It’s a big day for WANdisco as it announces a ‘game changing’ partnership with open source Hadoop provider Hortonworks, starts a 2m share placement process to raise funds to further accelerate its scorching development, and issues high growth interim results for the six months to June 30, continuing a trend (see here). The bottom line is this company UK-based company is establishing itself as one of the foundation players in the early stage big data market.
The importance of the Hortonworks partnership is hard to overstate. The two companies will jointly go to market with integrated, high performance big data solutions built on the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) with full integration of WANdisco's Non-Stop Hadoop software. The aim is to deliver 100% uptime for HDP across multiple data centres. What that means for the market is that Hadoop has gained enterprise-level credentials, shifting it from a big batch processing engine into a real time transaction processing environment suitable for use by ‘normal’ enterprise businesses (e.g. supermarkets and financial services institutions) not just those running major web sites like Spotify, Yahoo or Amazon. This could be vital for market adoption, particularly in the UK.
For WANdisco, CEO David Richards says it is a game changer that will alter the way it enters the big data market, validates its approach, while significantly widening its market and providing access to new customers. In addition, SAP and Hortonworks announced a partnership recently whereby HANA will run on Hortonworks, so WANdisco now has access to the SAP marketplace too. Significantly, the SAP, Hortonworks, WANdisco combination has the hallmarks of an influential axis.
In terms of financial results, revenue was up 20% to $3.5m, with bookings (WANdisco is predominantly subscription based) more than doubling from $3.4n to $6.1m. Naturally costs are rising, on the back of investment in product and people, and so the operating loss now stands at $6m. WANdisco’s market is still very early stage however and both it and the company are developing rapidly so we are expecting substantial growth for both.