LONDON (ShareCast) - (Sharecast News) - Distributed computing firm WANdisco reported a drop in first-half revenues that saw the business' losses deepen, with news of a large auto industry contract not enough to stop its shares dipping on Tuesday.
For the six-month period ended 30 June the company's revenues came in at $5.7m, down 41% compared to the same period last year, with losses before tax plunging 79% to $11.2m.

Sales fell amid a drop in bookings from $10.2m to $9m, with big data and cloud bookings dropping 11% to $6.2m, while source code management bookings dropped 13% to $2.8m.

The AIM traded outfit had cash and cash equivalents of $18m at 30 June, up from $9.9m at the same point last year.

The period also saw WANdisco expand its relationship with IBM, increasing the royalty payable to the AIM traded company from the sale of its IPs from 30% to 50% and engaging in joint engineering works with the IT giant to support IBM Big SQL and other products.

Elsewhere, the firm signed an OEM sales partnership with Alibaba Cloud, filed a blockchain patent and developed its relationship with Microsoft, gaining co-sell status on Fusion software bundled with Microsoft Azure and signing three deals concerning the banking, semiconductor and retail sectors.

David Richards, chief executive and chairman of WANdisco, said: "We take confidence from the early traction we are seeing with Microsoft. To sign three strategic deals through this channel so early in our relationship underpins our belief that Fusion is the only solution capable of enabling organisations to seamlessly move large volumes of critical data to the cloud, without any downtime or service disruption."

On Tuesday the company also said WANdisco Fusion had been selected by a "global automotive and truck manufacturer" after an "extensive" pilot, with the contract beginning next month and initially worth $200,000 on an annualised recurring revenue basis. The initial contract covers less than 3% of the customer's data pool and the customer has identified over 20 projects that Fusion could be rolled out to.

WANdisco's shares were down 8.08% at 603.00p at 0920 BST.

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