WANdisco in Sheffield enjoys strong momentum following contract wins

The Sheffield-based firm gained contracts both directly and with its key cloud channel partners including Azure, AWS and IBM, as well as its principal analytics partners Databricks and Snowflake.

The company's preliminary unaudited revenues are expected to be in-line with current market estimates, upgraded in December 2021.

Bookings increased 30 per cent to $8.4m from $6.5m in the fourth quarter of 2020. For the 2021 financial year, bookings increased 17 per cent to $11.9m from $10.2m in the prior period. Ending RPO (Remaining Performance Obligations), is expected to be approximately $9.4m for the 2021 financial year, up 92 per cent year-on-year.

David Richards, CEO and chairman of WANdisco, said: “The WANdisco team has worked incredibly hard to lay the groundwork for a significant acceleration in new customer wins through an effective restructuring of our sales organisation.

"We are now seeing the benefit of this labour as we look to secure larger deals, in new markets through our growing, market leading product portfolio.

“The new contract wins we saw in the fourth quarter directly and through key industry partners are testament to the strategic progress we have achieved across the business this year, while the General Availability of the LiveData Platform for Azure – announced in October 2021 – was a critical step in converting WANdisco's new business pipeline.

“We are excited by the opportunities we are seeing in the market to enter new verticals and are well placed to capitalise on an expected increase in IoT-driven deals this year.

"The fourth quarter saw a significant increase in bookings and RPO and this momentum, combined with high near-term visibility, gives us confidence in our ability to execute on the company’s strong first quarter and second half 2022 pipeline."

Toward the end of the 2021 financial year, WANdisco took steps to realise efficiencies in its business model through sales reorganisation and cost management. The firm says it has a strong balance sheet, with WANdisco’s year-end cash position expected to be approximately $27.8m, a 32 per cent increase on the prior year, with $1.2m in trade receivables.

In the last year, the business has made steady progress in its transition to a cloud-centric, consumption-based model, resulting in more predictable revenues, reduced discounting and increased upsell opportunities.

The cloud platform model of the 'Commit to Consume' contract structure, where a customer is obligated to move a minimum amount of data over a given time, is now the standard for WANdisco.

The transition has allowed WANdisco to deepen its strategic relationships with key partners including Oracle. The firm recently announced that Oracle will provide fully funded access to WANdisco’s LiveData Migrator solution to support its enterprise customers and partners in accelerating data lake migrations to the cloud.

Oracle has a large, defined pipeline of opportunities driven by its cloud services business, WANdisco said.

The General Availability of the LiveData Platform for Azure was launched in the second half of 2021. The announcement signified the completion of a multi-year joint project with Microsoft to integrate WANdisco's technology into its cloud fabric and unlock the Azure ecosystem for global blue-chips – one of the most important initiatives in WANdisco's history to date, according to the company.