results of operations of the Company that would have been reported had the acquisition occurred on April 26, 2014 and should not be taken as representative of future consolidated results of operations of the combined company (in millions).

 

Adjustments have been reflected in the unaudited pro forma condensed combined information to include the amortization of identifiable intangible assets, purchase accounting adjustments to deferred revenue, interest expense related to the associated financing arrangement, costs directly attributable to the acquisition and impacts to our provision for income taxes as a result of the acquisition. Pro forma net revenues were not materially different than those presented in the consolidated statements of operations.

 

Fiscal 2015 Acquisitions

On October 27, 2014, we completed the acquisition of certain assets related to Riverbed Technology, Inc.’s SteelStore product line for $79 million in cash. The SteelStore product line supports leading backup applications and cloud providers so that customers have a choice in how they extend their existing data protection infrastructure into the cloud.

In addition, on the same date, we acquired certain intangible assets from a privately-held software developer for $6 million in cash.

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Following are the fair values of net assets acquired as of the closing date (in millions):

 

 

The results of operations related to these acquisitions have been included in our consolidated statements of operations from the acquisition date. Pro forma results of operations have not been presented because the acquisitions were not material to our results of operations.

 

6. Goodwill and Purchased Intangible Assets, Net

Goodwill activity is summarized as follows (in millions):

 

  

Purchased intangible assets are summarized below (in millions):

 

 

During fiscal 2016, we recorded a charge of $11 million to fully impair developed technology related to our fiscal 2013 acquisition of CacheIQ as a result of our discontinued use of such technology. The impairment charge is included in accumulated amortization in the table above.

Amortization expense for purchased intangible assets is summarized below (in millions):

 

 

As of April 29, 2016, future amortization expense related to purchased intangible assets is as follows (in millions):

 

 

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7. Balance Sheet Details

Cash and cash equivalents (in millions):

 

Inventories (in millions):

 

 

Other current assets (in millions):

 

 

Property and equipment, net (in millions):

 

 

On April 19, 2016, we sold certain buildings and land in Sunnyvale, California which had a net book value of $118 million at the time of sale, for $250 million in cash. As described in Note 10 – Financing Arrangements, certain of the properties did not qualify as sales under accounting standards due to continuing involvement related to leaseback arrangements. The remaining properties, which had a net book value of $51 million and related sales proceeds of $102 million, were recognized as sales, resulting in a gain of $51 million in fiscal 2016.

Depreciation and amortization expense related to property and equipment, net is summarized below (in millions):

 

 

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Other non-current assets (in millions):

 

 

Accrued expenses (in millions):

 

 

Product warranty liabilities:

Equipment and software systems sales include a standard product warranty. The following tables summarize the activity related to product warranty liabilities and their balances as reported in our consolidated balance sheets (in millions):

 

 

 

Warranty expense accrued during the period includes amounts accrued for systems at the time of shipment, adjustments for changes in estimated costs for warranties on systems shipped in the period and changes in estimated costs for warranties on systems shipped in prior periods.

 

Deferred revenue and financed unearned services revenue (in millions):

 

 

Deferred product revenue represents unrecognized revenue related to undelivered product commitments and other product deliveries that have not met all revenue recognition criteria. Deferred services revenue represents customer payments made in advance for services, which include software and hardware maintenance contracts and other services. Financed unearned services revenue

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represents undelivered services for which cash has been received under certain third-party financing arrangements. See Note 18 for additional information related to these arrangements.

8. Other income (expense), net

Other income (expense), net consists of the following (in millions):

 

 

9. Financial Instruments and Fair Value Measurements

The accounting guidance for fair value measurements provides a framework for measuring fair value on either a recurring or nonrecurring basis, whereby the inputs used in valuation techniques are assigned a hierarchical level. The following are the three levels of inputs to measure fair value:

Level 1: Observable inputs that reflect quoted prices (unadjusted) for identical assets or liabilities in active markets.

Level 2: Inputs that reflect quoted prices for identical assets or liabilities in less active markets; quoted prices for similar assets or liabilities in active markets; benchmark yields, reported trades, broker/dealer quotes, inputs other than quoted prices that are observable for the assets or liabilities; or inputs that are derived principally from or corroborated by observable market data by correlation or other means.

Level 3: Unobservable inputs that reflect our own assumptions incorporated in valuation techniques used to measure fair value. These assumptions are required to be consistent with market participant assumptions that are reasonably available.

We consider an active market to be one in which transactions for the asset or liability occur with sufficient frequency and volume to provide pricing information on an ongoing basis, and consider an inactive market to be one in which there are infrequent or few transactions for the asset or liability, the prices are not current, or price quotations vary substantially either over time or among market makers. Where appropriate, our own or the counterparty’s non-performance risk is considered in measuring the fair values of liabilities and assets, respectively.

 

Investments

The following is a summary of our investments (in millions):

 

 

As of April 29, 2016 and April 24, 2015, gross unrealized losses related to individual securities were not significant.

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The following table presents the contractual maturities of our debt investments as of April 29, 2016 (in millions):

 

 

Actual maturities may differ from the contractual maturities because borrowers may have the right to call or prepay certain obligations.

Fair Value of Financial Instruments

The following table summarizes our financial assets and liabilities measured at fair value on a recurring basis (in millions):

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Our Level 2 debt instruments are held by a custodian who prices some of the investments using standard inputs in various asset price models or obtains investment prices from third-party pricing providers that incorporate standard inputs in various asset price models. These pricing providers utilize the most recent observable market information in pricing these securities or, if specific prices are not available for these securities, use other observable inputs like market transactions involving identical or comparable securities. We review Level 2 inputs and fair value for reasonableness and the values may be further validated by comparison to multiple independent pricing sources. In addition, we review third-party pricing provider models, key inputs and assumptions and understand the pricing processes at our third-party providers in determining the overall reasonableness of the fair value of our Level 2 debt instruments. As of April 29, 2016 and April 24, 2015, we have not made any adjustments to the prices obtained from our third-party pricing providers.

Fair Value of Long-Term Debt

As of April 29, 2016 and April 24, 2015, the fair value of our long-term debt was approximately $1,519 million and $1,524 million, respectively. The fair value of our long-term debt was based on observable market prices in a less active market. All of our debt obligations are categorized as Level 2 instruments.

