WANdisco surges after winning its largest contract ever

The financial services firm will use the company’s patented big data and cloud product, WANdisco Fusion, on a volume limited, perpetual license.

Fusion allows the client to move active, critical data between primary and disaster recovery sites as well as through the cloud without any downtime.

Separately, the company ended the first quarter of 2017 with $7.6m in cash, reducing cash burn in the to zero, due to a combination of prior quarter bookings, good cash collection and expense efficiencies.

The AIM-listed company also received its annual research and development tax credit from HM Revenue & Customs during the quarter.

Chief executive and interim chairman David Richards said that the contract win “reinforces our belief that Fusion is the only solution that can enable organisations to seamlessly move large volumes of critical data without any downtime or service disruption - something many thought impossible”.

"We continue to see increasing traction with WANdisco Fusion, which is providing the foundation for our strong order book and sales pipeline for the current financial year."

Eric Burns, deputy head of institutional research at WH Ireland, said that given the upfront perpetual - as opposed to multi-year subscription - nature of the contract, a healthy maintenance tail has also been secured which is likely to be at very high margin and it expects that most of the $4.1m contract to fall through to the bottom line.

“WANdisco entered 2017 with $11m of forward bookings which, when added to today’s $4.1m contract, gets us to consensus revenue numbers currently at $15m. This leaves ample scope for outperformance over the remainder of 2017”, Burns said.

Shares in WANdisco were up 16.88% to 450p at 0923 BST.