City in brief: Wandisco signs major cloud contract; Polypipe bullish post-Brexit decision and Card Factory has high hopes for Christmas trading

CLOUD software provider Wandisco has secured a contract win for its Amazon S3 Cloud solution, available in Amazon’s AWS Marketplace, with global online gaming company Playtika.

Playtika selected WANdisco Fusion enabling it to transfer the large volumes of data generated to the cloud without impacting the gaming experience of Playtika’s 6m daily players across 190 countries.

The deal is based on Terabytes of data being replicated by WANdisco Fusion on a subscription basis.

Previously, the Sheffield-based company announced a $1.5m contract with a US financial services institution with over $200bnin assets secured through WANdisco’s partnership with Oracle and a $775,000 agreement with a major global bank headquartered in Europe for WANdisco’s Subversion Multisite Plus ALM software.

David Richards, chief executive officer and interim chairman of WANdisco, commented: “This is an important contract win for WANdisco as it not only demonstrates our ability to reap real benefit through our channel partnerships, but Playtika’s selection of WANdisco Fusion further demonstrates that the capabilities we offer companies considering cloud migration and hybrid cloud deployments are truly unique.

“Playtika found that no other solution could move active, continuously changing data to the cloud without downtime and disruption and keep both their on-premise and cloud environments in sync. This further validates our vision that the Company’s ability to manage unprecedented volumes of active data in the cloud is firmly at the heart of our growth strategy.”

***

MANUFACTURER Polypipe is on track following its acquisition of Nuaire earlier in the year.

The group’s revenue for the ten months ended 31 October 2016 was 23.7% higher at £370.3m compared to the prior year.

Overseas revenue benefitted from a weaker sterling exchange rate following the Brexit decision in June. It said it had seen no impact on revenue and order intake since the EU Referendum. It has seen polymer input costs adversely affected due to the weaker sterling however, but is passing costs on to customers.

David Hall, chief executive, commented: “Our business continues to perform well following the EU referendum, with both orders and revenue ahead of the same period last year.

“I have confidence that our broad based exposure to UK residential, commercial and infrastructure sectors of the construction market, a broad range of quality products, strong customer relationships and market leading technical expertise leaves us well positioned for 2017.”

***

RETAILER Card Factory saw revenues grow 4.4%, a decline in growth for the same 9 months ended 31 October 2015 when revenues increased 7.9%.

Card Factory warned that a weaker trading period due to lower footfall had affected trading but had high hopes for the Christmas period.

12 new stores were opened in the third quarter bringing the year total so far to 46. Card Factory now has a total of 860 stores across the UK.

Karen Hubbard, Card Factory’s chief executive officer, said: “The general retail environment has remained challenging with adverse footfall trends impacting customer traffic into our stores. We remain wary of the uncertain outlook for consumer confidence, although we are pleased to note that, since the start of October, weekly sales patterns for everyday ranges in our stores have started to improve.

“We enter the important final quarter with an excellent Christmas offering, both in our card ranges and an expanded choice of seasonal gifts. Whilst it is always difficult to forecast short term footfall trends, we remain confident that the quality and value of our extensive range will continue to appeal to consumers.”