 

 

10. Financing Arrangements

Long-Term Debt

The following table summarizes information relating to our long-term debt (in millions, except interest rates):

 

 

Senior Notes

In June 2014, we issued $500 million aggregate par value of 3.375% Senior Notes due June 15, 2021, and received proceeds of approximately $495 million, net of discount and issuance costs. Our 2.00% Senior Notes and 3.25% Senior Notes, with a par value of $750 million and $250 million, respectively, were issued in December 2012. We collectively refer to such long-term debt as our Senior Notes. Interest on our Senior Notes is paid semi-annually on June 15 and December 15. Our Senior Notes, which are unsecured, unsubordinated obligations, rank equally in right of payment with any future senior unsecured indebtedness.

We may redeem the Senior Notes in whole or in part, at any time at our option at specified redemption prices. In addition, upon the occurrence of certain change of control triggering events, we may be required to repurchase the Senior Notes under specified terms. The Senior Notes also include covenants that limit our ability to incur debt secured by liens on assets or on shares of stock or indebtedness of our subsidiaries; to engage in certain sale and lease-back transactions; and to consolidate, merge or sell all or substantially all of our assets. As of April 29, 2016, we were in compliance with all covenants associated with the Senior Notes.

As of April 29, 2016, our aggregate future principal debt maturities are as follows (in millions):

 

 

1.75% Convertible Senior Notes due 2013 settled in June 2013

On June 10, 2008, we issued $1,265 million aggregate principal amount of 1.75% Convertible Senior Notes (the Convertible Notes) that matured in June 2013. Upon maturity, the Convertible Notes were converted into shares of common stock at a conversion rate of 31.40 shares of common stock per $1,000 principal amount of the Convertible Notes (which represented the effective

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conversion price of $31.85 per share). Upon conversion in June 2013, the holders received cash for the principal amount of the Convertible Notes and an aggregate of 5 million shares of common stock for the $179 million excess of the conversion value over the principal amount.

We separately accounted for the liability and equity components of the Convertible Notes. The initial debt component of the Convertible Notes was valued at $1,017 million based on the contractual cash flows discounted at an appropriate comparable market non-convertible debt borrowing rate at the date of issuance of 6.31%, with the equity component representing the residual amount of the proceeds of $248 million which was recorded as a debt discount. Issuance costs were allocated pro-rata based on the relative initial carrying amounts of the debt and equity components. As a result, $5 million of the issuance costs was allocated to the equity component of the Convertible Notes, and $21 million of the issuance costs remained classified as other non-current assets. The debt discount and the issuance costs allocated to the debt component were amortized as additional interest expense over the term of the Convertible Notes using the effective interest method.

The interest expense recognized on the Convertible Notes consisted of the following (in millions):

 

 

Concurrent with the issuance of the Convertible Notes, we entered into arrangements to buy up to approximately 32 million shares of our common stock, at a price of $31.85 per share. During fiscal 2014, concurrent with the repayment and conversion of the Convertible Notes, we exercised the Convertible Note hedges which were net settled for an aggregate of 4 million shares from the counterparties. We also entered into separate transactions in which we sold warrants to acquire 40 million shares of our common stock at an exercise price of $41.28 per share. During fiscal 2014, 32 million warrants were exercised at a weighted-average price of $43.09 and were net settled with 1 million shares of our common stock, equal to the difference between the market price on the date of exercise and the exercise price of the warrants on their respective exercise dates, and the remaining warrants expired unexercised.

Credit Facility

In December 2012, as amended in February 2016, we entered into a credit agreement with a syndicated group of lenders that is scheduled to expire on December 21, 2017 and provides for an unsecured $300 million revolving credit facility that is comprised of revolving loans, Eurocurrency loans and/or swingline loans. The credit facility includes a $100 million foreign currency sub-facility, a $50 million letter of credit sub-facility and a $10 million swingline sub-facility available on same-day notice. Available borrowings under the credit facility are reduced by the amount of any outstanding borrowings on the sub-facilities. We may also, subject to certain requirements, request an increase in the facility up to an additional $50 million and request two additional one-year extensions, subject to certain conditions. The proceeds from the facility may be used by us for general corporate purposes.

Borrowings under the facility, except for swingline loans, accrue interest in arrears at an alternate base rate as defined in the credit agreement or, at our option, an adjusted London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) plus in each case, a spread (based on our public debt ratings and the type of loan) ranging from 0.2% to 1.2%. Swingline borrowings accrue interest at an alternate base rate. In addition, we are required to pay fees to maintain the credit facility, whether or not we have outstanding borrowings. The facility contains financial covenants requiring us to maintain a maximum leverage ratio of not more than 3.0:1.0 and a minimum interest coverage ratio of not less than 3.5:1.0. The facility contains customary affirmative and negative covenants, including covenants that limit our ability to incur debt secured by liens on assets or indebtedness of our subsidiaries and to consolidate, merge or sell all or substantially all of our assets. As of April 29, 2016, no borrowings were outstanding under the facility and we were in compliance with all covenants associated with the facility.

Short-Term Loan

In connection with the SolidFire acquisition, we entered into a short-term loan of $870 million that matures on November 2, 2016, of which we repaid $20 million in fiscal 2016. We may repay the loan before its maturity without penalty; however, we may not reborrow any borrowings that were repaid under the term loan agreement. As specified in the term loan agreement, interest on the outstanding borrowings accrues at an adjusted LIBOR plus a spread (based on our public debt ratings) or, at our option, a base rate. The interest rate on the loan as of April 29, 2016 was 1.57%. We may, from time to time, elect to convert the outstanding loan from one rate to another. We expect to repay the loan in full on or before the maturity date using funds generated from our global operations. The loan is subject to the same covenants as our credit facility.

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Sale-leaseback Transactions

As discussed in Note 7 – Balance Sheet Details, in fiscal 2016 we entered into a sale-leaseback arrangement of certain of our land and buildings, under which we leased back certain of our properties rent free over lease terms ending at various dates ranging from March 31, 2017 to December 31, 2017, unless terminated early by us. Due to the existence of a prohibited form of continuing involvement, these properties did not qualify for sale-leaseback accounting and as a result they have been accounted for as financing transactions under lease accounting standards. Under the financing method, the assets, which had a net book value of $67 million at the date of the transactions, will remain on our consolidated balance sheets and proceeds received by us from these transactions of $148 million are reported as financing obligations. At the end of each respective leaseback period, or when our continuing involvement under the leaseback agreements ends, each transaction will be reported as a non-cash sale of land and buildings and extinguishment of financing obligations, and the difference between the then net book value of the properties and the unamortized balance of the financing obligations will be recognized as a gain on sale of properties.

