Has market got WANdisco sell-off wrong?

Just hours after being named Listed Company Entrepreneur of the year, Wandisco founder David Richards was brought back to earth today with a reminder about the realities of stockmarket life.

The live data firm has more than doubled in value over the past year, helped by landmark partnerships such as March's 'co-sell' agreement allowing its Fusion platform to be sold as a packaged offering with Microsoft Azure.

Whilst tie-ups with some of the world's tech titans have done wonders for investor confidence and the company profile, the AIM 100 stock succumbed to what looked like a bout of profit taking today as shares fell back as much as 10%.

This was despite broker Stifel upgrading its price target to 1,283p and saying that 2018 was shaping up to be one of the most exciting years in WANdisco’s history.

Source: interactive investor      Past performance is not a guide to future performance

Stifel highlighted the words of the judges at last night's Enterprise Awards at London's Dorchester Hotel when singing the praises of CEO Richards. 

He co-founded the business with chief scientist Dr Yeturu Aahlad in 2005. Without raising any private equity, venture capital or angel funding they led it to the London Stock Exchange in 2012 in an IPO that raised over $24 million.

The company is now worth around £500 million but it's not all been plain sailing for Richards, who was pushed out of the business in 2016 only to be reinstated a week later following pressure from shareholders.

The technology company, whose name stands for Wide Area Network distributed computing, even fell out of the FTSE AIM 100 until it bounced back following a quadrupling of its share price over the following year.

After last night's award, Stifel said:

"The judges warmed to the trials that Mr Richards has endured, survived and prospered from over the past years.

"It is not enough to make errors, but learning from them and then doing things differently and not repeating the prior mistakes are amongst Mr Richards' unique qualities."

Key to WANdisco's recent success has been the LiveData platform that enables companies to make their data always available, as well as accurate and protected. 

In results for 2017, WANdisco reported revenues growth of 73% to $19.6 million with big data bookings for its Fusion platform up 121% year-on-year. Significantly, cash burn reduced to $5.3 million from $8.3 million the year before.

Richards called it a pivotal year, following the financial restructuring in 2016 and increased focus on partnership opportunities. 

The Sheffield and San Francisco-based company now has significant OEM relationships with Alibaba, IBM and Dell EMC, alongside go-to-market partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Oracle.

Stifel said WANdisco offered investors exposure to the 'noisiest' theme in IT currently - big data and hybrid cloud computing.

They wrote: "We see abundant evidence that the company is now positioned to accelerate growth that should create further value for its shareholders."