19 January 2015

WANdisco plc

2014 Q4 Bookings update

Strong increase in momentum of Big Data business

WANdisco (LSE: WAND), the leading provider of non-stop Big Data, reports fourth quarter sales bookings increasing by 8% compared with the prior year to $4.7m.  Bookings for the year were $17.4m, up 18% on the prior year.

Highlights

·      Record Big Data bookings 

·      Five new Big Data customers

·      British Gas expands its WANdisco Big Data solution in the largest Big Data deal to date

·      Significant growth in sales pipeline

Big Data

$2.1m of bookings in the quarter came from our Big Data products (Q4 2013: nil).

Amongst existing Big Data customers, British Gas, after a period of extensive testing, is, as announced on 8 January 2015, scaling up into live production, entering into a new subscription that is our largest-ever Big Data contract, valued at $750,000. 

Five new customers selected our Non-Stop Hadoop product for deployment alongside our distributor partners Cloudera and Hortonworks. Amongst these customers, in the consumer sector, dunnhumby and Epsilon are transforming the capture, interrogation, availability and responsiveness of their customer data. In financial services, two global banks have adopted our technology for analysing buying behaviour, verifying financial transactions and managing risk, including fraud.

These highlighted contracts from new and existing customers have initial values of between $160,000 and $750,000, with customers indicating plans to scale up these contracts as they further develop Hadoop operations.

Responding to customer requirements, we have added to the continuous availability features of Non-Stop Hadoop. New features enable data capture from multiple data centres; allocation of data processing to the most cost-effective hardware; and selective replication of data to comply with national regulations. These features, controlled through a new administrative user interface, were released during the period as Non-Stop Hadoop 1.9.10.

During the fourth quarter our pipeline of sales opportunities grew significantly and currently includes a broad industry spread, with opportunities in the EMEA and Asia-Pacific regions building up to complement our well-established opportunities in the Americas. A number of successful fourth-quarter production trials are expected to lead to new subscription contracts during the coming months. In addition, for the first quarter of 2015 we have scheduled a number of significant new production trials with potential new customers.

Application Lifecycle Management ("ALM")

$2.6m of bookings in the quarter came from our ALM products, (Q4 2013: $4.3m). ALM sales were impacted by the decision to focus certain sales resources on closing those Big Data opportunities that accelerated late in the quarter. The high proportion of bookings from new subscriptions, and high renewal rates, continue to demonstrate the potential of the ALM market.

New customers this quarter included Zurich Insurance and Elektrobit Automotive. More customers are adopting our products to manage the popular Git open source code management environment. We enhanced our Git products during the period with variants for the GitLab and Gerrit collaboration tools.

Based on its operating scale and revenue potential, we intend to advance the ALM business towards profitability in 2015.

David Richards, WANdisco Chief Executive Officer, comments:

"Our fourth quarter sales mark an increase in momentum in our Big Data business, as successful production trials have led into some significant contract wins in a short period of time. Alongside our new customer wins, our first contract expansion by an existing customer was particularly encouraging.

Our technology is demonstrably becoming part of standard Hadoop enterprise architecture as our partnerships with Cloudera, Hortonworks and Oracle increasingly provide a compelling combination of technologies for live data operations.

WANdisco is enabling customers in various industries to realise performance, insight, reliability and savings that they otherwise could not achieve. We believe that many of our new Big Data customers will go on to expand significantly their WANdisco solutions as they take more and more data into their mission-critical applications."

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About WANdisco

(LSE: WAND) is a provider of enterprise-ready, non-stop software solutions that enable globally distributed organizations to meet today's data challenges of secure storage, scalability and continuous availability. WANdisco's products are differentiated by the company's patented, active-active data replication technology, serving crucial continuous availability requirements, including Hadoop Big Data and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), including Apache Subversion and Git. Fortune Global 1000 companies, including Juniper Networks, Motorola, Intel and Halliburton, rely on WANdisco for performance, reliability, security and availability. For additional information, please visit www.wandisco.com. 

Disclaimer

This announcement contains forward-looking statements that are based on current expectations or beliefs, as well as assumptions about future events. Undue reliance should not be placed on any such statements because they are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties and can be affected by other factors that could cause actual results, and WANdisco's plans and objectives, to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. WANdisco undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statement contained within this announcement, regardless of whether those statements are affected as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, save as required by law and regulations.