 

 

 

11. Stockholders’ Equity

Equity Incentive Programs

The 1999 Plan — As most recently amended on September 11, 2015, the 1999 Stock Option Plan (the Plan) comprises five separate equity incentive programs: (i) the Discretionary Option Grant Program under which options may be granted to eligible individuals at a fixed price per share; (ii) the Stock Appreciation Rights Program under which eligible persons may be granted stock appreciation rights that allow individuals to receive the appreciation in fair market value of the shares; (iii) the Stock Issuance Program under which eligible individuals may be issued shares of common stock directly; (iv) the Performance Share and Performance Unit Program under which eligible persons may be granted performance shares or performance units which result in payment to the participant only if performance goals or other vesting criteria are achieved and (v) the Automatic Award Program under which nonemployee board members automatically receive equity grants at designated intervals over their period of board service. The Plan expires in August 2019.

Under the Plan, the Board of Directors may grant to employees, nonemployee directors, consultants and independent advisors options to purchase shares of our common stock during their period of service. The exercise price for an incentive stock option and a nonstatutory option cannot be less than 100% of the fair market value of the common stock on the grant date. Options granted under the Plan generally vest over a four-year period. Options granted generally have a term of seven years after the grant date, subject to earlier termination upon the occurrence of certain events. The Plan prohibits the repricing of any outstanding stock option or stock appreciation right after it has been granted or to cancel any outstanding stock option or stock appreciation right and immediately replace it with a new stock option or stock appreciation right with a lower exercise price unless approved by stockholders. RSUs granted under the Plan include time-based RSUs that generally vest over a four-year period with 25% vesting on each anniversary of the grant date. The Compensation Committee of the Board of Directors (the Compensation Committee) has the discretion to use different vesting schedules. In addition, performance-based RSUs may be granted under the Plan and are subject to performance criteria and vesting terms specified by the Compensation Committee.

Under the Plan, the number of shares reserved for issuance is reduced by two shares for every share subject to a full value award, which are specified to be grants that are in the form of performance shares and/or performance unit awards, stock, restricted stock or restricted stock units. The Plan (i) limits the number of shares that may be granted pursuant to awards under the Stock Issuance Program to a participant in any calendar year to 1 million, (ii) limits the initial value of performance units a participant may receive to not more than $5 million and (iii) limits the number of performance shares a participant may receive in a calendar year to 1 million.

During fiscal 2016, the shares reserved for issuance under the Plan were increased by approximately 16 million shares. As of April 29, 2016, 23 million shares were available for grant under the Plan.

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Stock Options

The following table summarizes activity related to our stock options (in millions, except for exercise price and contractual term):

 

The aggregate intrinsic value represents the pre-tax difference between the exercise price of stock options and the quoted market price of our stock on that day for all in-the-money options.

Additional information related to our stock options is summarized below (in millions):

 

 

Restricted Stock Units

In fiscal 2016, we granted PBRSUs to certain of our executives. Each PBRSU has performance-based vesting criteria (in addition to the service based vesting criteria) such that the PBRSU cliff-vests at the end of either an approximate two year or three year performance period, which began on the date specified in the grant agreement and ends the last day of fiscal 2017 or 2018, respectively. The number of shares of common stock that will be issued to settle the PBRSUs at the end of the applicable performance and service period will range from 0% to 200% of a target number of shares originally granted, and will depend upon our Total Stockholder Return (TSR) as compared to an index TSR (each expressed as a growth rate percentage) calculated as of the applicable period end date. The fair values of the PBRSUs were fixed at grant date and the related aggregate compensation cost of $20 million is being recognized, adjusted for forfeitures, over the shorter of the remaining applicable performance or service periods. As of April 29, 2016, there were approximately 500 thousand PBRSUs outstanding.

In fiscal 2016, 5 million time-based RSUs granted will vest at 50% annually over two years. All other time-based RSUs will vest over four years.

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The following table summarizes activity related to RSUs, including PBRSUs, (in millions, except for fair value):

 

 

We primarily use the net share settlement approach upon vesting, where a portion of the shares are withheld as settlement of statutory employee withholding taxes, which decreases the shares issued to the employee by a corresponding value. The number and value of the shares netted for employee taxes are summarized in the table below (in millions):

 

 

Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Eligible employees are offered shares through a 24-month offering period, which consists of four consecutive 6-month purchase periods. Employees may purchase a limited number of shares of the Company’s stock at a discount of up to 15% of the lesser of the market value at the beginning of the offering period or the end of each 6-month purchase period. On September 11, 2015, the ESPP was amended to increase the shares reserved for issuance by 5 million shares of common stock. As of April 29, 2016, 11 million shares were available for issuance. The following table summarizes activity related to the purchase rights issued under the ESPP (in millions):

 

 

Stock-Based Compensation Expense

Stock-based compensation expense is included in the consolidated statements of operations as follows (in millions):

 

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As of April 29, 2016, total unrecognized compensation expense related to our equity awards was $310 million, which is expected to be recognized on a straight-line basis over a weighted-average remaining service period of 1.8 years.

Total income tax benefit associated with employee stock transactions and recognized in stockholders’ equity were as follows (in millions):

 

 

Valuation Assumptions

The valuation of stock options, RSUs and ESPP purchase rights and the underlying weighted-average assumptions are summarized as follows:

 

 

N/A - Not applicable. No options were granted in fiscal 2016.

 

In connection with our acquisition of SolidFire, we assumed all of the then outstanding unvested options to purchase SolidFire common stock and converted those into unvested options to purchase 2 million shares of our common stock. The weighted average assumptions used to value these options, as of the acquisition date, were an expected term of 4.3 years, risk-free interest rate of 1.1%, expected volatility of 31% and expected dividend yield of 3.3%. The weighted average fair value per share of these options was $14.32.

 

Stock Repurchase Program

As of April 29, 2016, our Board of Directors has authorized the repurchase of up to $9.6 billion of our common stock. Under this program, which we may suspend or discontinue at any time, we may purchase shares of our outstanding common stock through open market and privately negotiated transactions at prices deemed appropriate by our management.

