Thank you Matt and welcome everybody to the long-awaited WANdisco Capital Markets Day here at the London Stock Exchange. For those that you don't know my name's David Richards. I'm the co-founder and CEO of WANdisco. Need to click it through. Today I wanna take a few moments to talk about our business and our opportunity and how we see the WANdisco business and investor story. As a team today, we want to guide you through our belief in the inflection point this business has reached. A solid business structured and supported to take an unmatched product to market at a moment when the need for that product is truly emerging. WANdisco today, as our recent momentum has shown is in a strong operational footing. We have the right product and positioning product market fit if you will.
Only WANdisco can seamlessly move data at this scale from edge to cloud and I'm sure you'll see that today with some of the customer stories and product stories that we're gonna tell you. We've got a go-to-market structure and partner ecosystem that is unlocking value for us through beachhead design wins, and follow-on wins with major global firms. We have a customer model, both in terms of pricing and proof of concept that is allowing customers to engage in our product in ways that prove value to them easily effectively and in a number of use cases. All of this excites me and excites the team around me today because our strength and readiness combined with market shift opening up around us a market shift that we have aligned our product to take advantage of.
As more and more enterprises seek to act on their ambitions to unlock data from their businesses, WANdisco is the only organization capable of helping them navigate that journey. Our product is the value. We can not only help these enterprises' customers unlock but in many cases we help them see it for the first time. And thanks to the proliferation of IoT and edge environments powered by 5G the data activation era is unfolding in front of us clear and sustainable growth for WANdisco. Now, the proliferation of data we've talked about this before is really being driven by connectivity not just in the personal realm but also in every single corner of enterprise. This real systemic enabler of that connectivity in recent years has been the advent of 5G networks.
Those networks steadily growing around the world are really unlocking the growth in data that all enterprises are grappling with. There's gonna be over 75 billion connected devices worldwide by 2025 and that data generated by these devices, well, you can see it here it's staggering and growing rapidly. The difficulty at the moment is so much of that data is trapped with almost 70% of IT decision-makers polled by Wakefield agreeing that the true usefulness of their data remains beyond reach. The shape of the issue here is not just known data being out of reach but many organizations don't even know where to begin in assessing which data could possibly hold value for them. It's that challenge where WANdisco has the power to be the most effective partner for our customers.
So if you take those data points around data proliferation and stick it up in ways in which enterprises are now actively seeking to harness and unlock their data they're generating then that's where things really do reach an inflection point. Take automotive as just one industry vertical. They have over an exabyte of data up in the cloud. Mercedes-Benz and BMW are actively rolling out data service innovations around that data. Look also at the energy space. Nearly 100 petabytes of smart meter data in the cloud as you've seen by our commercial momentum already in the smart meter space. This unlocking of data is happening right at the moment when we have the only product to help enable it. All of this we believe points the data activation era.
A total addressable market a TAM as you can see here of $14 billion and that's where we're focused. Now, attacking this TAM is something we've been pointing the business towards for the past two years. The reason I feel that our product and go-to-market channel and our customer model are so well set to deliver the success is because each of the team here today has been honing and shaping those areas over the past two years ready to support our impact in the market we're now leaning into. From the Azure GA that we announced a couple of years ago the partnerships that we've led on top of that with Databricks and Snowflake, these foundational partnerships that we set alight in 2019. And then on top of that the commit-to-consume model and the early successes that we've seen via that.
There are plenty of things that we've not done quite deliberately because we're so laser-focused on this data activation goal. The exciting thing is in combination all of this work is helping us capture a commercial opportunity in the market and it's also helping us shape and scope opportunity through the quality of conversations we are now having with customers. And here are some examples. One of the world's largest automotive manufacturers with a five-year, $5 million commit-to-consume contract. You're going to see when Erik talks about this later when we say five-year commit-to-consume, it's not like a subscription that takes five years. This will probably be consumed in less than 12 months. Or the insurance company that's also using IoT data to reshape insurance, moving from actuarial science to data science, how people actually drive their cars, and you're gonna see huge changes in that market.
Oracle the prepaid and they're paying that for their customers to use WANdisco's technology as part of a data migration service called Data Migration Service or IBM, we just recently announced a $3.3 million contract with a large North American Canadian bank. The key to all of this really and I was having this conversation with somebody earlier is product. We built a product for data scale and many people have asked me well they were asking me two years ago where is this data? It hadn't arrived because IoT really didn't exist but it's arrived now. We have a product positioned perfectly at this time for exabyte scale data. Yes, exabyte scale data and those data moves are happening now. It's also critical this is done at speed. Yes, there are alternatives.
You can put it onto the back of a truck and drive it up to the cloud, and you can take six months doing it or you can do it in less than a month with us. What's also important and you're going to see this come out I suspect from the sales team and the business development team that being cloud agnostic is really important. For customers, the ability to remain sovereign over their core asset, data is really critical and our ability to move it to a cloud of their choice as they arbitrage between different compute facilities in cloud is also critically important. I alluded earlier to a design win and somebody asked me how long does a typical sales cycle? Many of you are going to be familiar with Arm.
So when Arm announced a deal with Samsung, or with Canon, that was a design win. They were designed into the infrastructure of those companies. Large telecommunications company we announced on the twenty-third of March a $1.5 million commit-to-consume contract. A week later we announced another deal of $1.2 million. Suddenly we're at $2.7 million in a week. What happened? This is commit-to-consume is beautiful because it doesn't. It's not a time-boxed renewal. This is an expansion. As that data gets consumed or as the objective to consume expands, then so does the deal at the same pace. In this case it was for smart meters and as they moved into other geographies the annual consumption rate was growing enormously.
And then a quarter later, we announced another deal but this time it was $11.6 million for an aggregate of $14.3 million. I can tell you that this is not going to stop here. The future opportunity here is significantly more than that. That's one telecommunications company. We're very greedy at WANdisco. We're targeting significant market share. We want every telecommunications provider. Right, Frank?
Yeah.
This, of course, has led to much improved performance. You can see the bookings was up 1,200% to $27.3 million in RPO and Erik is going to cover this, remaining performance obligation is at $31 million. You can see the success that we've seen virtually everywhere in the organization. The customer model commit to consume encouraging experimentation use case and expansion. The go-to-market and channel relationships that we have core relationships with Microsoft, AWS, Google, Databricks, and Snowflake. Product as I mentioned is absolutely fundamental. We have product market fit. We have the right product at the right time. You're going to hear from our sales organization that is now enhanced and hungry. The business development organization that's laser-focused on these IoT opportunities in key verticals.
Our marketing that's crystallizing the mission and actively contributing to our sales pipeline. So enough from me. You're going to here from. First of all, I'm going to hand over to Keith Graham who's going to cover our product strategy and roadmap. You're going to hear from Rich Baker, our VP of Global Sales, Frank Moser, our VP of IoT, and Adrian Ashley, they're going to talk about our sales model and go-to-market strategy and some customer stories. And then going to hand over to Peter Scott who's been with us for a long time now as I'm sure you know who runs business development. Then Chris Pemberton, who recently became our Global VP of Marketing is going to cover the marketing strategy.
And then Erik, who I'm sure you all know, our CFO, is going to cover how this commit-to-consume model translates into revenue and cash. And then we're going to do a quick wrap-up and Q&A, and I won't hold you back from getting some drinks. After each section, we will be taking a brief five-minute Q&A. When Keith's finished, we'll be taking some questions. There'll be questions both in the room and online and hopefully in this hybrid world that we now live all this is going to work. So Keith, I'll hand over to you now.
Thanks David and good afternoon everybody. Can everybody hear me? There we go. Within products we've got a very simple goal and that's to make it easier to sell and to operate a variety of use cases to any cloud. We're trying to keep it as simple as possible within the organization. As the bridge between the sales organization and engineering it's a focus from us to talk about the product market fit that David talked about. But what does that actually mean to people? It's also to make sure that what we're seeing in the market and what the customers are asking for and what the sales team are bringing in that translates to the actual code that the engineers are writing and delivering. So, we also make sure within the product group that we're doing that translation.
When we're talking to them, we're not just talking about the what it is that we want them to deliver and the when, of course, because we've got release cycles we're dealing with but we're also trying to bring out the why. What's the reason? What's the value that the customer is trying to unlock? And why they want this particular feature? We've seen that has made a huge benefit for the engineers actually getting engaged and understanding the why they're actually delivering it. An example with that would be where we're talking about the prioritization of datasets, why is that important?
In discussing with those, we then would lean on some of the stuff like that Chris's team would do in the marketing that would talk about a campaign, you know, move your data, not your deadline. Making sure that people understand why that is important or what it means from a customer's perspective. We're also trying to make sure that we enable new use cases all the time, either the ones that we see in the market or that we hear the customers asking for specifically through the customer success group what they'd like to do how they'd like to continue. We don't want it to be a single engagement. We want to continue that relationship and build that going forward.
A key tenet of ours in product is to make sure there's ease of use is there. It's complicated some of the stuff that we do but we wanna make sure that we hide that complexity to the end user. We don't want them to be worried about it but we also wanna make sure that they don't need specialist teams, specialist training to block the adoption of the product within their organizations. The design team is very focused on making sure that we maintain that simplicity across that. We work very closely with the strategic partners that Peter's got and from the product perspective that means we wanna understand their roadmaps where they're going, what features they're delivering, what they're seeing, what they want to do, and also the timing of that so that we're then working as a preview with them.
