25th Sep 2018 11:36
LONDON (Alliance News) - WANdisco PLC on Tuesday reported a doubling in its interim loss as revenue halved and operating expenses increase, though the company also said it has signed a deal with a "global" automotive and truck manufacturer.
In the six months ended June, the distributed computing software company reported a widened pretax loss to USD11.2 million from USD6.3 million.
WANdisco's revenue in the first half decreased 41% to USD5.7 million from USD9.7 million a year before.
The company said the reduction in revenue was due to moving to a new accounting standard, IFRS 15, for revenue recognition and the fall in new sales bookings to USD9.0 million from USD10.2 million.
The computer software company's operating expenses increased to USD17.6 million from USD12.5 million. WANdisco attributed the rise in cash overheads to investments made in its Channel Management and Engineering divisions.
Looking ahead, WANdisco said it is seeing "increasingly strong market traction" for its products as global demand for big data and cloud migration continues.
WANdisco believes it has a "robust and strengthening" sales pipeline - which "underpins" its "continued confidence" of achieving market expectations for all of 2018.
Sales bookings in 2017 totalled USD22.5 million. WANdisco's revenue for 2017 was USD19.6 million and its pretax loss USD14.0 million.
In a separate announcement, WANdisco said it has been selected by an unnamed "global automotive and truck manufacturer" to deploy its live data platform WANdisco Fusion.
The contract is worth USD200,000 on an annualised recurring revenue basis and will begin in October.
The current contract covers less than 3% of the customer's data pool and the customer has identified 20 projects that require WANdisco Fusion. The company expects the value of the contract will grow to a multi-million dollar annualised value.
WANdisco was selected following an extensive pilot, it said. The contract will enable the hybrid-cloud, multi-cloud and seamless migration of critical live data for the customer.
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer David Richards said: "We have begun to see a significant structural shift in the composition of our revenue base, from large, difficult-to-forecast on-premise transactions toward more predictable, annual recurring cloud revenues. We see significant opportunities to expand our total available market in Cloud and as annual recurring revenues increase over time, develop a smoother, increasing revenue profile for our firm.
"We take confidence from the early traction we are seeing with Microsoft. To sign three strategic deals through this channel so early in our relationship underpins our belief that Fusion is the only solution capable of enabling organisations to seamlessly move large volumes of critical data to the cloud, without any downtime or service disruption.
These deals are initially small in size relative to our on-premise, perpetual licence deals, as cloud customers buy for current capacity, knowing that they can scale up their usage easily as more data is migrated to the cloud. The revenue from cloud customers should not only be predictable and recurring but also grow significantly over time."
Shares in WANdisco were down 6.4% at 614.00 pence each Tuesday.
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