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The following table summarizes activity related to this program (in millions, except per share amounts):

 

 

The aggregate purchase price of our stock repurchases for fiscal 2016 consisted of $960 million of open market purchases, of which, $763 million and $197 million was allocated to additional paid-in capital and retained earnings, respectively.

Since the May 13, 2003 inception of our stock repurchase program through April 29, 2016, we repurchased a total of 247 million shares of our common stock at an average price of $32.85 per share, for an aggregate purchase price of $8.1 billion.

 

Accelerated Share Repurchase Agreement

In fiscal 2014, we entered into a collared Accelerated Share Repurchase (ASR) with a third party under which we prepaid $750 million to purchase shares of our common stock. The aggregate number of shares ultimately purchased was determined based on the volume weighted-average share price of our common stock over a specified period of time. This contract settled in fiscal 2014, resulting in the repurchase of 19 million shares, at an average price per share of $39.13. The value of the ASR forward contract was determined to be $14 million, which was recorded as additional paid-in capital.

 

Preferred Stock

Our Board of Directors has the authority to issue up to 5 million shares of preferred stock and to determine the price, rights, preferences, privileges, and restrictions, including voting rights, of those shares without any further vote or action by the stockholders. No shares of preferred stock were issued or outstanding in any period presented.

 

Dividends

The following is a summary of our fiscal 2016, 2015 and 2014 activities related to dividends on our common stock (in millions, except per share amounts).

 

 

On May 25, 2016, we declared a cash dividend of $0.19 per share of common stock, payable on July 27, 2016 to holders of record as of the close of business on July 18, 2016. The timing and amount of future dividends will depend on market conditions, corporate business and financial considerations and regulatory requirements. All dividends declared have been determined by the Company to be legally authorized under the laws of the state in which we are incorporated.

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Accumulated Other Comprehensive Income (Loss)

Changes in AOCI by component, net of tax, are summarized below (in millions):

 

 

The amounts reclassified out of AOCI are as follows (in millions):

 

 

 

12. Derivatives and Hedging Activities

We use derivative instruments to manage exposures to foreign currency risk. Our primary objective in holding derivatives is to reduce the volatility of earnings and cash flows associated with changes in foreign currency exchange rates. The program is not designated for trading or speculative purposes. Our derivatives expose us to credit risk to the extent that the counterparties may be unable to meet the terms of the agreement. We seek to mitigate such risk by limiting our counterparties to major financial institutions. In addition, the potential risk of loss with any one counterparty resulting from this type of credit risk is monitored on an ongoing basis. We also have in place master netting arrangements to mitigate the credit risk of our counterparties and to potentially reduce our losses due to counterparty nonperformance. We present our derivative instruments as net amounts in our consolidated balance sheets. The gross and net fair value amounts of such instruments were not material as of April 29, 2016 or April 24, 2015. We did not recognize any gains and losses in earnings due to hedge ineffectiveness for any period presented. All contracts have a maturity of less than six months.

Over the next 12 months, we expect an immaterial amount of derivative net gains or losses recorded in AOCI as of April 29, 2016 will be reclassified into net revenues. The maximum length of time over which forecasted foreign currency denominated revenues are hedged is six months.

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The notional amount of our outstanding U.S. dollar equivalent foreign currency exchange forward contracts consisted of the following (in millions):

 

 

The effect of derivative instruments designated as cash flow hedges recognized in net revenues on our consolidated statements of operations is presented in the consolidated statements of comprehensive income (loss) and Note 11 – Stockholders’ Equity.

The effect of derivative instruments not designated as hedging instruments recognized in other income (expense), net on our consolidated statements of operations was as follows (in millions):

 

 

 

13. Restructuring and Other Charges

Beginning in the first quarter of fiscal 2014, management approved several restructuring actions to streamline our business, eliminate costs and redirect resources to our highest return activities. These actions included the May 2013 Plan, the March 2014 Plan, the May 2015 Plan and the March 2016 Plan, under which we reduced our global workforce by approximately 7%, 4%, 3%, and 11%, respectively. We have completed all of these activities, with the exception of the March 2016 Plan, which we expect to complete by the second quarter of fiscal 2017 with no significant additional charges. Restructuring and other charges related to these plans consisted primarily of employee severance-related costs.

Activities related to these plans are summarized as follows (in millions):

 

 

Liabilities for our restructuring activities are included in accrued expenses in our consolidated balance sheets.

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14. Income Taxes

Income before income taxes is as follows (in millions):

 

Domestic income before taxes is lower than foreign income before taxes due to significant domestic expenses related to the amortization of intangibles, stock-based compensation and restructuring expenses.

The provision for income taxes consists of the following (in millions):

 

 

The provision for income taxes differs from the amount computed by applying the statutory federal income tax rate as follows (in millions):

 

 

We generated foreign earnings in lower tax jurisdictions primarily related to income from our European operations which are headquartered in the Netherlands. During fiscal 2016, we acquired SolidFire and recorded a tax charge of $64 million related to the integration of SolidFire intellectual property into our worldwide operations.

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The components of our deferred tax assets and liabilities are as follows (in millions):

 

Net deferred tax assets consist of the following (in millions):

 

 

In the third quarter of fiscal 2016, we adopted new accounting guidance on the balance sheet classification of deferred taxes that requires that all deferred taxes be presented as non-current. We applied this guidance prospectively and, accordingly, we did not reclassify amounts reported as of April 24, 2015.

The valuation allowance increased by $1 million and $8 million in fiscal 2016 and 2015, respectively. The increases are mainly attributable to corresponding changes in deferred tax assets, primarily foreign tax credit carryforwards in a foreign jurisdiction and state tax credit carryforwards in certain states.

As of April 29, 2016, the federal and state net operating loss carryforwards were approximately $15 million and $31 million, respectively, before applying tax rates for the respective jurisdictions. The federal, state and foreign tax credit carryforwards were approximately $40 million, $131 million and $22 million, respectively. Certain acquired net operating loss and credit carryforwards are subject to an annual limitation under Internal Revenue Code Section 382, but are expected to be realized with the exception of those which have a valuation allowance. The federal and state net operating loss carryforwards and credits will expire in various years from fiscal 2018 through 2036. If realized, $41 million, tax effected, of net operating loss and tax credit carryovers will be recognized as additional paid-in capital. The foreign tax credit carryforward does not expire.

