General Motors (GM) has signed a deal with WANdisco which will see the UK tech vendor help the automotive giant move “petabyte-scale data” to the cloud. The news is a welcome boost for WANdisco, which has been hit by financial scandal in recent months.
The deal with GM, the US’s largest automaker which owns brands including Buick, Cadillac and Chevrolet, was announced this morning, and the initial phase will be worth $400,000 to WANdisco, a statement to the London Stock Exchange said.
General Motors and WANDisco to work together on data migration
Operating from headquarters in Sheffield and California, WANdisco helps its customers move their data from IoT and edge devices, as well as on-premises data repositories, onto public and private cloud platforms. It has established partnerships with many leading cloud providers including Amazon’s AWS, Google Cloud and Oracle.
The company has agreed what it describes as a “master license agreement” with GM as a new customer, which will see it “move petabyte-scale data to the Microsoft Azure Cloud using WANdisco Data Migrator for Azure.”
WANdisco says the agreement constitutes “a significant working relationship” with GM, and will “enable continuous data movement through the use of WANdisco software and services over a number of different use cases to be transacted through the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.”
The first phase of the relationship sees GM committing to moving at least 3.3PB of data, with a contract value of over $400,000. Details of the type of data being migrated have not been disclosed.
The WANdisco statement added: “The simplified structure of the deal on the Azure Marketplace strongly supports the power of WANdisco’s partnership go-to-market model with leading cloud service providers to seamlessly deliver high impact data integration solutions that accelerate business impact.”
WANDisco looks to recover after ‘fraudulent irregularities’ allegations
AIM-listed WANdisco’s share price rose 11% in early trading on Wednesday following the news, though this will be of little comfort to shareholders given that the company’s value has collapsed since trading in its shares was suspended earlier this year when alleged financial irregularities came to light.
The company reported income of $7.3m in 2021, and earlier this year said in a trading update that it anticipated revenue for 2022 to be around $24m, with bookings of $115m. But trading in its shares was suspended in March when potentially “fraudulent irregularities” were discovered in the company’s accounts. An independent investigation was launched, and discovered revenue referenced in the trading update should have been $9.7m, while bookings should have been $11.4m.
In April, the company’s co-founder and CEO David Richards, along with CFO Erik Miller, resigned their roles, with former Sage Group boss Stephen Kelly appointed interim CEO. Since then the company has secured $30m in fresh funding, and Kelly has taken up the chief executive position on a full-time basis. It resumed trading on AIM on July 25.
Richard and Miller have subsequently been asked by WANdisco’s board to repay bonuses worth £650,000 they received last year, but according to Sky News have declined to do so.
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