Member Article

Sheffield's WANdisco widens losses as it continues investment in Big Data

Sheffield-based software firm WANdisco has reported pretax losses of USD$18 million, widening on last years losses of USD$7 million as heavy investment in its newer Big Data products offset revenue growth.

Revenue increased to USD$5 million from USD$3.5 million in the same 6 month period last year.

As well as increasing product development expenditure, the company also increased staff from 162 from 147, though the firm expects that its operating costs for the remainder of the year to remain broadly stable compared to the first-half.

Following the half year end the company secured a USD$10 million revolving credit facility with HSBC Bank PLC, which it will use to finance its continued expansion in the Big Data market.

WANdisco is dually headquartered in Sheffield and San Ramon, California in the US, and has recently reported new customer wins including British Gas and UCI Health.

David Richards, chief executive officer, said: “2014’s first half saw further traction with our Big Data strategy, while our established ALM business continued to deliver strong sales.

“Our ALM customers continued to renew their subscriptions and many expanded their solutions to exert more control over their software development operations.

We have deepened our partnerships with the Hadoop market’s two principal distributors, Cloudera and Hortonworks, and benefitted from the significant corporate investments that they have attracted.

“We launched a partnership with Oracle, opening up access to their global hardware sales channel.

“Our product strategy was accelerated by our acquisition of OhmData, augmenting our HBase database expertise. A new credit facility from HSBC gives us funding options for future investments, and is an expression of confidence in the business.

Our first half progress has moved us forward significantly along our path to becoming the leading provider of non-stop infrastructure for Big Data.“

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Clare Burnett .