73% increase in revenue marks ‘pivotal year’ for WANdisco
WANdisco, the Sheffield and California big data specialist, has reported a record 2017 – with revenues up 73% to $19.6m.
Publishing its annual results to December 31 2017, the firm said it had secured record bookings; up 45% year-on-year to $22.5m, from $15.5m in 2016. The firm is still looking to achieve a break even cash flow and in 2017 reported a loss from operations $13.5m, from losses of $9.3m in 2016.
Pre-tax losses of $10m were reported, up from pre-tax losses of $18 in 2016. Its adjusted EBITDA loss stood at $600,000, an improvement on its $7.5m loss in 2016.
David Richards, chief executive and chairman of WANdisco, said: “This has been a pivotal year for WANdisco – following the transformation of our financial position during 2016, we have focused on building a commercial strategy which will deliver sustainable long-term growth. By expanding our partnership ecosystem we have significantly extended the reach of WANdisco Fusion, unlocking new sales opportunities in a cost effective manner.
“Our partnership with IBM brought two new record contracts during 2017 and integrations with AWS, Microsoft and Virtustream give me confidence that we can take advantage of the significant market opportunity for WANdisco Fusion. Organisations across the world are recognizing the value of being able to harness live data at scale and our technology is gaining increasing traction across new sectors and markets.
“Our strategy is delivering clear results; we have increased revenue by 73% while maintaining control of our costs, bringing us significantly closer to our goal of cash flow breakeven. We have started 2018 with a strong new business pipeline and I am confident WANdisco is well positioned to take advantage of a wide range of sizeable growth opportunities.”
During 2017, WANdisco announced a new $5m term loan facility with Silicon Valley Bank, with an additional $3m revolving credit facility.
The firm also successfully placed 2.97 million shares on 4 December 2017, raising gross proceeds of $22m. Its cash balance stood at $27.4m, including $4m from the new growth capital facility, as at 31 December 2017 (31 December 2016: $7.6m)
The firm also announced this morning it had entered into a non-exclusive OEM sales agreement with Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group.
Under the sales agreement, WANdisco Fusion will be sold as a standard component on Alibaba Cloud, covering several key aspects including Live Data migration to Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba Cloud for disaster recovery and hybrid big data with Alibaba Cloud. The partnership represents a substantial increase in WANdisco’s addressable market and a significant extension of its channel strategy.
Hong Tang, chief architect of Alibaba Cloud, said: “We believe WANdisco’s unique Live Data platform can significantly help our customers to leverage cloud for their data computing demands, whether it is to migrate their on premise data to our cloud, utilize cloud for disaster recovery solutions or maintain a hybrid-cloud solution, while ensuring their data is always available, accurate and protected.”