A reconciliation of the beginning and ending amount of unrecognized tax benefits is as follows (in millions):

 

 

As of April 29, 2016, we had $216 million of gross unrecognized tax benefits, of which $164 million has been recorded in other long-term liabilities. Unrecognized tax benefits of $147 million, including penalties, interest and indirect benefits, would affect our provision for income taxes if recognized.

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We recognize accrued interest and penalties related to unrecognized tax benefits in the income tax provision. During fiscal 2016, 2015 and 2014, we recognized accrued interest and penalties of approximately $2 million, $4 million and $2 million, respectively in the consolidated statements of operations and $11 million and $9 million, respectively, were recorded in the consolidated balance sheets as of April 29, 2016 and April 24, 2015.

The tax years that remain subject to examination for our major tax jurisdictions are shown below:

Fiscal Years Subject to Examination for Major Tax Jurisdictions at April 29, 2016

 

 

In addition, we are effectively subject to federal tax examination adjustments for tax years ended on or after fiscal 2001, in that we have carryforward attributes from these years that could be subject to adjustment in the tax years of utilization.

In June 2015, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) signed a closing agreement with respect to transfer pricing arrangements and, in October 2015, completed the examination of our fiscal 2008 to 2010 income tax returns. During fiscal 2016, we recorded a tax charge of $23 million attributable to transfer pricing and other audit settlements and the related re-measurement of uncertain tax positions for tax years subject to future audits. During fiscal 2016, the German tax authority concluded the examination of our fiscal 2009 to 2012 returns. We recorded a $2 million tax benefit for the net impact of the audit adjustments and related release of unrecognized tax benefits.

In July 2014, the IRS completed the examination of our fiscal 2005 to 2007 income tax returns upon approval by the Joint Committee of Taxation. During fiscal 2015, we recorded a tax charge of $47 million attributable to the audit settlement and related re-measurements of uncertain tax positions for tax years subject to future audits.

We are currently undergoing federal income tax audits in the United States (U.S.) and several foreign tax jurisdictions. Transfer pricing calculations are key issues under audits in various jurisdictions, and are often subject to dispute and appeals. The IRS has concluded the examination of our tax returns for our fiscal years through 2010. The IRS plans to commence the audit of our fiscal 2012 and 2013 returns in fiscal 2017.

On September 17, 2010, the Danish Tax Authorities issued a decision concluding that distributions declared in 2005 and 2006 from our Danish subsidiary were subject to Danish at-source dividend withholding tax. We do not believe that our Danish subsidiary is liable for withholding tax and filed an appeal with the Danish Tax Tribunal to that effect. On December 19, 2011, the Danish Tax Tribunal issued a ruling that our Danish subsidiary was not liable for Danish withholding tax. The Danish tax examination agency appealed to the Danish High Court in March 2012. In February 2016, the Danish High Court referred the case to the European Court of Justice.

We continue to monitor the progress of ongoing discussions with tax authorities and the impact, if any, of the expected expiration of the statute of limitations in various taxing jurisdictions. We engage in continuous discussion and negotiation with taxing authorities regarding tax matters in multiple jurisdictions. We believe that within the next 12 months, it is reasonably possible that either certain audits will conclude, certain statutes of limitations will lapse, or both. Based on current information, we do not expect significant changes to our existing unrecognized tax benefits as of April 29, 2016.

As of April 29, 2016, the amount of accumulated unremitted earnings from our foreign subsidiaries is approximately $4 billion. We have not provided U.S. income taxes and foreign withholding taxes on the undistributed earnings of foreign subsidiaries because we intend to permanently reinvest such earnings outside the U.S. If these foreign earnings were to be repatriated in the future, the related U.S. tax liability may be reduced by any foreign income taxes previously paid on these earnings as well as tax attribute carryforwards. We estimate the unrecognized deferred tax liability related to these earnings to be approximately $1 billion as of April 29, 2016.

On July 27, 2015, in Altera Corp. v. Commissioner, the U.S. Tax Court issued an opinion related to the treatment of stock-based compensation expense in an intercompany cost-sharing arrangement. A final decision was issued by the Tax Court in December 2015. In February 2016, the Commissioner appealed the Tax Court decision. At this time, the U.S. Department of the Treasury has not withdrawn the requirement to include stock-based compensation from its regulations. Due to the uncertainty surrounding the status of the current regulations, questions related to the scope of potential benefits, and the risk of the Tax Court’s decision being overturned

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upon appeal, we have not recorded any benefit as of April 29, 2016. We will continue to monitor ongoing developments and potential impacts to our financial statements.

 

 

15. Net Income per Share

The following is a calculation of basic and diluted net income per share (in millions, except per share amounts):

 

 

We have excluded 12 million, 8 million and 6 million weighted-average shares of common stock potentially issuable under employee equity award plans in fiscal 2016, 2015 and 2014, respectively, from the diluted net income per share calculations as their effect would have been anti-dilutive.

 

16. Segment, Geographic, and Significant Customer Information

We operate in one industry segment: the design, manufacturing, marketing, and technical support of high-performance storage and data management solutions. We conduct business globally, and our sales and support activities are managed on a geographic basis. Our management reviews financial information presented on a consolidated basis, accompanied by disaggregated information it receives from our internal management system about revenues by geographic region, based on the location from which the customer relationship is managed, for purposes of allocating resources and evaluating financial performance. We do not allocate costs of revenues, research and development, sales and marketing, or general and administrative expenses to our geographic regions in this internal management reporting because management does not review operations or operating results, or make planning decisions, below the consolidated entity level.

Summarized revenues by geographic region based on information from our internal management system and utilized by our Chief Executive Officer, who is considered our Chief Operating Decision Maker, is as follows (in millions):

 

 

Americas revenues consist of sales to Americas commercial and U.S. public sector markets. Sales to customers inside the U.S. were $2,753 million, $3,096 million and $3,131 million during fiscal 2016, 2015 and 2014, respectively.

