Sheffield-based WANdisco makes strong start to 2017

The Sheffield-based firm told shareholders at its annual general meeting that 2016 had been a year of substantial progress, with its WANdisco Fusion product now generating significant sales momentum.

David Richards, the chief executive and interim chairman of WANdisco, told the AGM: “Alongside our strong sales traction, we have realigned our cost base, which we now believe is at an appropriate level to deliver a positive EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxation depreciation and amortisation) .”

He added: “I am also pleased to report WANdisco has made a strong start to 2017. We continue to develop a growing new business pipeline, which was highlighted by our sales team securing the company’s largest contract to date in Q1, a $4.1 million contract win with a major financial services multinational.

“Our key strategic partnerships, in particular our OEM (original equipment manufacturer partnership) with IBM, continue to remain central to our progress and we look forward to further developing our channel partnerships to accelerate the deployment of WANdisco globally.”

WANdisco is at the leading edge of Big Data technology - data that is so large and complex it cannot be processed using traditional desktop computers.

Big Data is used by internet giants such as Yahoo, Netflix, Amazon and eBay to keep their operations going.

Earlier this year, it was revealed that WANdisco is working with Yorkshire academics on a project that could speed up the diagnosis and treatment of dementia.

WANdisco is using its expertise to support a European Union funded initiative which could make it easier for doctors to spot the early signs of dementia, a disease which killed more than 61,000 people in England and Wales last year.

The University of Sheffield’s Center for Computational Imaging & Simulation Technologies in Biomedicine has started to analyse this data with WANdisco’s Active Transactional Data Replication technology.