We're working to make sure that when we're ready and they're ready we can be part of their marketing campaign so that it looks much more cohesive. We don't necessarily wanna be in competition with their features unless that's the stated goal of the business to be in competition. But we want to understand what they're doing and it's also a way of us making sure that we're staying in touch with what the market is requiring. All of that staying with the customers staying with the partners listening to the engineering side of it is all about servicing and expanding the TAM that we've already identified. Over the last three or four years, we've moved from delivering an on-premise solution that had cloud as a target destination to one that's encompassed cloud thinking.
Cloud thinking we're talking about being pervasive throughout the product and what we mean by that, of course is in usability. How do you actually use it? How do you consume the product? If you're an Azure person and you want the Azure portal interface because that's the easy way for you to adopt it and use it then we want to provide that. Also if you're going across multiple clouds and you want a single user interface to go across any and all clouds we want to provide that as well. It's about making sure that the usability to allow self-service that they can choose which way they want to go and adopt the product. We also bring in the idea about self-solve.
If you come across an issue, how we want to make sure all the time that we're thinking and proactively suggesting what might be the issue what you might need to do, so you can fix it yourself. We don't want to have to grow the support organization as we grow the customer and the install base. We're constantly thinking about if we talk about if we find a problem that we need to fix, we need to make sure that it's put out there so the customer can fix it themselves. Developing the first third-party Azure native service, that's a difficult thing to actually. The first third-party Azure native service was really helpful for us on this transition and the journey.
It's not just a question of taking something that you install on-premises on a machine and now doing it in a virtual machine in the cloud. There's a lot more behind it, and working very closely with Azure as they develop that together with us allowed us to understand what does it actually mean to operate a cloud service, to come from the cloud and not just push to the cloud? That's been really, really helpful for us in how they think about it and how the cloud actually operates. That's also led us to adopt some of the terminology within product that the cloud vendors and Azure use such as you know private preview public preview leading to GA and what that means throughout those different steps of engaging with your customers all the way through.
We've tried to adopt that all the way inside it. Things like consumption pricing, consumption billing, usability, all of that has been taken into account so the product actually takes that and provides that information allowing the sales and finance to then offer different contracts that commit-to-consume of this world edge to the individual customers. Acquiring new customers and expanding existing relations always means that we're looking to expand the use cases within our existing customers and what they're trying to use. A few examples are here that I'll just talk through a few of them just to give a little flavor to it. For example, Bank of America started off with a multi-petabyte disaster recovery solution going across different locations.
As a bank, their security requirements were extensive and difficult. We had to work through all of that with them. Now that we got through that and they've moved, it's a long-term relationship for disaster recovery. Now as they switch to go and look into moving some of their datasets to the cloud, we're the choice that they've gone for how they can move that data securely all the way up to the particular cloud. That's an expansion for us and a very interesting one for us to be able to see an existing customer grow as they move their data around. NatWest is a bit more local. We started with them as a cloud migration, but then as they've publicly been out talking about multiple clouds, they want to go across different ones, different data sets in different clouds.
They're looking for how can they move that data from in between those, the individual clouds. That's beyond a migration up. That's a long-term movement between the different clouds. That's particularly interesting for us to get engaged with and to work with them on that. AT&T is an interesting one as well. When we started with them it was about a large tens of petabytes of data they wanted to move from an on-premise data center up to the cloud and that was to shut down that data center.
The cost reductions to them to move that was one of the elements, but the other element was, of course, that they could unlock that data in the cloud and the analytics, which we'll hear about, I think, a bit later on, that they can actually do by having the data available in the cloud. A twofold use case for them. The quicker they could do it the more they could get there the better from that side of it. Having successfully done that with them they're now. They've got it up in Azure. One of the challenges that they have seen there is if you want to keep your data across different regions in Azure has decided the pairing that you have to go and do for cross-region replication.
If you want to go to different ones outside the 28 pairings they have, well, that's a problem. That is a problem, but it's an opportunity. Now we're able to work with them and with Microsoft on a preview function to be able to look at how we can unlock and go from any of the individual regions across and do Azure cross-regional replication. Just an expansion of just the movement, really important and very public references. What does that mean when they actually get to the cloud? It's very nice for us to be actively involved in that. Just on the AT&T and I get asked regularly what our competition is. In the AT&T example, when we were right in the middle of doing it the competition was a data transfer device. I think David touched on that we're talking about.
It's a thumb drive. To anyone who knows what a thumb drive is. Pretty big thumb drive, by the size of a desktop computer. You're talking about it handling a petabyte of data. It says a petabyte, but it really only has 800 TB. Anyway, the idea to go and move 20 PB, you need 25 of them. In the conversations with them we then have discussions around you know well you're gonna need 25 of them. You're bringing boxes in with barcodes on them to move the data up. That's tricky, and that's just the data you've got now. What happens when it's changing and it's moved, and it's still on its way to its destination? It brings all kinds of different complexity and talking to them we had an interesting conversation.
We said, "You're not in the logistics business. You know, if you're Rob Carter at FedEx, you know, maybe you should be moving boxes with barcodes on it. But even he doesn't do it that way. You're in the communications, the networking, the bandwidth. Why are you doing it like this?" It prompted a lot of thinking and then, of course, the alternative was to do it through their own networks and use us for it and that was how it goes. That just shows that when it's a small set of static data, there's an alternative to go and use. When it's large data and it's changing it becomes problematic. When you take that to the next stage you talk about the scale that David's talking about and that we're seeing in the market with the IoT customers to even contemplate moving it with boxes.
You're then moving up to the next one which is the trucks. That's just an extra level of complexity and if it's continuously changing the data how do you reconcile the changes when it's been delivered to the cloud? That's why we see ourself in that unique position that when you're trying to move that kind of scale of data then we are in a unique position from that side of it. The new use cases go beyond the large scale of data that David talked about which is obviously a very sweet spot for us. When it's large amounts of data that need to move as fast as possible that's very, very useful for us. We want to also make sure that the use cases we talk about is not just once we've moved it that's the end of the relationship.
We want to make sure that when we've moved it up we can be part of that continuous movement. It's got a destination and we want to be part of that destination as such. When we talk about activating the data, we're also looking at not just landing it at the different clouds but landing into the different storage areas. When you're going across the different clouds and across the different storage. That's one thing and we take care of all of that. Where they want to move the data ultimately is up into the catalogs which we also support but then up into the data processing ones. We already support the Snowflake, the Databricks, but now what about when you want to go between the Snowflake, the Databricks, and all those different systems across the cloud?
Once it's cloud-resident data we don't want that to be the end. We want to be in the middle of that, and that's where we're driving that forward. That also means that we can expand not just the number of users, but the actual number of people and personas within an organization that get value and relevance out of our product from that side of it. Expanding it in that particular way is obviously really important. All of those pieces fit together into what we would do with our roadmap. We try with each of the different releases that we talk about to have a business-led kind of theme in there just to give a focus. I won't go through each of the different features here and explain them to you unless you want to with a drink. That's fine.
I won't bore everybody with those. I just thought it'd be useful to see some of the ones and that we're talking about specifically in there. With the Q3, the imminent stuff that we've already got out and are delivering on that, we see that as the market expands of people who want to move to the cloud. We also see that the sources like a network-attached storage that's also continuing to expand. That means the on-premise one is still growing and the movement to cloud is there. We wanna make sure that we're tapped into that really, really well. It's growing. It's expanding so that we've added that in as a system. We also wanted to show that when I say about hiding complexity and making it easy to use just it is just an additional new source for people.
They don't have to worry about any more information than that to be able to capture it. We want to make sure that that's understood by everybody, which make it easy. We also want to make sure when the salesman, Rich, who you'll hear from later on is up that he doesn't have to come back and go "Well, they got this format and this thing and this." We want to kind of remove those kind of barriers to the adoption with the customers. I talked about the additional use case of the cloud when we're dealing with preview features together with Azure and that's a good alignment with them. It doesn't just restrict us to doing something with Azure.
When we're able to handle that change notification stuff from an Azure storage we can of course use that to go across the different clouds and expand that. Working with them within the Azure world also opens up opportunities for us beyond and in that area. The people who are using the data when it gets up there that whole user base that continues to expand. If you look at what people are seeing in the analytics, that's ongoing and recurring growth that we see in there. With our next gen stuff that we're talking about coming out later on in the year we're talking about all those activations not just delivering it to one end system but being across all the different systems transformations being across the true data pipeline of that.
That will grow the number of users as I said that it's applicable to within the organizations. That's a shift for us then to be dealing with architects and people who are moving the data to the actual data scientists, the people who have got it there, who are unlocking it and are not interested in the fact as David said that it was on-prem. They don't care. They want to actually activate and use the data up there. That was all I wanted to share. The key focus for us, of course, is to expand the use cases expand the number of users and stay laser-focused on servicing and expanding the 14 billion TAM that's already been identified.
Thanks, Keith. I think we've got time for a couple of quick questions if there are any in the room or online. George.
[Audio Inaudible] One morning you had an email, and that email said, "Right, we're moving to consumption as a model." I just wondered from a product side what had to change in order to drive consumption?
