WANdisco’s star continues to rise as bookings hit record

The Sheffield-based company, whose software is used by multi-national companies such as HP, Intel, Barclays, McAfee, Honda and Asda’s parent company Wal-Mart, said total bookings for 2012 were up 71 per cent on the previous year at £5m.

WANdisco said that notable new customers secured in the fourth quarter include Apple, Fujitsu, Cap Gemini, General Dynamics, Delta Systems, Penn State University, E-Signal, Pioneer Investments, Georgia Tech and another division of Cisco.

The company also announced new deals from its recently set-up Chinese office including H3C and Nanjing Exchange.

Renewals in the fourth quarter included John Deere, European Southern Observatory, Cooper Power, Amgen, Sherwin Williams, Mentor Graphics, Pitney Bowes, Ansys, Navis, Huawei and Western Digital.

During the three-month period, WANdisc o bought AltoStor, a Silicon Valley-based company working in the fast-expanding ‘Big Data’ market, for £3.2m.

WANdisco said the purchase will speed up and enhance its ability to develop products for the Big Data market – the rapidly-growing volume of complex, diverse and high-speed data which underpins an increasing number of firms.

AltoStor’s founders Dr Konstantin Shvachko and Jagane Sundar were two of the founding developers of Apache Hadoop, software which is used by firms including Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon and eBay to manage their vast databases.

“In business terms it’s the most important thing I’ve ever done,” said WANdisco chief executive David Richards.

“It’s a coup. For a small company to acquire the founders of Hadoop is massive. It’s the hottest space in IT today.”

Buying AltoStor will accelerate WANdisco’s launch of its own Big Data products by a year.

It now hopes to launch an enterprise tool “within months”, said Mr Richards.

Mr Sundar joined as chief technology officer and vice president of engineering for Big Data, while Dr Shvachko became chief architect for Big Data.

The company will report results for the financial year to December 31 on Thursday, April 25.

Analyst George O’Connor, at Panmure, said: “This is a bookings update, so WANdisco did not disclose further P&L results – investors need to await the April results – but in our view they are likely to be similarly a shade better than expectations.”