Losses widen by $5m at WANdisco as bookings drop

WANdisco, the Sheffield and California big data specialist, has seen losses widen due to lower revenue, fewer bookings and increased overheads in the first half of the year.

The listed company this morning announced its interim unaudited results for the six months ended 30 June 2018. Pre-tax losses for the period increased to $11.3m from $6.3m. Total bookings for the first half of 2018 reduced to $9m from $10.2m.

Big Data and Cloud bookings stood at $6.2m, down from $7m. Revenue for the period was $5.7m, down from  $9.6m.  The firm reported a statutory loss from operations of $12.2m

Cash at 30 June 2018 was $18, down from$27.4m at 31 December 2017.

However, , the firm said it had a robust and strengthening sales pipeline which underpinned the Board’s continued confidence in achieving full year market expectations. The firm said that during the period it had significantly expanded its relationship with IBM and gained new customers in the insurance, banking, telecommunications and US Government.

David Richards, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of WANdisco, said: “In the first half of this year we have made significant improvements to our business model. We have broadened and deepened our relationship with IBM, increasing the royalty payable to WANdisco, and have begun joint development work to support IBM Big SQL, which should increase our opportunities in the IBM channel.

“We also have begun to see a significant structural shift in the composition of our revenue base, from large, difficult-to-forecast on premise transactions toward more predictable, annual recurring cloud revenues. We see significant opportunities to expand our TAM in Cloud and as annual recurring revenues increase over time, develop a smoother, increasing revenue profile for our firm.

“We take confidence from the early traction we are seeing with Microsoft. To sign three strategic deals through this channel so early in our relationship underpins our belief that Fusion is the only solution capable of enabling organisations to seamlessly move large volumes of critical data to the cloud, without any downtime or service disruption. These deals are initially small in size relative to our on-premise, perpetual licence deals, as cloud customers buy for current capacity, knowing that they can scale up their usage easily as more data is migrated to the cloud. The revenue from cloud customers should not only be predictable and recurring but also grow significantly over time.”