That's a very good question. That's where I'll leave to the Azure native service. That's how billing is done from them. Understanding that we already had to go and make those changes to be able to work in a consumption model with Azure meant that we were already enabled to go and add that in. We constantly add additional pieces of information into it but we've also put it into the core kind of product. It wasn't a big step for us. We've added that now into billing engines, and we show all of that, we report all that information directly internally into Erik and his team as well. It wasn't a big step for us.
Is it fair to ask you about moonshots?
Moonshots?
Stuff you're working on.
What did he talk about or not?
We're obviously a deep IP R&D company and we have a product that is in the labs at the moment that we're very excited about that makes it even easier to consume this product. I mean, obviously for the technical people in the room things like Lambda, serverless compute, inordinate scale, and taking advantage of some of those capabilities are very interesting for us and we're experimenting with some of those.
Thank you.
All right.
Any other questions online? Perfect. Okay.
Excellent. Thank you.
Over to the sales team. Thanks, Keith. Are you two staying there, or are you joining me on stage?
Joining.
I feel lonely up here without you two. I'll let them take their seat. My name's Rich Baker. I'm the Senior Vice President for sales globally for WANdisco. The intention of this presentation really is to explain an understanding of my sales organization and how we operate in the new world that we find ourselves within now. A brief history of me before joining WANdisco is that I worked for Oracle for 16 years in a range of both individual quota-carrying and sales leadership positions, mostly in the technology division, and my last role at Oracle was to lead the Engineered Systems team across the UK, Ireland, Nordics, and Israel. I left Oracle to head up the EMEA and latterly, the global sales organization for Oracle's number one reseller.
And then, I was just in long conversation with AWS when David called and invited me to join WANdisco, so I declined the conversation any further with AWS and joined WANdisco, and it was a fantastic decision. Thank you, David. Outside of work for those interested, I'm also a member of the Dartmouth Lifeboat Crew. Okay, my sales organization is actually split geographically in the first instance. I've got Danny Keating, who runs EMEA and Asia Pacific, and then I've got Kevin Seaman who runs the USA North and South America for me. Today, I've brought two of my other senior leadership team. I've got Dr. Frank Moser and Adrian Ashley. I'll just give a quick bio on each of those. Frank was originally managing the Oracle. Sorry.
Frank was originally managing the Google Enterprise, now Google Cloud sales team for DACH, and then later DACH in the Nordics region. He did that for more than nine years, and after that, moved on to the Hasso Plattner Group, heading their sales organization for DACH and Benelux. He's also led DACH Southern European sales teams for SevOne, who were latterly acquired by IBM. Prior to Google, worked for Mercury Interactive, HP, and Siemens in the US and in Germany. He studied physics and mathematics in Munich and in Boulder, Colorado, and holds a PhD from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. He lives in the southwest of Germany next to the French border. In my organization, Frank has two roles. He's the VP of Strategic Accounts and he's also the Global IoT Sales Leader.
Frank, in a moment, is going to talk through the multiple WANdisco use cases that we have and give some customer references and the stories behind them. Alongside him, Adrian Ashley. Adrian's worked in IT for 30-plus years, predominantly working in financial services space in and around the city of London. His experience spans technical account management, both software and hardware pre-sales, managed services, and data migration. More recently, this has expanded into working with all of the top hyperscalers, and his role in WANdisco covers both the management of the Global Solutions Architects team, and he covers off all of the sales enablement. Adrian is my VP of Sales Operations and Global Sales Engineering. In Adrian's section, he's going to discuss our cadence improvements, specifically in business operations and around field readiness.
He will also describe the strengthening of our pricing and discounting structures that are providing increased forecast accuracy for us and consistency throughout the business. I'd like to discuss the sales motion shift across the last 18 months. David and Keith have both alluded to this. At WANdisco, we have had historic and current success with Hadoop migrations. These are still hugely relevant to us and provide substantial revenues. Combined deals in the pipe today total tens of millions of dollars' worth of potential revenues to us. Often these are typically single movements of large-scale data. However, the energy and the excitement and revenue explosion is being driven to us by edge-to-cloud and commit-to-consume deals.
Data growth and expansion is phenomenal and our customers need to be able to exploit and analyze that data quickly in order to gain market advantage and in most cases monetize it. You're going to hear from Frank that the growth in the number of intelligent sensors. For example, in automotive, telco, and utilities, is exponential. There are quite simply more transmitters than there are cloud receivers available. A fact that was confirmed by AWS themselves at the recent Barcelona IoT event. Combine that with the increased use of 5G networks capable of sending more and more data. It becomes a real-time problem for our customers. The answer is to use edge compute nodes to capture and store that data and then use WANdisco to move that data into public cloud or an alternative on-premise target.
By offering our WANdisco solution as a commit-to-consume transaction, where customers commit to a monthly data volume being transferred over a period of years, we're able to secure recurring revenue streams, and the customer's decision is de-risked as it switches from CapEx to OpEx. I wanted to highlight some of the high-level sales data points to you. We continue with a strong focus on building pipeline. To give color and perspective to that, we're tracking today at 3x versus where we were back in January of this year. That's even more remarkable when I explicitly asked my entire sales team to remove any stagnant deals from that pipeline back then, so everything we're working on now is tangible and real and in operation.
On average, we have a 43% pipeline conversion rate, which is well above the usual tech benchmark of 30%-35%, which is a reflection of our improved sales operations. Sales cycles have switched from multi-quarter to, in some cases, in-quarter transactions, and that includes net new customers. We believe that this is because we are now seen as a strategic purchase. The decision to buy WANdisco often sits in the C-suite, sometimes with the CDO, but in multiple cases, contracts are signed directly with the Chief Exec, and this significantly accelerates our sales cycles and time to close. Recurring customers are also increasing, and retention is high. Data volumes are growing, even beyond customers' high-level predictions, so they're returning early, as David said, during his presentation. One of our telco customers has returned three times within the last two quarters.
They're also using our technology for alternative use cases. Again, the telco example was originally for smart meter utility data, but this has now expanded into autonomous driving projects. Why WANdisco? David's touched on a few of these. What are the USPs, and what is the market relevance today? Well, firstly, we have experience and legacy of moving data at massive scale and with volumes, and with the volumes of data now being generated by IoT devices and sensors, coupled with the advances in 5G technology, this is our sweet spot. Essentially, we can move more data at larger scale faster than our competitors can in the market. Each cloud vendor does have their own solution to this problem. Their technology is proven to be less effective than ours, and worse still, it's proprietary to them, whereas we are completely agnostic.
What that means is that we provide our customers not only with a better solution, but also offer them choice and flexibility over where their data resides. That's a great negotiation point for them when they're negotiating better discounts themselves with the cloud providers. Our products allow customers to choose which cloud providers, plural, that they want to work with and allows data transfer between those multi-cloud environments. At this point, it's also important to talk about scaling up. In order to capitalize on the market demand, our sales success, and momentum, we are in the process of scaling up our sales teams globally. We're recruiting people who truly understand the IoT market and the significance of organizations rapidly adopting edge-to-cloud strategies. The team we are assembling are thought leaders in this space, and in many cases are bringing their own established client relationships with them.
To provide additional scale, we're also leveraging a range of partnership engagements, which Peter is going to talk through shortly to extend our penetration into unexploited and culturally challenging geolocations around the world. We are proactively developing our relationships with the GSIs, ISV hyperscalers, distribution partners, and with the public cloud vendors themselves. To give a flavor of these activities, I'm traveling to South Africa with David next week to kickstart a range of partner activities in that region, and Peter is working closely with some of our partners, in and around China. Before I hand over to Frank, I just wanted to mention our ability to now acquire top talent into the organization. Our success and growth and opportunity to overachieve is being widely recognized in the highly competitive IT sales job market. The team is very stable and this year we've had zero voluntary attrition.
Many of our hires have had alternative offers tabled to them by AWS and Google, me included, but we've elected to join WANdisco instead. The ability for us to hire great talent is critical, and we're winning the race to secure a great team. I'm going to hand you to Frank.
Good afternoon. As you can easily tell, I'm a German, or even worse, I'm an Austrian, so forgive my crappy English. When I joined WANdisco, I didn't see that coming but I'm now so happy that it's there. It all started for us with an opportunity at an automotive supplier in Germany, and the way they monetize data, and that's the interesting part. Again, talking about scalability and reliability, they're moving 30 PB to the cloud on a biweekly basis, and data disruption means business disruption.
The charming part about that is that they're reselling that data that comes from sensors in cars, reselling that data to the automotive, to the car manufacturers, like giving them new options to monetize the data, like having a fancy GPS if you need it, having add-ons to your car, or even improve the performance of your EV, when you're going on holidays, something like that. It's very interesting. Again, they're also selling it to insurance companies that you can open up everything you do with your car. I wouldn't do that. That's a whole new market for us.
When we saw, as soon as we had this, I thought, "Okay, there must be something, someone else out there doing the same." We were trying to create a model, you know, and we're looking for other automotive suppliers who might be doing the same, and we found one in France, and we sold a contract to them a few weeks ago, and we will probably sell another one this year. They're basically doing the same, just on a tinier scale. They just recently announced that they will do all the ADAS, so that means advanced driver assistance systems for cars and autonomous vehicles for BMW. That means the data will increase. It's just a pure numbers game. If you look at the more, if you...
