Trading Update and Outlook

RNS Number : 8698H

WANdisco Plc

11 April 2022

 

11 April 2022

WANdisco plc

("WANdisco" or the "Company")

Trading Update and Outlook

Strong momentum in Q1 with multiple new contract wins

Unaudited Q122 bookings of $5.8m: up significantly from $1.1m in Q121

General Availability of LiveData Migrator and LiveData Migrator for Azure accelerates new business momentum

WANdisco (WAND.L), the LiveData company, announces a trading update for the quarter ended 31 March 2022 ("Q122").

Trading Update

The Company saw strong trading in Q122 following significant contract wins for its LiveData Migrator (LDM) solution, both directly and via key cloud channel partners including Azure, AWS and IBM, as well as its principal analytics partners Databricks and Snowflake. As a result, the Company's unaudited Q122 bookings are $5.8m: up significantly from $1.1m in Q121. Ending RPO¹ (Remaining Performance Obligations) is expected to be approximately $14m for Q122: up significantly from $4.2m in Q121. The continued high visibility of the Company's near term business pipeline underpins confidence in strong 2022 trading.

The Company continues to have a strong balance sheet, with WANdisco's quarter-end cash position expected to be approximately $21.3m, with $2.4m in trade receivables.

In Q122, the Company secured significant contracts for LDM from the Internet of Things ("IoT") service providers, migrating data from on-premise edge platforms to the cloud. Key to these wins was the Company's cloud agnostic solution that moves large amounts of data from on-premise Hadoop to multiple different clouds. A strategic selling point to customers is that LDM can move data to any of the cloud providers, essentially commoditizing the large cloud platforms.  With LDM, a customer can rapidly change the cloud destinations of its data. This provides ultimate ownership of data to the customer, and allows customers to avoid vendor lock-in and arbitrage cloud pricing and functionality. LDM reinstates control of data back to the customer. WANdisco was chosen for its ability to support the migration of data to several cloud providers. Additionally, the Company's ability to migrate data at scale without requiring any system downtime, along with its capacity to automatically migrate data changes as they occur, ensuring data consistency, were key factors in securing these contracts.

The Company won several contracts during the first quarter with the potential for expanded use cases and additional Commit-to-Consume revenues for WANdisco in the future. Key contracts included:

·In February, WANdisco completed a significant data migration for a major client to Microsoft's Azure cloud, through LDM. The client owns and operates Canada's largest railway and is currently engaging WANdisco on future use cases, including in IoT data, with the potential to move another 30 petabytes of data to the cloud per year.

·In March, having signed a $1.5m Commit-to-Consume contract with a top ten global telco, the Company announced its first significant follow-on deal with that customer one week later, worth $1.2m, driven by an increase in data throughput for one of the customer's end-customer smart meter operators.

·This 'land and expand' momentum continued toward the end of the first quarter, with WANdisco recently announcing a major IoT deal with a multinational insurance group, operating in over 30 countries, with the potential to expand across geographies as the customer migrates increasing amounts of data over time. In the same week, WANdisco announced a contract win with a top 10 global retailer - an existing client of three years - using LDM to create a new, focused environment for machine learning and other analytical workloads. WANdisco continues to deliver new value through existing customer relationships by providing critical solutions for new use cases and expansions.

·The Company is seeing continued momentum in cloud migration opportunities, recently winning another contract worth $213k, to migrate a subset of data for a world leading computer vendor from its existing Hadoop environment, with data volumes expected to increase over time.

The General Availability of LDM and LDMA (LiveData Migrator for Azure) was essential in the acceleration of business in Q122. Achieving the General Availability milestone in October 2021 has provided potential customers with greater assurance about their ability to embark on petabyte-scale data migration projects with WANdisco and, as such, is steadily unlocking a pipeline of growth opportunities, especially in IoT.

Additionally, the Company's successful transition to a cloud-centric, consumption-based model during the last year has allowed WANdisco to deepen its strategic relationships with key partners including Oracle. WANdisco announced in January 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. WANdisco announced the first pre-pay deal through the new Oracle partnership during the first quarter to accelerate data lake migrations for Oracle customers. WANdisco's deepening relationship with Oracle has unlocked a large, defined pipeline of opportunities, with strong commercial potential, driven by its cloud services business.

Outlook

Looking ahead, the high visibility of WANdisco's near term business pipeline underpins confidence in continued strong trading in 2022. The Company is well placed to capture significant market opportunities in high-quality IoT-driven deals and expand into new verticals in the course of the year.

David Richards, CEO and Chairman of WANdisco, commented:

"The General Availability of LDM and LDMA in H2 last year laid the groundwork for a significant acceleration in new customer wins this quarter. The customer value that this solution provides is clear as we are securing larger deals, in new markets such as IoT, in addition to migrating Hadoop workloads to the cloud to facilitate analytics.

"Additionally, we are seeing a shortening of the sales cycle due to cloud endorsement, but also due to the Commit-to-Consume model for customers.  They are getting massive functionality and utility from their data, they are not required to purchase upfront licenses, and in turn the Company is seeing limited need or pressure for discounting on price."

"We are excited by further market opportunities to enter new verticals and are well placed to capitalise on an expected increase in IoT-driven deals this year. Q122 saw a step-change in bookings and RPO and this strong momentum, combined with high near term visibility, gives us confidence in our ability to execute on the Company's strong Q2 and 2022 pipeline".

Footnotes

1)  Ending RPO is defined as Beginning RPO plus Bookings minus Recognised Revenue.

ENDS

For further information, please contact:

WANdisco plc	via FTI Consulting
David Richards, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman
Erik Miller, Chief Financial Officer
FTI Consulting	[phone]
Matt Dixon / Kwaku Aning / Tom Blundell
Stifel (Nomad and Joint Broker)	[phone]
Fred Walsh / Richard Short
Panmure Gordon (Joint Broker) Erik Anderson / Alina Vaskina	[phone]

Note: This announcement contains inside information which is disclosed in accordance with the Market Abuse Regulation (No 596/2014).  The person responsible for this announcement is Erik Miller, CFO.

About WANdisco

WANdisco is the LiveData company. WANdisco's LiveData Cloud Services enable enterprises to create an environment where data is always available, accurate and protected, creating a strong backbone for their IT infrastructure and a bedrock for running consistent, accurate machine learning applications. With zero downtime and zero data loss, WANdisco LiveData Platform keeps geographically dispersed data at any scale consistent between on-premises and cloud environments allowing businesses to operate seamlessly in a hybrid or multi-cloud environment. For more information on WANdisco, visit www.wandisco.com .

 

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