20th Mar 2014 14:57
LONDON (Alliance News) - WANdisco PLC Thursday posted a widened pretax loss for 2013 as it bolstered its staff.
At the same time, WANdisco, produces software for businesses that is continuously available, announced a new customer win with British Gas and appointed a former Chief Executive of The Sage Group PLC as non-executive Chairman.
WANdisco posted a pretax loss of USD20.0 million, widened from USD8.0 million in the previous year, despite seeing revenue rise to USD8.0 million from USD6.0 million, as sales costs and operating expenses jumped.
The rise in operating expenses was primarily caused by a jump in staff costs to USD12.1 million from USD5.9 million. The company bolstered its sales force and software engineering teams during the year, taking its headcount to 147 from 90. It appointed Paul Harrison, formerly of Sage, as Chief Financial Officer in September.
The company also posted exceptional costs of USD2.8 million, comprising of costs relating to WANdisco's acquisition of Altostor LLC and intellectual property of TortoiseSVN.net, re-organisational costs, and a USD484,000 currency exchange loss.
A key concern for WANdisco going forward will be building up its operations to meet the opportunity of Big Data.
"The thing we talk about the most is scale, the opportunity is scaling up so quickly, and its so large, we have to build a company that's capable of scaling to meet the challenges of that marketplace," Chief Executive David Harris told Alliance News.
"It's unquestionable that big data is happening right now, a lot might happen, its unquestionable that this is a very large, disruptive market place. We've now got products to go to market, so we now have to scale up our operation in all areas."
As part of this scaling, the company will also look to continue investing in its headcount in 2014.
"Our headcount rose to 147 in December, we expect that to go north of 200 this year," Harrison told Alliance News. "It'll be more high quality engineers often found on the west coast, bright young things- not inexpensive but very talented."
"It's been interesting to see young, bright engineers chose Wandisco ahead of other far more established giants of the technology industry. We're going to continue to invest on that front, and grow our enterprise sales force because we need more field sales capability than we have today," Harrison said.
At this stage, the company isn't considering further acquisitions in order to expand its operations, although it is a possibility in the longer term.
"We don't have any current plans, we're very focused on execution, over time we'll look at certain strategic mergers and acquisitions, potentially in the ALM marketplace and potentially in the Big Data marketplace," Richards said.
Bookings for the year rose to USD14.7 million from USD7.9 million, mostly driven by growth in the company's main Application Life-Cycle Management market.
WANdisco announced that it had won a contract with British Gas, part of Centrica PLC, to provide its Non-Stop Hadoop technology, as the gas supplier looks to replace its legacy enterprise database technology. WANdisco's technology will allow continuous availability of data, reduce data storage costs and enable mission critical applications to be implemented without downtime or data loss, WANdisco said.
British Gas will deploy an initial test implementation, and depending on its success, may scale its deployment, WANdisco said.
The deal is one of WANdisco's initial Big Data deployments, following its first deployment with the University of California's Irvine Health March 4. Big data is the capture, curation and analysis of large pools of structured and unstructured data.
Although it is early days for WANdisco's Big Data business, contracts like British Gas and the University of California Irvine give WANdisco examples of how its technology can be used, to demonstrate the need for constantly available data to the market.
"The opportunity that big data yields are enormous, UCI are hoping to use this to predict cardiac arrest from pacemaker data three days before its going to happen," Richards told Alliance News. Richards explained that when a hospital is implementing the product for this sort of purpose, its key that there's an assurance the product is always available regardless of any potential disruptions.
"It's those kinds of use cases that we have to prove out, we've got a number in our pipeline; those are all very good proof points, we'll tell the story with the narrative of the use cases, where the customers are using our technology," Richards explained.
WANdisco also announced the appointment of non-executive Director Paul Walker as non-executive Chairman. The role has previously been covered by David Richards, Chief Executive, since the company's initial public offering in 2012. However, as the company has grown, it said it now will split the two roles. Walker was previously the Chief Executive of business-management software firm Sage.
"Success in Big Data in 2014 will be defined by the number of enterprise customers deploying Hadoop, underpinned by our non-stop technology," said Richards in a statement. "These will be highly strategic deals for WANdisco and over time, as these customers move into full production deployments, we anticipate they will scale into broader enterprise implementations."
Shares in WANdisco were trading up 2.0% at 1,297.75 pence Thursday afternoon.
By Hana Stewart-Smith; [email protected]; @HanaSSAllNews
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