I'm always walking around, sorry. If you look at the number of EVs or sensor-equipped cars, right now in Germany, I think it's about 6%, and that will increase massively. That means more data for us, more data that needs to be moved to the cloud, more data that needs to be analyzed. We are the only ones that can do it at scale, and we can do it with all the cloud providers. That's something we've proven on several occasions. What you see here is, we found our sweet spot. We're redefining this not every week, but we're checking it. Sanity checks are always necessary. At the moment, it's for us, if the data exceeds a certain volume, if there's no feasible infrastructure to go directly to the cloud, and there isn't.
Even if there's 5G, the sheer number of connections usually kills it. If there's data processing on-prem, it makes sense, and it does all the time because you don't wanna move everything to the cloud, something you don't need. You just move in incremental data. That makes sense. WANdisco is the way to go, moving it from edge to the cloud. You see we're in telco, and this also gives us an entry point into other areas. Smart cities, connected vehicles, told you about it. Oil and gas, we're just touching that in South Africa and in Canada. Smart grid, very important.
It's a little bit of an overlap with smart cities, but we shouldn't forget, once we reach a certain level of EVs on the streets, and it's not only the case for the U.K. or Germany, our power grid will go down if we don't find an intelligent way to distribute the data. That's a fact. Advanced driving systems, autonomous vehicles, smart manufacturing, that's another thing because, of course, first target is the automotive market because they're very advanced in their manufacturing technologies. We're talking to SAP right now because SAP, they have an IoT solution that stores data on-prem and can now move it to the cloud. But with us, they can move it faster and more reliable.
We're really hoping to get at least a tiny bit of what SAP was doing in the past, and yeah, it should be good. Data gem. It's all about data gem in here. That's what I would say because you see what we do, public clouds, cloud storage, WAN, WANdisco Edge to Cloud, data coming from sensors going to the edge, and we can move it to any cloud of your choice. The thing is, we are the only ones who could do it at scale. If that thing here stops, your revenue stream stops in future. I mean, we were talking to a lot of CDOs, and I know the role of the CDO isn't defined yet. Most of the time it's more CTO, CDO. At least in Germany it's that way.
Now they find out, okay, data is the new gold. You can make money out of data, and a lot of money. The more you know, the more you can streamline all your processes. We're in collaboration with Celonis at the moment, one of the biggest process miners in this world. They're also helping us to find the right targets. Of course, there's a high pressure on everybody because the automotive supplier we were talking to first, they were visionary. They were the only ones who increased their revenue during the pandemic. That means something. They have aligned their whole offering and have what they call, I can't name it or it's an easy tell for you who it is.
It's basically everything that has to do with internet or IoT. They have certain group of specialists who handles that, and that makes sense because we're not just talking in the first step. It's automotive data. In the next step it's data about connected parking. It's data about manufacturing, and all that we can feed that into the cloud. This is a little bit about processes we have. Of course, time to market is very important and sell and onboard. Maintenance, that's a big thing. When we're talking about energy providers and we're mentioning that we're doing something for telco that basically enables energy providers to use smart meter data for water and energy consumption.
They're extending this now for wind and solar parks and, especially, those wind parks. They're so maintenance intense and you have to know what's going on. I mean, depending on which source you're looking at, they have about 160-192 sensors on one of those. Is it turbine?
Yeah.
Yeah. It's turbine, sorry. And this, there's so much data. One of those things goes down, that's expensive. That's very expensive. Of course, data loss. If that stream is broken, your revenue stream is broken. I see on the side we have some white papers or some battle cards for different verticals we're working on. There are of course some more. We're not only selling stuff at the moment, we're selling it at scale, but we're also fine-tuning our approach because that is very important. We have a golden rule. For every hour I spend in an internal meeting, I spend at least one hour with a customer or with a prospect. At the moment, the ratio is I think two to one, which is good.
That helps us, of course, to laser focus on those areas, on the early adopters. Yeah. Again, another slide. Forget about the first two. That's the real deal. Optimized data transfer, and that's where we come into play. Immediate deployment. Scalable, I can't emphasize this enough, and future-proof. I always say we do simple things. We move data. I don't know. Keith is looking at me like that. Yeah, that's what we do. You should focus on stuff you do right. Actually, this is a quote from Yasser, the guy who handles the IoT business from AWS. Even he admitted during a conference that if the data exceeds a certain volume, you can't go directly from the devices to the cloud.
You need edge computing. Makes sense. Of course, in the new model, consumption-based, that has changed everything for us because there's zero risk for customers. Really, zero. I know it seems like I'm looking at the slides for a long time, but I don't have a script, so this is my favorite slide because I can go on about everything. So just yeah, see. And these are actual data from customers we've onboarded. The first one is not our first automotive supplier, but the second one based in France. It started off with several projects we had there. It was about connected parking. It was about vehicle sensor data. It was about assisted driving data. There's a difference between assisted driving and autonomous driving.
Even taking into account that in the EU, you're not allowed to collect as many data from a car as you are in the US, for example. I think the figure for Tesla in the US is 25 gig per hour, and in Germany, it's just 12. For BMW, it's around eight, but that will change. You see how massively that has grown. When we first talked to them, they were talking about four petabyte, and we signed a deal for 40. I just spoke to the guy yesterday, or on Monday, and they already exceeded that, so they're at 41.1 petabyte at the moment on-prem. That's why we're talking to procurement again, which is really nice.
The second one, that was our first telco. As you see, first deal started off smart meters for energy and water consumption. Then they rolled that out to a different geography. The last one is including data from Southern Europe and even bringing in data for solar and wind parks. We're now looking at 75 PB, and the probability that we will see more from them before the end of the year is very, very high. What I'd like to talk to you about now is that you can feel the excitement in the market. I mean, when I joined WANdisco, nobody knew us. At least that was my perception, I'm sorry. But now people are reaching out to us.
I mean, the managing director from SAP calls me. Or Yasser, the guy who handles the IoT business for AWS, said he knows my name, and that never happened. Never happened. They wanna work with us. They all wanna work with us because they see that we own the road to the cloud, or the pipes, whatever you might call it. We're the only ones who can do it with whichever cloud on the market. We even see traction in China. Pete and I had a few conversations with partners in China that we're onboarding right now, and it's so interesting. I mean, different culture, not a multi-cloud approach like we have over here. Yeah, very interesting.
Talking about the multi-cloud approach, that's even more interesting because we had customers that actually asked us to change the PO from saying we move X petabyte to Microsoft. Oh, I said Microsoft. I shouldn't have said that. But we move X petabyte to the cloud of our choice. Looking at my opportunities or my team's opportunities in Salesforce at the moment, I think there's not. These are all multi-cloud opportunities. For me, honestly, it doesn't matter if they go to AWS, Azure, Google. Of course, I know more guys at Google, but hey. Because we don't need them as much as we needed them before. That is the most amazing part.
I mean, at some of these opportunities, no, not right for the automotive supplier, but for that one, I never talked to the cloud vendors. Never. It was just a deal between us and the end customer, and that's it. Going back to the first big automotive deal that started it all, the interesting part is they're going through a German SI because they have a sovereign cloud offering. You know Germans, they would just wanna deal with German companies and how bad American companies and all that stuff. We are the only ones who have a direct contract with them. They don't go through. Almost named it. Named them.
We are the only ones that have a direct contract with them, and it tells you how important that piece is. We're the backbone of that telco. We're the backbone of their whole IoT strategy. I've seen investor slides that they shared confidentially with us. We're in their slides. I mean, that's just amazing. As Rich said, we're able to acquire top talent. When I joined WANdisco, I had a brilliant SE manager who left us after two months, and he came back. We hired him back about three months ago, and he said, "It feels like a different company." Honestly, it does.
I was at an EV conference in New York 3 weeks ago, and we had 8 meetings set up with the likes of GM, Ford, Tesla, Toyota, BMW U.S. and Mercedes-Benz U.S., and 8 follow-up meetings. 8. That never happens. I went out there, you know. I'm a German. I wear suits. Picture this, New York City in the summer, 36 degrees, humidity kills you, and I was so excited I had goosebumps. First thing, I called my wife and told her how excited I was. Not much of a reaction, so I called Rich. He understood it, and David understood it. It feels like we're at a tipping point here. And it's this, it feels like the early days of Google. It's just great to work with for WANdisco.
I'm happy that I decided not to work for AWS because I think Rich and I were applying for the same role. Thank you.
Thanks, Frank. How we doing for time, Matt? Are we,
Couple more minutes.
Okay, that's fine. We've talked about the product. Hello. There we go. We've talked about the product from Keith. We've talked about Rich's sales organization. My role in field operations is trying to exploit the pipeline that we've got going forward, and obviously not having a huge cost of sale increase on that huge pipeline that we have in closing those deals. You know, we talk about an appealing working environment. Over the last 12 months, the whole sales management team has been refreshed. We've got four new team members in place. One's been promoted through the organization. We're putting the right people in those spots, and we're exploiting the capabilities of our HR team, who are very good at finding the right personnel for our sales teams.
Also, clearly, with the talent that we've got in-house is exploiting their personal networks, my personal network, understanding, you know, salespeople that we've worked with in the past and their capability of potentially coming to join WANdisco. What we don't do is we don't go through a huge recruitment process as some of our competitors do. Dance of the seven veils, presentations, multiple interviews with many people within the organization. We like to get under the skin of the individual, make sure that we believe that they can do the job, and then offer them a position as soon as they can start with WANdisco. Again, moving into the IoT space, we are looking in areas of sales possibly that we haven't looked in before.