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The majority of our assets, excluding cash, cash equivalents, short-term investments and accounts receivable, were attributable to our domestic operations. The following table presents cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments held in the U.S. and internationally in various foreign subsidiaries (in millions):

 

 

With the exception of property and equipment, we do not identify or allocate our long-lived assets by geographic area. The following table presents property and equipment information for geographic areas based on the physical location of the assets (in millions):

 

 

The following customers, each of which is a distributor, accounted for 10% or more of our net revenues:

 

 

The following customers accounted for 10% or more of accounts receivable:

 

 

17. Employee Benefits and Deferred Compensation

Employee 401(k) Plan

Our 401(k) Plan is a deferred salary arrangement under Section 401(k) of the Internal Revenue Code. Under the 401(k) Plan, participating U.S. employees may defer a portion of their pre-tax earnings, up to the IRS annual contribution limit. We match 100% of the first 2% of eligible earnings an employee contributes to the 401(k) Plan, and then match 50% of the next 4% of eligible earnings an employee contributes. An employee receives the full 4% match when he/she contributes at least 6% of his/her eligible earnings, up to a maximum calendar year matching contribution of $6,000. Our employer matching contributions to the 401(k) Plan were as follows (in millions):

 

 

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Deferred Compensation Plan

We have a non-qualified deferred compensation plan that allows a group of employees within the U.S. to contribute base salary and commissions or incentive compensation on a tax deferred basis in excess of the IRS limits imposed on 401(k) plans. The marketable securities related to these investments are held in a Rabbi Trust. The related deferred compensation plan assets and liabilities under the non-qualified deferred compensation plan were as follows (in millions):

 

 

Postretirement Health Care Plan

Certain of our executive officers are eligible to participate in our Executive Retirement Medical Plan, which upon retirement provides medical coverage beyond the COBRA maximum benefit period to a defined group of senior executives based on minimum age, service and level of responsibility (that is, Executive Vice President or above) as a fully-insured plan. Coverage continues through the duration of the lifetime of the retiree or the retiree’s spouse, whichever is longer. In fiscal 2016, the Compensation Committee closed this plan to the executives eligible for participation as of November 12, 2015. Participation in the plan will not be offered to executives who were not eligible for the plan on that date. There is no funding requirement associated with the plan and none of the benefit obligation was funded as of April 29, 2016. Assumed health care cost trend rates have a significant effect on the amounts reported for the health care plan.

International Defined Benefit Plans

We maintain various defined benefit plans to provide termination and postretirement benefits to certain eligible employees outside of the U.S. We also provide disability benefits to certain eligible employees in the U.S. Eligibility is determined based on the terms of our plans and local statutory requirements. Assumed discount rates and expected long-term returns on plan assets have significant effects on the amounts reported for the defined benefit plans.

 

Funded Status

The funded status of our postretirement health care and international termination and postretirement benefits was as follows (in millions):

 

 

Amounts recognized in the consolidated balance sheets were as follows (in millions):

 

 

18. Commitments and Contingencies

Operating Leases

We lease various equipment, vehicles and office space in the U.S. and internationally.

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Future annual minimum lease payments under all non-cancelable operating leases with an initial term in excess of one year as of April 29, 2016 are as follows (in millions):

 

 

Rent expense under all cancellable and non-cancelable operating leases was $69 million, $67 million and $66 million in fiscal 2016, 2015 and 2014, respectively.

 

Purchase Orders and Other Commitments

In the ordinary course of business, we make commitments to third-party contract manufacturers, to manage manufacturer lead times and meet product forecasts, and to other parties, to purchase various key components used in the manufacture of our products. A significant portion of our reported purchase commitments arising from these agreements consist of firm, non-cancelable, and unconditional commitments. As of April 29, 2016, we had $211 million in non-cancelable purchase commitments for inventory. We record a liability for firm, non-cancelable and unconditional purchase commitments with contract manufacturers for quantities in excess of our future demand forecasts. As of April 29, 2016 and April 24, 2015, such liability amounted to $7 million and $17 million, respectively, and is included in accrued expenses in our consolidated balance sheets. To the extent that such forecasts are not achieved, our commitments and associated accruals may change.

In addition to inventory commitments with contract manufacturers and component suppliers, we have open purchase orders and contractual obligations associated with our ordinary course of business for which we have not yet received goods or services. As of April 29, 2016, we had $37 million in construction related obligations and $152 million in other purchase obligations.

 

During the ordinary course of business, we provide standby letters of credit or other guarantee instruments to third parties as required for certain transactions initiated either by us or our subsidiaries. As of April 29, 2016, our financial guarantees of $14 million that were not recorded on our consolidated balance sheets consisted primarily of standby letters of credit and surety bonds.

 

Financing Guarantees

While most of our arrangements for sales include short-term payment terms, from time to time we provide long-term financing to creditworthy customers. We have generally sold receivables financed through these arrangements on a non-recourse basis to third party financing institutions within 10 days of the contracts’ dates of execution, and we classify the proceeds from these sales as cash flows from operating activities in our consolidated statements of cash flows. We account for the sales of these receivables as “true sales” as defined in the accounting standards on transfers of financial assets, as we are considered to have surrendered control of these financing receivables. Provided all other revenue recognition criteria have been met, we recognize product revenues for these arrangements, net of any payment discounts from financing transactions, upon product acceptance. We sold $243 million, $197 million and $296 million of receivables during fiscal 2016, 2015 and 2014, respectively.

In addition, we enter into arrangements with leasing companies for the sale of our hardware systems products. These leasing companies, in turn, lease our products to end-users. The leasing companies generally have no recourse to us in the event of default by the end-user and we recognize revenue upon delivery to the end-user customer, if all other revenue recognition criteria have been met.

Some of the leasing arrangements described above have been financed on a recourse basis through third-party financing institutions. Under the terms of recourse leases, which are generally three years or less, we remain liable for the aggregate unpaid remaining lease payments to the third-party leasing companies in the event of end-user customer default. These arrangements are generally collateralized by a security interest in the underlying assets. Where we provide a guarantee for recourse leases, we defer revenues subject to the industry-specific software revenue recognition guidance, and recognize revenues for non-software deliverables in accordance with our multiple deliverable revenue arrangement policy. In connection with certain recourse financing arrangements, we receive advance payments associated with undelivered elements that are subject to customer refund rights. We defer revenue associated with these advance payments until the related refund rights expire and we perform the services. As of April 29, 2016 and April 24, 2015, the aggregate amount by which such contingencies exceeded the associated liabilities was not significant. To date, we have not experienced material losses under our lease financing programs or other financing arrangements.

