WANdisco’s £20m share placing to fund extra staff

David Richards, president and chief executive of WANdisco

The Sheffield-based company also announced what it described as a very significant product partnership with Hortonworks, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of Enterprise Hadoop software.

Hadoop is open source Big Data technology which serves as the backbone for many of the world’s largest and most important databases and is used by companies such as Yahoo, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon and eBay.

Hadoop’s mantra is that the system never goes down.

David Richards, president and CEO of WANdisco, said: “I was talking to a Wall Street Bank and they said that one minute of outage equals $100m loss per minute. Outage is not an option. Outage cannot happen.”

Outage refers to the time when a network is down. WANdisco’s engineers in Sheffield are working on devising software that prevents outage completely.

Mr Richards said the deal with Hortonworks will be “game changing”.

“It will give us access to an enormous market of existing and potential clients including major banks, major telecommunications companies and global Fortune 100 companies,” he said.

The group placed two million shares with institutional investors at £9.50 a share – a 7.8 per cent discount to the closing price on Wednesday – to raise £19m.

Both existing shareholders and new institutions took up shares.

New finance director Paul Harrison said the money will be partly used to hire more people to work on the Big Data side.

“We have 140 people at WANdisco, but we’ve got relatively few engineers dedicated to Big Data. We’ve got to expand the skills set. We also need to expand the sales team,” he said.

The group is looking to recruit 10 to 15 engineers and another 10 sales people.

“If we can find the talent in Sheffield, we’ll absolutely do it,” said Mr Richards.

“We have 70 in Sheffield and we have the office space for 100. These are high quality jobs at the cutting edge, the bleeding edge of technology.”

WANdisco reported half year results for the six months to June 30 yesterday.

Bookings rose by 80 per cent to £3.8m in the first half of 2013 – not far off the £4.9m reported for the whole of last year

The group signed up over 30 blue chip customers during the half year.

It said that notable new customers included General Atomics, Societe Generale, Maxim, Canon, Cisco, Blue Cross Blue Shield, LSI Corp and ADP.