As we understand new geographies, understand new industries where the IoT use cases is now becoming apparent, and there are more emerging day on day, again, we can exploit those particular industries to recruit the right people. Once we've recruited those people, clearly making sure that they hit the road running from day one is a priority. We've got cadences in place to make sure that we can train those guys, make sure that they're productive from day one, make sure that the sales systems that we have in WANdisco are all accessible to them, and they know how to use them from day one.
Moving on from day one plus, a huge amount of work has gone into knowledge transfer, taking various guises from technical updates from Keith's team to what's happening in the industry so that, again, our sales teams can be conversant and have the right conversations with the right people in those industries is a constant process that we make sure that the team is up to date on. To shore up that sales team, we've got a sales analytics team, and that is really looking to new markets, doing research on areas that we haven't thought our products are applicable in but may well be applicable as the edge-to-cloud market matures, there are more use cases coming through the different industries.
In fact, I'm traveling up to Sheffield, our HQ in the UK, tonight to start a graduate intake to help boost that analytics capability that we have. In terms of the sales cycle, we've already said that part of my remit is the solutions architects within WANdisco. I'm responsible for the global team. Those guys get engaged with the sales team. They support the sales team with any pilot or proof of concept necessary that our customers or prospects want. Because of the way that Keith's team has designed the product those proof of concepts and pilots are rapidly deployed. We get under the skin of the customer organizations and work with them to develop the use case, to develop the capabilities of the tool for their particular need.
What I've tried to do as part of the field operations is simplify our sales model in terms of pricing, so not only do our sales team understand the way we price our product, but the customers do as well, so there's no conflict, no different expectation of what we're selling to the customer and what the customer thinks that we're selling to them. Very much a consumption-based model based on volume and the term of license, how long they want to move that data for. In the case of IoT, you know, we've already seen repeat business coming through as explained previously. Through the management team, again, to help accelerate that sales funnel, we have a very streamlined approvals process.
Clearly bigger, the bigger deal and the better view that we have of future business with an individual customer helps that approval process, so we can very much simplify that. All of those three points we've talked about then helps improve the forecast accuracy of where we're going as a business. We've talked about being able to potentially close business within quarter now, but also making sure that the rest of the organization is behind that forecast, understanding where we need to engage our technical staff to make sure that the customer is successful in their endeavors with our products. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Ade. Well, who's going? You or me? I was just gonna say thank you, Adrian. I mean, clearly this is a huge inflection point for us from a sales perspective, and it's a really exciting time to be at WANdisco, especially for me and the rest of the management team. You can probably sense our enthusiasm. We know we've got a job of work to do here, and we know that we're gonna be successful in it. Sorry, David. Okay. Thank you. Brilliant, by the way, guys. Any questions online first? I'm sure there's gonna be loads in the room, so any que-
Thank you. We have a couple of questions submitted from Michael Gifford at Charles Stanley. His first question is, "What are the bottlenecks to the growth of the business? Are you finding it difficult to recruit the right talent?
Who's taking that? Shall I take it? Yeah. Okay. The first part of the question was around bottlenecks?
What are the bottlenecks to the growth of the business?
Right now, we are moving at speed, so it's possibly more of a historic problem than it is a current problem for us. When this IoT edge-to-cloud explosion happened, some of our business processes and the sales operations behind it couldn't quite keep pace. We've fixed that, broadly speaking now. It's still on the slide that's on the screen now. I think the bottlenecks have largely been removed. In terms of hiring and recruiting top talent, we're finding that increasingly easy. People are actually approaching us now, which is it's unusual for a company the size of WANdisco. I've got multiple people inside of my network. I know these guys do, and the rest of the sales organization do. I've got people who I worked with back in Oracle who are desperate to come and work for me here at WANdisco.
Suddenly we've got this, if you like, beachhead into that market, and we're just winning the battle. I'm gonna preempt a second part of that question, which is, "Is that gonna cost money?" It's a really interesting question because people have already raised that to us in terms of investment rounds and things like that. It's an interesting question because no is the answer. We could have one sales individual can bring us tens of millions of dollars worth of revenue. This isn't, you know, we need multiple people to be able to scale. We can have individuals who are major quota carriers, so that reduces it in the first instance. Secondly, and the reason we can attract top talent as well, is 'cause the ability to overachieve and do really well with us is there. Yeah.
I mean, we're hiring people right now from Google who are coming to join this company, so
Thank you. The next question from Michael Gifford at Charles Stanley is, "What prevents AWS, Google, Microsoft developing a similar system as WANdisco system? What IP protection does WANdisco have on the technology?
Well, the first part in the question, we have 35 patents uniquely in our ability to do this. But patent protection isn't everything in life. There are usually ways around just about everything. But we've been doing this for a very long time. Nobody's ever been able to replicate this solution. When we did the IPO in 2012, people asked me the question, you know, "Could XYZ company do it?" The answer to that is no. It's very hard. We have my co-founder and chief scientist, Dr. Yeturu Aahlad, is a genius in this space.
The product we have developed early, it turns out, because the data wasn't there, to move data edge to cloud is now. I'm gonna ask Rich and Frank to clarify this, but we don't see anything even close to moving this to moving data at this scale.
In POC comparison, we are much faster than the current competition. However, to answer the question in a slightly different tangent.
Each of those companies that you just mentioned, AWS, Microsoft, whoever, they're going to be proprietary. We're agnostic, and that's the difference. We've talked about multi-cloud a lot. Why would you buy a single-streamed road or pipe to the cloud when you can have agnostic?
Adam.
Great. Thank you very much. Look, guys, that was fascinating. Frank, the question is really for you. We're both in sales. Sadly, I think my holidays this year are going to be not quite as exotic as yours, but, you know. The prime difference is that is I work in equity sales, so product-market fit, with perhaps the exception of WANdisco plc, is not quite there at the moment. Just drilling down into you know, what was really fascinating, looking at the vector, you know, of the different touch points you have, which are really powerful.
Yeah.
Obviously, with each customer, it's going to be different, you know. We know working in sales, there's always a hierarchy of concerns. Out of those three elements, whether it's volume, whether it's analytics, you know, whether it's monetization, what really resonates? That's my first question. What really resonates at the moment? What's the one that is, that's the hook? Then the second question I have, we all know that the best customer is the customer for life. You know.
Yeah
It's the one that the one that calls you, not that you keep calling back. You know, and how do you know, what's the driver for pushing that relationship into a long-term relationship?
First of all, I'd say it's the point about data monetization, and I've forgotten that because I haven't used a script. It is very important. We're talking to different people right now. We're talking to the business owner. We're not talking to the guy who's responsible to move data. I'm not interested in that one. He might be a nice guy, but as I said, cutting down the movement of data is cutting down a revenue stream, and that's why monetization is the most important thing. Second, I told you a little bit about numbers for autonomous vehicles. We're just at the beginning of a journey, I'd say. Data volume will increase massively. That's why the telco we know. There's another telco we're talking to right now.
That's why they chose us and that's why those automotive suppliers chose us. Because we're the only ones who can do it and it's a service, and if their data grows we grow with them. I forgot, or I just might bring up the slide if you. That one here. Because you see those verticals, we're expecting at least, I'd say we're expecting in every one of those verticals, I'm expecting GBP 10 million recurring revenue next year. That will. That's just the beginning. That is just the beginning.
Can I just, David, can I just ask you one more question quickly? Look, the booking numbers are kind of speaking for themselves. You know, it's really about consumption speed. You sort of talked about, you know, that's, it's not about multi-year, it's about they're going to consume that in 12 months. What are the key elements in terms of rate of consumption?
Caveat is that it's early, because, you know, we've just been through the first half. There are two key things for you to think about. One is the deals that we're doing here, 50% is cash up front. You wouldn't possibly. Right, and you know, question to me is, okay, why would you do that? Well, we have more power, so the deals that Frank's doing right now, he tells them that that's a condition of doing business with us, right? That's the first thing.
I can't because our commission model- [Crosstalk]
Yes
works like that.
Yes. Our commission model works like that. That's true. You need another airplane, Frank. Secondly, it's because they believe that they're going to consume this quickly. When we do a five-year commit to consume, it doesn't mean that they're going to consume it in five years. What Frank alluded to earlier is the French auto parts manufacturer the sensor guys in France. They've already surpassed the amount of data that they have committed to on-premise. We know that that will get consumed probably in the next few months. What the market will be waiting for, as you said, the next key element, is the rate of consumption. I think it's, as I said, the caveat is that it's early, but we are expecting to see those taps turn on and consumption happen pretty quickly.
Frank, do you want to add anything to that?
The other interesting part is, we're not even talking to the business owner. I know that they're above 40 PB. The procurement guy calls me. I mean, that tells you something. The same for the telco by the way.
Thank you. It's nice to see somebody a little bit more excitable than David.
Brilliant, guys. Next we're going to get you to the right slide. Good luck following that, Peter.
Can I just ask one more question? One more question.
Uh-
We're 15 minutes behind.
Okay. [Crosstalk]
Let's not.
Really?
If it's a quick question, I'll-
No, it's not a quick question.
All right. Obviously, for those in the room, the guys are all hanging around afterwards, so you can obviously call on Frank, Rich, Adrian, Peter, et cetera.
