WANdisco could have prevented Amazon hitch

The Sheffield-based firm has high hopes for its latest Big Data product WANdisco Fusion, which it claims could have saved hours of heartache and homelessness last weekend.

Due to a major glitch at cloud hosting provider Amazon Web Services, users of dating app Tinder, holiday home finder Airbnb and online movie provider Netflix, couldn’t get online for much of the weekend.

David Richards, CEO and co-founder at WANdisco, said: “The outage at Amazon Web Services took out Airbnb and Tinder.

Their two primary sites failed which cost then $1,100 per second. WANdisco can solve that problem. We can ensure that data exists in another place.

“If Amazon Web Services had had WANdisco, this wouldn’t have happened.”

So is WANdisco now talking to Amazon?

“We’re talking to everyone,” said Mr Richards, avoiding the question. “We support the hybrid cloud.”

WANdisco is at the leading edge of Big Data technology – data that is so large and complex it cannot be processed using traditional desktop computers.

​Big Data ​is used by internet giants such as Yahoo, Netflix, Amazon and eBay to keep their operations going.​

Mr Richards said that Fusion is designed for companies that are deploying Big data and as it’s self-downloadable it works in a similar way to an app, but it contains all of WANdisco’s patents.

He was speaking yesterday as WANdisco announced a reduction in half-year​ ​losses and said its penetration of the Big Data market has taken a big step forward in the first half of the year​.

Revenue ​rose 13 per cent to £3.7m for the six months ​to June 30. The group said ​its ​adjusted ​underlying loss ​fell to £6m from £6.2m.

​​The firm said it attracted eight new customers in the second quarter alone and the first three Big Data customers went into live production with the new WANdisco Fusion product.

WANdisco cannot name its new customers for confidentiality reasons but they include a major government agency that regulates financial services, one of the world’s largest banks on the east cost of America, a major New Zealand government agency, a big Swiss retail bank, a big Australian bank and comparethemarket.com.

“Comparethemarket is an up and coming company that doesn’t mind showing off about using cutting edge technology,” said Mr Richards.

WANdisco’s Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) business​ ​brought in £3.2m for the same period, ​unchanged on last year.

ALM enables software engineers who are in different countries to work on the same project at the same time irrespective of where they are.