We have entered into service contracts with certain of our end-user customers that are supported by third-party financing arrangements. If a service contract is terminated as a result of our non-performance under the contract or our failure to comply with the terms of the financing arrangement, we could, under certain circumstances, be required to acquire certain assets related to the service contract or to pay the aggregate unpaid financing payments under such arrangements. As of April 29, 2016, we have not been required to make any payments under these arrangements, and we believe the likelihood of having to acquire a material amount of

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assets or make payments under these arrangements is remote. The portion of the financial arrangement that represents unearned services revenue is included in deferred revenue and financed unearned services revenue in our consolidated balance sheets.

 

Indemnification Agreements

We enter into standard indemnification agreements in the ordinary course of business. Pursuant to these agreements, we agree to defend and indemnify other parties, primarily our customers or business partners or subcontractors, for damages and reasonable costs incurred in any suit or claim brought against them alleging that our products sold to them infringe any U.S. patent, copyright, trade secret, or similar right. If a product becomes the subject of an infringement claim, we may, at our option: (i) replace the product with another non-infringing product that provides substantially similar performance; (ii) modify the infringing product so that it no longer infringes but remains functionally equivalent; (iii) obtain the right for the customer to continue using the product at our expense and for the reseller to continue selling the product; (iv) take back the infringing product and refund to the customer the purchase price paid less depreciation amortized on a straight-line basis. We have not been required to make material payments pursuant to these provisions historically. We have not recorded any liability at April 29, 2016 related to these guarantees since the maximum amount of potential future payments under such guarantees, indemnities and warranties is not determinable, other than as described above.

 

Legal Contingencies

When a loss is considered probable and reasonably estimable, we record a liability in the amount of our best estimate for the ultimate loss. However, the likelihood of a loss with respect to a particular contingency is often difficult to predict and determining a meaningful estimate of the loss or a range of loss may not be practicable based on the information available and the potential effect of future events and decisions by third parties that will determine the ultimate resolution of the contingency.

We are subject to various legal proceedings and claims that arise in the normal course of business. No accrual has been recorded as of April 29, 2016 related to such matters as they are not probable and/or reasonably estimable.

 

 

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Selected Quarterly Financial Data (Unaudited)

Selected quarterly financial data is as follows (in millions, except per share amounts):

 

 

 

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REPORT OF INDEPENDENT REGISTERED PUBLIC ACCOUNTING FIRM

To the Board of Directors and Stockholders of

NetApp, Inc.

Sunnyvale, California

We have audited the accompanying consolidated balance sheets of NetApp, Inc. and subsidiaries (the “Company”) as of April 29, 2016 and April 24, 2015, and the related consolidated statements of operations, comprehensive income, cash flows, and stockholders’ equity for each of the three years in the period ended April 29, 2016. These financial statements are the responsibility of the Company’s management. Our responsibility is to express an opinion on the financial statements based on our audits.

We conducted our audits in accordance with the standards of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (United States). Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain reasonable assurance about whether the financial statements are free of material misstatement. An audit includes examining, on a test basis, evidence supporting the amounts and disclosures in the financial statements. An audit also includes assessing the accounting principles used and significant estimates made by management, as well as evaluating the overall financial statement presentation. We believe that our audits provide a reasonable basis for our opinion.

In our opinion, such consolidated financial statements present fairly, in all material respects, the financial position of NetApp, Inc. and subsidiaries as of April 29, 2016 and April 24, 2015, and the results of their operations and their cash flows for each of the three years in the period ended April 29, 2016, in conformity with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America.

We have also audited, in accordance with the standards of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (United States), the Company’s internal control over financial reporting as of April 29, 2016, based on the criteria established in Internal Control — Integrated Framework (2013) issued by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission and our report dated June 22, 2016 expressed an unqualified opinion on the Company’s internal control over financial reporting.

/s/ DELOITTE & TOUCHE LLP

San Jose, California

June 22, 2016

 

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REPORT OF INDEPENDENT REGISTERED PUBLIC ACCOUNTING FIRM

To the Board of Directors and Stockholders of

NetApp, Inc.

Sunnyvale, California

We have audited the internal control over financial reporting of NetApp, Inc. and subsidiaries (the “Company”) as of April 29, 2016, based on criteria established in Internal Control — Integrated Framework (2013) issued by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission. The Company’s management is responsible for maintaining effective internal control over financial reporting and for its assessment of the effectiveness of internal control over financial reporting, included in the accompanying Management’s Report on Internal Control Over Financial Reporting. Our responsibility is to express an opinion on the Company’s internal control over financial reporting based on our audit.

We conducted our audit in accordance with the standards of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (United States). Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain reasonable assurance about whether effective internal control over financial reporting was maintained in all material respects. Our audit included obtaining an understanding of internal control over financial reporting, assessing the risk that a material weakness exists, testing and evaluating the design and operating effectiveness of internal control based on the assessed risk, and performing such other procedures as we considered necessary in the circumstances. We believe that our audit provides a reasonable basis for our opinion.

A company’s internal control over financial reporting is a process designed by, or under the supervision of, the company’s principal executive and principal financial officers, or persons performing similar functions, and effected by the company’s board of directors, management, and other personnel to provide reasonable assurance regarding the reliability of financial reporting and the preparation of financial statements for external purposes in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. A company’s internal control over financial reporting includes those policies and procedures that (1) pertain to the maintenance of records that, in reasonable detail, accurately and fairly reflect the transactions and dispositions of the assets of the company; (2) provide reasonable assurance that transactions are recorded as necessary to permit preparation of financial statements in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles, and that receipts and expenditures of the company are being made only in accordance with authorizations of management and directors of the company; and (3) provide reasonable assurance regarding prevention or timely detection of unauthorized acquisition, use, or disposition of the Company’s assets that could have a material effect on the financial statements.

Because of the inherent limitations of internal control over financial reporting, including the possibility of collusion or improper management override of controls, material misstatements due to error or fraud may not be prevented or detected on a timely basis. Also, projections of any evaluation of the effectiveness of the internal control over financial reporting to future periods are subject to the risk that the controls may become inadequate because of changes in conditions, or that the degree of compliance with the policies or procedures may deteriorate.

In our opinion, the Company maintained, in all material respects, effective internal control over financial reporting as of April 29, 2016, based on the criteria established in Internal Control — Integrated Framework (2013) issued by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission.

We have also audited, in accordance with the standards of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (United States), the consolidated financial statements as of and for the year ended April 29, 2016 of the Company and our report dated June 22, 2016 expressed an unqualified opinion on those financial statements.

/s/ DELOITTE & TOUCHE LLP

San Jose, California

June 22, 2016

 

 

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None.