Okay. As you've heard from David and our sales leadership team, there's clearly an emerging need for these capabilities. What's driving that? The pandemic perhaps, proliferation of data. I think both of those are to play a big role in accelerating the adoption that we've seen. We've got clear product differentiation, and thus we've got the opportunity to take significant market share early. Now, this creates a tremendous opportunity not just for WANdisco, but also for our partners. You'll see today that we've now created critical mass within our partner ecosystem. While our go-to-market is not governed by these partners, we very much recognize their value as enablers and as accelerators. As I've shared previously, partners sit at the center of our go-to-market strategy.
Ensuring the product was easy to use, was tightly integrated, and commercials aligned with how our partners sell, but more importantly, how our customers now expect to buy. These were all key foundations in enabling us to begin to scale through the channel. Over the course of the past 12-24 months, we've executed against that strategy. We've drove product integrations while in parallel demonstrating sales proficiency and technical expertise with cloud service and data platform providers. The goal here was to provide faster and simpler migration of data to leading analytical platforms, things like Databricks and Snowflake. Now, this has led to us being architected into offshore migration factories developed by the global system integrators.
They're now leveraging our automation, they're augmenting our products with their solution accelerators, and they're combining our collective migration expertise and go-to-market efforts to accelerate our customers' migration and modernization goals in a fast and non-disruptive manner. We've entered into an agreement with a major cloud provider, which allows their professional services org. To subcontract data migrations to WANdisco, again, leveraging our depth and expertise to deliver a white glove, fully managed data migration service. We've executed resale agreements with a number of global and national system integrators. This further incentivizes these partners while driving operational efficiencies while allowing us to scale across additional geos, additional regions, additional geos, where we don't currently have coverage today. We've also expanded our current Oracle partnership.
You saw earlier this year, we entered into an agreement which allows Oracle Cloud Lift engineering to operate WANdisco or extend WANdisco to Oracle customers and partners at no additional cost. Our first joint customer is one of the largest drugstores in Brazil. Now, many of our partners both the cloud system providers and the independent software vendors, they're challenged by the speed at which customers are consuming their cloud services. That modernization and consumption, it cannot occur without the data, hence the increased focus on associated funding, which are now available to both system integrators and independent software vendors like WANdisco to own this problem. Now, for us, this means much closer engagement with their technical marketing and account teams and increased exposure to their customers.
We've demonstrated that we can significantly reduce migration effort and timeline, and we've established the value that data drives for our partners in year one and beyond, with one dollar of WANdisco generating greater than 20x for our partners. Our system integrator partners recognize the benefits of WANdisco's enhanced speed and scale of data movement into the clouds, which facilitates financial incentives based on their association with the client cloud subscription they are operating within, where they are the partner of record, so they can now drive revenue at an accelerated rate. Over the past 12 months, partners have been blown away by the speed and the velocity in which we were landing data into the cloud. A year ago, 30 petabytes in a cloud migration that was large. Today, we've got migration opportunities in the pipeline which are 10x that.
Now, clearly edge to cloud presents a far greater opportunity because unlike migration, this is the perpetual movement of data. Now, our largest customer, as you've heard from Frank today, is migrating 30 petabytes every two weeks. Now, due to its strategic nature, we're also seeing architectural and buying decisions happen much earlier for WANdisco, in contrast to migration, where the tooling is often an afterthought, or the solution to move data at that type of scale is incorrectly assumed. That's primarily due to a lack of experience of these organizations operating at this level of scale.
Now, due to the sheer volumes of data which needs to be replicated, we'll continue to align very closely with the cloud service providers who are leading in IoT, like AWS, and we must ensure available capacity of both the storage and the compute to support the data volumes that we're contracted to transport. Partnering with purpose means that we choose the right partners, means that there's consensus on the client issues that we're trying to resolve and how we measure success together. We've a shared interest in co-developing solutions roles are clearly defined, and thus there's alignment and accountability. Now, as we look to expand our edge to cloud business via our existing network, we're very focused on a select set of partners while actively evaluating new ones who share that similar purpose. Much of that direction will be driven by our joint customers.
Now, here strategic alignment is key. We start internally at the top, making sure that the leadership teams agree with the very need to partner. Consumption relies on time. You can't recover from it, hence performance and scale are crucial. Now, this is what WANdisco is known for. Compare and contrast, in the absence of joint customers, this would typically begin with product and engineering, owners of the cloud services that we influence. However, given the early landmark wins that Frank and the team have secured across all of the three major cloud providers in the first half this process is very different. Much of that early partner activity is now being driven inwards from our partners' sales teams across a handful of industries where we're now being recommended to these customers by our partners.
ISV co-sell wins of this magnitude intended to drive and generate this level of consumption, they get attention. Remember what I said earlier, $1 spent on WANdisco is generating upwards of $20 for the cloud platform provider, and all of these teams are measured on consumption and under enormous pressure to meet these targets. Now, having already been benchmarked against all of the cloud-native solutions in this space in a very large number of complex customer environments, the technology's proven to scale horizontally, to handle data of any size, while ensuring that customers have the flexibility and control over where that data resides. The team's therefore very bullish in our ability to capitalize and take that market share. Now similarly to the rest of the business, we find ourselves at this inflection point.
Partners are seeing a significant increase during H1 in the number of pipeline opportunities, so we're seeing a significant increase in the number of opportunities that have been sourced by our partners in the first half of this year. Again, I think a lot of that's down to having demonstrated proficiency and trust with these partners across not just sales but our alliances and our delivery teams. We've also now got a number of partners who have made significant investments to architect our technology into their migration factories, making the necessary changes to their existing workflows to take full advantage of WANdisco's capabilities, and this includes the cloud service providers like Microsoft Azure and a number of global system integrators. We've also demonstrated, however, that there's a precedent that partners will fund the use of our software and expertise to accelerate their clients' migrations.
We saw Oracle do this at the beginning of the year to extend the use of WANdisco to their customers at no additional cost. That in turn has enabled us to quickly develop pipeline in places like Latin America, a big area of focus for Oracle, but one in which we've got no presence. Now likewise, we've got opportunities in the second half, opportunities in the pipeline, which will be funded in full by the cloud service providers to not only ensure that they can meet aggressive migration timelines, but also consumption targets. Now, given the current migration focus and other consuming clients, we fully expect this to be a common way in which our products are funded moving forward. In addition, we're seeing significant pipeline growth in countries like China and South Africa. The guys alluded to that earlier.
Now, these are markets where historically we've been reactive, we've been opportunistic, but we're now partnering with both distributors, local solution providers who are essentially packaging WANdisco with other technologies to address these emerging edge-to-cloud requirements across some key verticals, automotive, telco, manufacturing, in partnership with cloud service providers like Alibaba Cloud. Now, both these partners have the same targets and are generating pipeline. Of course, this inflection point means that there are decisions that we must make as an alliances org regarding the prioritization of our existing partners, both now and in the future, and how we manage and curate these partners moving forward. This will largely be based around their current performance, their potential, and of course, their willingness to partner.
To that end, we're implementing real cadence and operational practice in the background to ensure that we can continue to invest and nurture in these alliances while continuing to engage in new and meaningful partnerships. Thank you for your time.
Yeah. Thanks, Peter. Any questions from the room before we take a break?
Sorry. You mentioned that in the second half you're gonna see some opportunities that are being more fully funded by partners.
Yeah.
What kind of scale have you done?
Um-
An illustration of that compared to the Oracle success?
Yeah. I mean, it's a factor of 10-20x now, quite easily. I mean, the opportunities that I'm talking about are, you know, migrations that may be up to 300 PB of data.
Fully funded by that partner?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you think about the value to the cloud service provider of winning that business, and it's highly competitive against, you know, all the three major cloud providers. In fact, maybe four or five cloud providers. The value of them winning that business at cost over the lifetime of that customer is clearly significant.
I was wondering if you could just give us a sense of the proportion of the pipeline that's actually coming through?
These partner relationships, I mean, touching back on the previous points on increasing market awareness, and also to Adam's previous question as to ideally you've got a customer phoning you up saying, "I've got a problem. Can you help?" What proportion is led by anyone from a Snowflake, a Databricks through to a public cloud provider versus an infosys or what have you?
I'll answer that first, then Pete can probably reiterate this. The deals that, for example, Frank was talking about, the IoT deals, we're talking about, you know, the world's largest telecommunications companies that are strategically building their business around an IoT implementation, right? Their entire business. That is our customer and our partner, and the cloud vendor is providing compute, right? What we can maybe... It's analogous to kerosene in the airline industry. It's something you absolutely need, but it's commodity. Where they buy compute from, they need the flexibility to arbitrage in the same way that airlines arbitrage with oil companies. They need the ability to arbitrage between different clouds. Being independent from the cloud vendor is really important and a really important part of our strategy. I mean.
My feeling is that there has been an inflection in those partnerships where we're often more important than the cloud vendor themselves. We're more strategic. The deals that Frank is doing, he's talking to the CEO of a telecommunications company. That's how important this technology is. As Frank also mentioned, they changed the PO that came to say going to a cloud and to go to a cloud of our choosing, and that really tells its own story. I mean, Pete, do you wanna?
