OhmData Acquisition

RNS Number : 8344K

WANdisco Plc

30 June 2014

 



WANdisco plc

("WANdisco" or the "Company")

30 June 2014

WANdisco acquires OhmData

Leading edge HBase skills advance WANdisco's Big Data strategy

London, UK - WANdisco plc (LSE: WAND), the leading provider of continuous availability software for global enterprises to meet the challenges of Big Data, has acquired San Francisco based OhmData Inc. ("OhmData") for an enterprise value of approximately $2.1m, to be satisfied by the issuance of 274,477 new shares in WANdisco (equivalent to 1.1% of current shares in issue).

OhmData develops database solutions based on the Apache HBase ("HBase") database. HBase is a core component of the Hadoop stack for processing large-scale data sets in real-time, and is used in mission-critical operations such as Facebook and Bloomberg messaging. OhmData has filed a patent covering requirements such as efficient database power utilisation. WANdisco has recently applied its continuous availability technology to HBase, and the OhmData team will make a major contribution to further developing the WANdisco Non-Stop HBase product.

OhmData, which has 3 employees, was co-founded by Alex Newman and Ryan Rawson, who will now join WANdisco. Alex Newman is a committer of open source code to the Hadoop ecosystem, whose code has been used in production for over 10 years. He has worked in big data, network protocol design, software security and application development, including working on HBase for Cloudera. Ryan Rawson is a Core Committer of HBase open source code and a member of the HBase Project Management Committee. Before co-founding OhmData, Ryan was a software engineer at Google, where he worked on Google's 'Big Table' forerunner to HBase, and Amazon, where he developed synchronous cross-data centre distributed business logic. He specializes in large systems, (hundreds of nodes or servers), extensive code bases and multiple language environments.

OhmData's unique expertise in design and development of databases is an important element of WANdisco's product development strategy.  Working alongside WANdisco's existing Big Data and distributed computing experts such as Dr. Yeturu Aahlad, Dr. Konstantin Shvachko, Dr. Konstantin Boudnik and Jagane Sundar, they will enhance WANdisco's ability to develop further ground-breaking technology, not least because of their ability to commit new Hadoop code to improve integration between WANdisco's products and the Hadoop Open Source platform.

WANdisco has already demonstrated that, by applying its patented active-active replication technology to Hadoop, it can make Hadoop resilient for enterprise deployments.  OhmData will continue this work with HBase to significantly add to WANdisco's ability to execute in the Big Data market.

Gartner analysts Merv Adrian and Nick Heudecker see HBase and other additional components as key to the relevance of Hadoop and comment: "As Hadoop core and related projects have progressed, its viability as a platform has been enhanced and substantial numbers of vendors in multiple categories, such as business analytics, data integration and workload management, have introduced products that assume its presence. Version 2.x of Apache Hadoop enables greater scalability and availability and expands beyond its batch processing roots to encompass new workloads and processing styles."*

David Richards, Chief Executive Officer of WANdisco comments: "We have again demonstrated that WANdisco can attract the top talent in the industry.  Alex and Ryan come to us having worked as core technologists at some of the biggest names in the industry such as Google, Cloudera and Amazon.  HBase is a critical component of the Hadoop stack and customers have told us that they need it to be continuously available. We are delighted to have added the OhmData team to our renowned Hadoop organization".

For further information please contact:

WANdisco plc	via FTI Consulting LLP
David Richards, Chief Executive Officer Paul Harrison, Chief Financial Officer Phil Branston, VP Corporate Development and Investor Relations
FTI Consulting  LLP	[phone]
Matt Dixon / Sophie McMillan / Jon Snowball / Roger Newby
Investec Bank plc (Joint Broker and Nominated Adviser)	[phone]
Christopher Baird / Dominic Emery
UBS Investment Bank  (Joint Broker)	[phone]
Rahul Luthra / Sandip Dhillon

About WANdisco

WANdisco (LSE: WAND) is a provider of enterprise-ready, non-stop software solutions that enable globally distributed organizations to meet today's data challenges of secure storage, scalability and availability. WANdisco's products are differentiated by the company's patented, active-active data replication technology, serving crucial continuous availability requirements, including Hadoop Big Data and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), including Apache Subversion and Git. Fortune Global 1000 companies, including Juniper Networks, Motorola, Intel and Halliburton, rely on WANdisco for performance, reliability, security and availability. For additional information, please visit www.wandisco.com.

About Apache HBase™

Apache HBase™ is a Hadoop database, distributed, scalable and used for random, real-time read/write access to information stored in Big Data. Apache HBase is an open-source, distributed, versioned, non-relational database modeled after Google's Bigtable. Just as Bigtable leverages the distributed data storage provided by the Google File System, Apache HBase provides Bigtable-like capabilities on top of Hadoop and HDFS.

*Gartner, 'Hadoop Evolves to Face New Challenges', December 2013

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