(a) Evaluation of Disclosure Controls and Procedures

The phrase “disclosure controls and procedures” refers to controls and procedures designed to ensure that information required to be disclosed in our reports filed or submitted under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the Exchange Act), such as this Annual Report on Form 10-K, is recorded, processed, summarized and reported within the time periods specified in the rules and forms of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Disclosure controls and procedures are also designed to ensure that such information is accumulated and communicated to our management, including our Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and our Chief Financial Officer (CFO), as appropriate to allow timely decisions regarding required disclosure.

Under the supervision and with the participation of our management, including our CEO and CFO, we carried out an evaluation of the effectiveness of the design and operation of our disclosure controls and procedures, as defined in Rules 13a-15(e) and 15d-15(e) under the Exchange Act, as of April 29, 2016, the end of the fiscal period covered by this Annual Report on Form 10-K (the Evaluation Date). Based on this evaluation, our CEO and CFO concluded as of the Evaluation Date that our disclosure controls and procedures were effective such that the information required to be disclosed in our SEC reports (i) is recorded, processed, summarized and reported within the time periods specified in SEC rules and forms and (ii) is accumulated and communicated to our management, including our CEO and CFO, as appropriate to allow timely decisions regarding required disclosure.

(b) Management’s Report on Internal Control Over Financial Reporting

Our management is responsible for establishing and maintaining adequate internal control over financial reporting, as such term is defined in Exchange Act Rule 13a-15(f). Our internal control over financial reporting is a process designed to provide reasonable assurance regarding the reliability of financial reporting and the preparation of financial statements for external purposes in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. Because of its inherent limitations, internal control over financial reporting may not prevent or detect misstatements. Also, projections of any evaluation of effectiveness to future periods are subject to the risk that controls may become inadequate because of changes in conditions, or that the degree of compliance with the policies or procedures may deteriorate.

Under the supervision and with the participation of our management, including our principal executive officer and principal financial officer, we conducted an evaluation of the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting based on the criteria established in Internal Control — Integrated Framework (2013) issued by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission. Based on this assessment, our management concluded that, as of April 29, 2016, our internal control over financial reporting was effective at the reasonable assurance level based on those criteria.

The effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting as of April 29, 2016 has been audited by Deloitte & Touche LLP, an independent registered public accounting firm, as stated in their report, which is included in Part II, Item 8 of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

(c) Changes in Internal Control Over Financial Reporting

There has been no change in our internal control over financial reporting identified in connection with our evaluation required by paragraph (d) of rules 13a-15 and 15d-15 under the Exchange Act that occurred during the fourth quarter of fiscal 2016 that has materially affected, or is reasonably likely to materially affect, our internal control over financial reporting.

None.

 

 

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PART III

The information required by Item 10 with respect to our executive officers is incorporated herein by reference from the information under Item 1 – Business of Part I of this Annual Report on Form 10-K under the section entitled “Executive Officers.” The information required by Item 10 with respect to the Company’s directors and corporate governance is incorporated herein by reference from the information provided under the headings “Election of Directors” and “Corporate Governance,” respectively, in the Proxy Statement for the 2016 Annual Meeting of Stockholders, which will be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission within 120 days of our year ended April 29, 2016. The information required by Item 405 of Regulation S-K is incorporated herein by reference from the information provided under the heading “Section 16(a) Beneficial Ownership Reporting Compliance” in the Proxy Statement for the 2016 Annual Meeting of Stockholders.

We have adopted a written code of ethics that applies to our Board of Directors and all of our employees, including our principal executive officer and principal financial and accounting officer. A copy of the code of ethics, which we refer to as our “Code of Conduct,” is available on our website at http://investors.netapp.com/governance.cfm. We will post any amendments to or waivers from the provisions of our Code of Conduct on our website.

Information regarding the compensation of executive officers and directors of the Company is incorporated by reference from the information under the headings “Executive Compensation and Related Information” and “Director Compensation,” respectively, in our Proxy Statement for the 2016 Annual Meeting of Stockholders.

Information regarding security ownership of certain beneficial owners and management and related stockholder matters is incorporated by reference from the information under the heading “Security Ownership of Certain Beneficial Owners and Management” in our Proxy Statement for the 2016 Annual Meeting of Stockholders.

Information regarding certain relationships and related transactions and director independence is incorporated by reference from the information under the headings “Corporate Governance” and “Certain Transactions with Related Parties” in our Proxy Statement for the 2016 Annual Meeting of Stockholders.

The information required by this item is incorporated by reference from the information under the caption “Audit Fees” in our Proxy Statement for the 2016 Annual Meeting of Stockholders.

With the exception of the information incorporated in Items 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14 of this Annual Report on Form 10-K, NetApp’s Proxy Statement is not deemed “filed” as part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

PART IV

 

See index to Consolidated Financial Statements in Part II, Item 8 of this Form 10-K

All financial statement schedules have been omitted, since the required information is not applicable or is not present in amounts sufficient to require submission of the schedule, or because the information required is included in the consolidated financial statements and notes thereto included in this Form 10-K.

The information required by this Section (a)(3) of Item 15 is set forth on the exhibit index that follows the Signatures page of this Form 10-K.

 

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SIGNATURES

Pursuant to the requirements of Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, the registrant has duly caused this report to be signed on its behalf by the undersigned, thereunto duly authorized.

 

POWER OF ATTORNEY

KNOW ALL PERSONS BY THESE PRESENTS, that each person whose signature appears below constitutes and appoints George Kurian and Ronald J. Pasek, and each of them, as his true and lawful attorneys-in-fact and agents, with full power of substitution and resubstitution, for him and in his name, place and stead, in any and all capacities, to sign any and all amendments (including post-effective amendments) to this Annual Report on Form 10-K, and to file the same, with all exhibits thereto, and other documents in connection therewith, with the Securities and Exchange Commission, granting unto said attorneys-in-fact and agents, and each of them, full power and authority to do and perform each and every act and thing requisite and necessary to be done in connection therewith, as fully to all intents and purposes as he might or could do in person, hereby ratifying and confirming all that said attorneys-in-fact and agents, or any of them, or their or his substitutes, may lawfully do or cause to be done by virtue thereof.

Pursuant to the requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, this report has been signed below by the following persons on behalf of the registrant and in the capacities and on the dates indicated.

 

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EXHIBIT INDEX

 

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93

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94

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