Yeah. No, I think that's fair. I think in terms of the impact that partners are gonna have on the overall pipeline, it's largely today centered more around migrations than it does edge to cloud, which you'd expect, right? This is emerging. I think that will change. Will it change in the second half? I think it'll change as soon as they start to see the consumption from those deals. But clearly what we've been focused on there for a number of years is to position ourselves as you know the best solution for these migrations at scale. I think that's where we're seeing a lot of the opportunities come whether it be from a global system integrator or a cloud service provider.
To David's point, you know, existing partners, the data platform providers, the Databricks, et cetera, they're not even seeing or forecasting the consumption from the deals that Frank and the team have been winning. That's quite telling. It's quite telling about where we are in the customer's purchase versus some of the analytical platforms that they're gonna use when that data arrives in the cloud.
I mean, Snowflake have less than 500 TB of data under management. We're talking about one customer moving 1 EB per year, right? It's a different league. Any questions online?
Yes. There's one question submitted from Peter McNally at Stifel. He asks, "With the exponential growth in sensors and distribution through partners suggesting there could be an acceleration in adoption, how does pricing change with larger volumes of data?
This is probably one for the sales team. Rich, do you wanna?
Yeah.
I mean, what I would say, first of all, is that the reason that you do consumption rather than subscription is to control those price sensitivities. What you don't see in consumption is heavy discounting because people are paying for what they're actually planning to use. That's why consumption is so important, an important tenet of our strategy.
Absolutely right. We would typically not discount regardless of the size of the deal. What we would do is we would use different levers in that mechanism. What we would do is we would offer if they offered us reference ability, for example, or use case white papers then we would potentially give them an increase in the volume of data that they're allowed to transfer as opposed to a physical discount. I know it's kind of the same thing, but ultimately we would allow them more data transfer perhaps over that time period, and that obviously allows us to negotiate better. We don't typically discount as such. We have a standard discount curve, which unless we get to, you know, a mega deal type situation, we wouldn't deviate from.
We're gonna take a break now for 10 minutes. We're gonna return at 4:10 P.M. There'll be time to get drinks and so on. Break now until 4:10 P.M. for people online.
Okay. Is this on? It's always the toughest job to be between the audience and drinks.
Yeah.
Which is the slot we're in now. Let's go ahead and get started. Okay. Welcome back. My name is Chris Pemberton. I'm the Vice President of Marketing here at WANdisco, and I think we're gonna have a window of sun up on the terrace. We've got some drinks, so we're gonna go. We're gonna be on time in this section. We're in the fourth quarter. We're gonna bring you home. Now, before I turn it over to Erik to talk about our consumption model, I wanna ask you to keep your eyes and ears open for some threads, okay? We've heard from product, sales, strategy, alliances. I'm gonna actually weave those together, and you're gonna hear the threads woven together from a marketing perspective. Now, David brought up this notion of the data activation era.
Now, as a marketing leader, I'd be remiss if I didn't share a story about what this actually looks like in the wild when a company activates their data and monetizes it for business impact. We all hate robocalls, spam calls. This is actually a picture of my phone from a week ago. I did not answer it. This fact is not lost on global telco leaders. Robocalls, spam calls drive customer churn, they decrease the customer experience. These are all important metrics for telco companies. Now, AT&T was able to move their data from on-prem data centers up into the cloud, and they did it seven times. They've done 6.5 billion robocalls have actually been filtered out as a result of getting their data up into the cloud faster so they could run advanced analytics. This is real business impact. Okay?
This is just one example of what data activation actually looks like. Okay, from a marketing perspective, there's five key pillars that we're leveraging to support and drive pipeline growth as well as awareness in the marketplace. One commercial team, okay? Sales and marketing aligned, going to market with the same message, same motions. In the upper left, sharp positioning. Okay? This drives our messaging architecture, our content, our campaigns. Then in the upper right, account-based marketing. This is the way that modern B2B technology marketing is done, and we're gonna look at an example of that. At the same time, we wanna create a brand that's in demand, provide some air cover, right, for those teams out in the field, so people are aware of WANdisco. Then we pull that all together and activate the partner network, really work to engage those partners to drive pipeline.
Let's start with the one commercial team concept. Okay. Rich and I and our teams work closely together to communicate, collaborate, not just from a capabilities perspective, but execution-wise. Now, we do that two ways, kind of a push and pull. Sometimes we need to push messages out to the field, make sure there's common, clear messaging consistent across the team. But you also heard this from Frank. We wanna also pull intelligence and insights from the field. They're having those conversations. We wanna pull that feedback back in, make our messages and our content better. Okay? You see content, like these are your executive level playbooks, your demo, your case studies, et cetera. We also wanna make sure that our outreach, it's synced, it's not siloed, and it's as efficient as possible. Those sequences, they're lined up, and they're driving impact.
Adrian and I also work closely together to make sure that our lead flow work streams are as efficient, and they're firing on all cylinders. Now, let's talk about this positioning. You've heard this, and here's a little hint. Here's a thread to pull on. Okay. Here's a two-by-two of the vectors that really matter, and I think all of my colleagues have actually touched on parts of this. You can see on the left-hand side, scale, volume of data moved. On the bottom, we've got speed. Now, let's talk about these competitive offerings. In the lower left, open source, free DistCp tools. We're seeing these show up on our doorstep after they've failed. These DIY solutions, they're small. They're static data, okay? They're not mission critical.
Now, in the upper left, you've heard this referred to a couple times, bulk data transfer devices. These are literally 45-foot trailers stuffed with storage that are driven to the site, plugged in, and then driven back to the cloud. Sure, if you get enough trailers, you could move more volume of data, but it's pretty slow. Keep in mind, in an environment of macroeconomic headwinds as well as environmental challenges, each one of these trailers can cost between $50,000 and $300,000 just to power. On top of any migration costs, you're paying a quarter of a million dollars just to power it. Now, on the right-hand side, the custom in-house solutions, professional services, these depend on skilled engineering talent. Again, you could hire a lot of engineers and possibly move it faster, but there's an upper limit.
No one addresses the scale and speed the way that WANdisco does. If I could actually draw this chart accurately, it's not linear. It's logarithmic. I'd put the orange bubble way up here. That's what we're seeing and what the stories you've heard that have happened in the last six months. One of the ways that we're bringing this to market, WANdisco was actually named as a sample vendor in Gartner's recent Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing. We've got demand gen campaigns in market to drive leads, fill the pipeline, okay, move them through. Let's talk about this concept of account-based marketing. At WANdisco, we've got three types. I'm gonna talk about the one-to-one model, and I think Pete referenced this earlier. Here's an example where we partnered recently with sales and alliances.
We wanted to understand what were the key buying criteria. Speed, scale, multi-cloud. Okay? We built a custom audience in LinkedIn. We did ad creative, and you can see everything that followed that was aligned. The landing page, right? Your offer, personalized follow-up. Now, two things to note about this. Before we get to that, if you want a 11-word key value proposition, this is it. Move petabyte scale data to any cloud in half the time. Now, two takeaways. Number one, we were able to engage the entire buying center up, down, across. From engineers all the way up to the CEO, who actually engaged with this content 10 times. This is an account that was trying to move 200 petabytes in four months. Now, second, this was a very efficient media spend.
To actually engage the entire buying center at this account was $2,500. Just as an example of when we focus, ABM doesn't have to be expensive. Now, on the other end of the spectrum, we talked earlier about multi-cloud and the distaste for cloud vendor lock-in. This is an example from an ad campaign that we're gonna run that speaks right to this challenge. We know from quantitative and qualitative data that cloud vendor lock-in is a pain and something that needs to be addressed. This is something you're gonna see in market rest of the year, as well as some demand campaigns next year. Now, the fifth part is how we activate the partner network and the partner ecosystem. Now you can see we've shifted our strategy a little bit, actually significantly this year, from quantity of leads, engagement, to quality.
Different type of events here. You heard Frank talk about the EV conference in New York, right? CDO-level events where Rich and team, they're going, and they're having 10, 15 one-on-one meetings with the chief data officer. Okay. VP of data and analytics. They were having success in the industry focus vertical conferences. Rail, automotive, telco, oil and gas. Now, this is a good time to talk about ROI in marketing. I mentioned earlier the Hype Cycle demand gen campaign. The campaigns that we're doing at these CDO events deliver about a 2x return on the investment for that event. We're getting in front of the right people. The CPL, the cost per lead, is higher, and I'm fine with that because it's generating the right meetings with the right people.
Now, the partner-level events can actually generate, and we've seen one in the last six months, generate a 10x return because we're leveraging the partner's promotion network, their brand name. Okay? The cost of putting on a virtual event is much lower. However, these are tough to scale because we're coming out of a pandemic. People wanna meet in person. Right? These are the metrics that we're looking at closely as we ramp and as we evolve this go-to-market model, so we can make sure that we're spending our marketing dollars efficiently, and we're driving the lead flow that the team needs. With that, I'm gonna turn it over to Erik, or if we have any questions.
Yeah. Thanks, Chris. Great presentation. Any questions online? Any questions in the room?
Please.
As you're the marketing guy, I guess you're responsible for the word activate. I just wondered, is there any sort of product story buried in that notion around activate as opposed to what we had in the past, which was about migrate?
I would say that the story is product. Think back to Keith's slide, that foundational slide, that's the story. Where when a customer comes and says, "We wanna move to a different cloud, we wanna activate our data," they can actually do it in BigQuery, in BI, in those analytics packages. We're not just moving it to the storage, we're telling the stories around, "Here's how this telco activated their data. Here's how this manufacturer did.
