20th Mar 2014 10:27
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.
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.
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 2.3% at 1,301.67 pence Thursday morning.
By Hana Stewart-Smith; [email protected]; @HanaSSAllNews
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