Morningstar, Inc. 2010 Annual Report 43 Largest Customer Competitive Landscape License Agreements Research and Development Seasonality In addition to trademarks, we currently hold several patents in the  United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. We believe these  patents represent our commitment to developing innovative products  and tools for investors. In 2010, our largest customer accounted for less than 5% of our  consolidated revenue. In the majority of our licensing agreements, we license our products  and/or other intellectual property to our customers for a fee. We  generally use our standard agreements, whether in paper or elec- tronic form, and we do not provide our products and services to  customers or other users without having an agreement in place. The economic and financial information industry has been marked  by increased consolidation over the past five years, with the stron- gest players generally gaining market share at the expense of smaller  competitors. Some of our major competitors include Thomson  Reuters; Standard & Poor’s, a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies;  Bloomberg; and Yahoo!. These companies have financial resources  that are significantly greater than ours. We also have a number of  smaller competitors in our two business segments, which we discuss  in Business Segments, Products, and Services above. We maintain licensing agreements with our minority-owned oper- ations. We put these agreements in place so these companies can  use our intellectual property, such as our products and trademarks,  to develop and market similar products under our name in their  operating territories. We believe the most important competitive factors in our industry  are brand and reputation, data accuracy and quality, breadth of data  coverage, quality of investment analysis and analytics, design, prod- uct reliability, and value of the products and services provided. In the ordinary course of our business, we obtain and use intel- lectual property from a wide variety of sources. We license some  of this intellectual property from third parties and obtain other por- tions of it directly from public filings. We believe our business has a modest amount of seasonality. Some  of our smaller products, such as the  Ibbotson Stocks, Bonds, Bills,  and Inflation Yearbook  and one of our investment conferences, gen- erate the majority of their revenue in the first or second quarter of  the year. Most of our products are sold with subscription or license  terms of at least one year, though, and we recognize revenue ratably  over the term of each subscription or license agreement. This tends  to moderate seasonality in sales patterns for individual products. A key aspect of our growth strategy is to expand our investment  research capabilities and enhance our existing products and services.  We strive to rapidly adopt new technology that can improve our  products and services. We have a flexible technology platform that  allows our products to work together across a full range of invest- ment databases, delivery formats, and market segments. As a  general practice, we manage our own websites and build our own  software rather than relying on outside vendors. This allows us to  control our development and better manage costs, enabling us to  respond quickly to market changes and to meet customer needs  efficiently. As of December 31, 2010, our technology team consisted  of approximately 800 programmers and technology and infrastruc- ture professionals. We believe market movements generally have more influence on  our performance than seasonality. The amount of revenue we earn  from asset-based fees depends on the value of assets on which we  provide advisory services, and the size of our asset base can increase  or decrease along with trends in market performance. In 2010, 2009, and 2008 our development expense represented 8.9%,  8.0%, and 8.0%, respectively, of our revenue. We expect that devel- opment expense will continue to represent a meaningful percentage  of our revenue in the future.