Live data firm WANdisco expects to deliver a greater volume of deals

WANdisco has published a trading update for the year ended December 31 2019 and an update on the progress which is being made with the company's strategic joint product initiative with Microsoft.

Revenue for the year ended December 31 2019 is expected to be around $16 million, alongside a "strong" year-end cash balance of $23.3 million which the board is confident will enable the company to achieve cash flow break even.

The statement added: "While revenue for the year was below expectations, the company delivered strong sequential revenue growth in H2 2019 (c. 67%), driven by accelerating demand across both existing and new geographies."

"Toward the end of 2019, a small number of significant deals slipped into 2020. The majority of these deals are within the company's growing Microsoft channel, where customers have elected to wait for public availability of the company's embedded Azure product, Fusion Resource Provider.

"Other pipeline customers across multiple channels have elected to revisit the initial scope of their engagements and increase them.

"The board fully expects these deals to close in 2020 and notes that they are not competitive tenders."

The delayed deals now expected to close early in 2020, along with the company's current pipeline, support the noard's continuing confidence in meeting current market expectations for the full year in 2020.

The statement added: "The joint FRP project with Microsoft brings WANdisco into the data fabric of the Azure cloud, integrated as if it were a native Microsoft product and unleashes the collective strength of the Microsoft seller network. As such, it is the most important initiative in the company's history."

"Importantly, the FRP product has now entered a critical phase of customer deployment, 'private preview'.

"Private preview signifies the availability of the product to select, existing Microsoft customers to address their data migration and data availability requirements and to provide product feedback ahead of the revenue generating 'public preview' expected in Q1 2020.

"General availability will follow this public preview, launching the full joint go-to-market strategy. A number of customers, including one of the world's largest retailers and a global systems integrator with over 100,000 employees have agreed to participate in the private preview."

The statement added: "Alongside the private preview, a global US restaurant and beverage chain has begun using WANdisco Fusion to migrate data to Azure Data Lake Storage in an Azure-specific use case with wide appeal within the Azure customer base, and where WANdisco is the only viable solution."

David Richards, chief executive officer and chairman of WANdisco, said: "2019 was a significant year for WANdisco.

"We delivered on our primary strategic goal, cementing our partnership with Microsoft to embed Fusion into Azure, allowing customers to use Fusion as if it was a native Azure offering.

"We are now focused on bringing the product to general availability which we expect to facilitate a greater volume and velocity of deals.

Mr Richards added: "The future of analytics and in particular machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) is in the cloud. Our partnership with Databricks highlights the growing demand for non-disruptive solutions for bringing data to the cloud. In this regard we are uniquely positioned.

"Having successfully raised $16.5 million from existing shareholders in November 2019, we have secured the balance sheet and are well positioned to capitalise on our cloud opportunities in 2020 and beyond and achieve the important milestone of cash flow breakeven.

"While 2019 did not meet our financial expectations, the product and strategic progress is significant, and we enter 2020 more confident than ever."