It's really about commit is the idea you're getting to. Is it consume is what you're really getting to in terms of your notion on activate?
It's consume. Consume is how you activate.
That is, that's the essence, that's the backbone of that story. Commit is part of the contracting. When you consume, you can start to drive business impact.
Thank you.
Yep.
Any other questions?
Great.
Okay, thanks.
Erik.
It's the bit you've all been waiting for.
Yeah.
The CFO's presentation.
Hopefully, it doesn't disappoint. As you've heard from my colleagues today, you know, the company really is in an inflection point on how it goes to market, the products it builds. Servicing the cloud has meant changes across a lot of facets of our business. That also manifests itself in how we bill our customers, how we recognize revenue, and all the good stuff that involve dollars. So, we really evolved our model from what was originally a subscription model, where it wasn't necessarily right size, heavy discounting from the customer's perspective, to commit to what you're going to use, priced on data volume, and you commit to a certain amount of data over a fixed period of time under a commitment to consume.
As you move that through, as data's in motion, as it moves into the cloud, that's when it gets monetized. That's when we recognize revenue. We've introduced some key KPIs this year that are important to follow the business as it undergoes this transition and begins to put up some significant numbers. The first important concept is remaining performance obligations, RPO. That's a balance sheet concept. That's a sum total at a snapshot in time, at a beginning of a period, at an end of a period, of all the contracts, all the obligations we have with our customers to deliver our products. It's a superset of deferred revenue. It's a store, if you will. It's indicative of how future revenues are going to roll out.
The bigger the RPO, the larger potential for future revenues. To that, as we move through in a flow concept, we move through for bookings in the period. Those are contracts signed in the period. Typically, our standard terms and conditions ask for a year in advance, from a cash flow perspective. For the multiyear contract, pay for the first year, then that rolls over and renews it the next year as the default. Some of our customers are looking. We have the ability to ask them for more, and we have, and they've committed to a 50% prepayment upfront. Those, I think, will be more unusual down the track, but starting off, they're very, very helpful to the company. It shows the customer's commitment to the technology and utilizing it.
You certainly would not make a commitment of that magnitude and send me a check for it if you didn't intend to use a lot of it. I think that's really indicative of the demand in the marketplace. How do we recognize revenue? I have the cloud migration icon there to show that as the data comes in either from the edge or on premises, moves into the cloud of your choice that triggers a meter. There's contemporaneous reporting that we get from product, from the statistics we gather, and we know how much data is being moved by each customer over some pretty short time intervals. We batch that up, and at the end of a period, at the end of a month, we send a bill.
It's typically 30-day terms from that, so 30-60 days cash collection cycle. That also becomes a reported revenue on the accrual basis in that period. Remember, if data doesn't move, there's no revenue. At time zero, a contract signed, unlike a subscription contract, is a potential. It doesn't generate revenue till that data moves. If we're doing everything right, and we're having a positive book-to-bill ratio, RPO at the end of the period is bigger than when it started. That's very much indicative of health, of future potential revenues as we're building up those cohorts of revenue to be recognized in the future with a larger RPO balance at the end. This is really a win-win for ourselves and our customers. We get higher long-term customer value. Why?
You're buying what you need, you buy it over a period of time, and when you need more, you can go buy some more. We participate in that upsell, unlike a subscription where there's a mismatch between consumption and sales. Often in our favor, sometimes in the customer's favor, if it's going to continue to grow. This way, we participate in growth, and it's very much a key for us in this model. It's more predictable. If looking back at the prior slide, you see that store of value, all of that RPO that's built up. Over time, as we gain more familiarity and statistics on how it's consumed, we'll be able to apply you know, a sharper focus on looking how our revenues are going to roll out. That'll give us a reliable reported revenues rate.
There's less discounting because it's more ideally matched to the customer's needs. You buy what you need, and then when you need some more, you come back and buy it again. We have standard discounting. We have a standard terms and conditions. We typically don't move off of those unless there's situations, getting a customer reference, things of that nature. 'Cause we are still a growing business establishing beachheads, so we do have to be a bit flexible. It's also a faster sales cycle. Part of that is technical. You can go off and use the product on a very limited basis for free. There's 5 TB you can move at any time. So you can assess the applicability of the product for your business.
When you make your commitment, it's much easier from a technical buy-in perspective, standard terms and conditions, easy to refer to. It's bought like you buy Azure, like you buy AWS services. There's not a lot of heavy duty heavy lifting through legal. Commit-to-consume contracts are non-cancelable. If there's ever a question that what happens if I buy X number or X amount of data and I don't use it all, at the end, you get billed for it. Once we say we have a booking, that's a firm commitment. I have a sheaf of purchase orders on my desk, or virtually on my desk, that I can point to that evidences those commitments. I'll hand that over. Well, I'll take questions first and then hand it over to David. Yes, David.
Yeah. I've asked this question once to Frank, but it always worth asking two people the same question.
Hopefully you get the same answer.
Hopefully. When you get a new deal, you've talked about IoT being perpetual data migration. Data movement, and then obviously the cloud migration can be a big lump up front, and then maybe dropping down to a lower level. When you announce a deal, how can we sort of calibrate the difference between say there's a GBP 5 million migration deal versus a GBP 5 million IoT deal, how can you help us calibrate the lifetime, potential lifetime value of how that compares between the two deals? Is-
I think it's a bit early days to some degree, but certainly in the first half of the year, we've seen the IoT deals have a much larger, as in evidenced by the one deal with the telco, where it grew in the first seven days. It more than doubled in size, and then took a quantum leap in the second quarter with GBP 11.6 million-GBP 14.3 million. So that is indicative of it being really a large amount of data. I think if you think about it from a technical perspective, machine-generated data just is generated faster without human intervention, just grows more than exponentially.
I think maybe 5 years ago, 5 years from now, we'll look back and say, "Wow, where did all that data come from?" Because we've had it from a very small base 20 years ago to this explosion of data. I think that's gonna take another quantum change because of IoT.
Again, if you look at the Arm's business back in the day, you could plot Arm's revenue growth against cell phone usage and the need for low power chips. You know, what Frank and Rich and Adrian were talking about earlier was 20 times growth in the next three years in just automotive data. You should be able to plot us along those lines as well in a very similar way.
I think with respect to the migration question, you will also find similarly, sales presented a curve, Frank presented a curve that showed how when we're starting to talk to a customer, the initial spec is small for a small amount of data. Even before we close the first PO, that tends to grow because folks look at what the technology brings, what the benefits of activating their data really means to their business, and they uncover more and more use cases.
Even if it's a migration, and I've got this defined amount of data I wanna move, once you see the changes that wrought in your business, you're more likely to say, "Well, I'll need to move this piece, and then I'll move that piece." That'll also follow a similar curve, probably at a slightly reduced amplitude, I'd guess.
Thanks. Any questions online?
No questions online.
Any other questions from the room?
George.
Yeah. Just for consistency, do you mind if I ask the macro question? Some of the sort of the peer group is talking about sort of macro influencers on consumption rates, post commits, and are you seeing or do you have any concerns on that front in terms of procurement? Are any extra hurdles going in on the procurement side? Any sort of slowdowns you're seeing on that front?
No, not on any procurement side.
This is a sea change for virtually every business in every single industry sector. For example, how do you solve the power utilization issue in Europe? You put smart meters into everybody's home. That plays extremely well. I was actually due to appear on Newsnight this evening but they wanted a business that was suffering as a result of the increased power utilization cost. We are benefiting from it tremendously. I can tell you. The movement to cloud is driving efficiencies in organizations who can't afford to or find it difficult to maintain on-premises huge deployments the power consumption. You know, the use of data boxes to move data, as Chris mentioned, punches a massive hole in the ozone layer in addition to being a quarter of a million dollars just to power one of those things.
Yeah, we're benefiting. Those headwinds are tailwinds for us.
Yeah. That's it. Again, if you really think about it, in a drive for efficiency, you need to more finely calibrate whatever you do. Think about electric vehicles, for example, and charging data. The more data you have, you know how to optimize things. Optimizations actually comes for free because you actually already have spent on the hard parts of it. Now, using it more intelligence, you know, can get more miles out of your car, more efficiency, and that requires data to do that. The explosion of IoT, I believe is gonna be you know, it will be countercyclical to what happens with other businesses and bricks and mortar and things that are more exposed to the more typical economy.
Amazing result, you're getting people to pay prepay.
Correct.
Doesn't that shift to post pay as consumption drives revenue as opposed to commit?
Well, we've seen, excuse me, an example is Snowflake. If you've gone through and read their 10-Q and looked at their presentation. Now, they're into this. They're probably five years ahead of us in some ways in terms of how their model has evolved and the statistics they can get out of it. They've seen some shift of that to maybe quarterly in advance instead of year in advance. Still they're getting a goodly chunk that's taken care of up front. I think we need to be resolute in holding to our terms and conditions. We have a very unique product offering that can drive transformational change within our customers' business, and I think we need to be paid for that, and part of that is the terms and conditions that are favorable to us.
Thank you.
Thank you.
All right. Thanks, guys.
Just to wrap up, I hope you found that very useful. You can probably see a transition in the team, and we have a high quality team of people, not just in the room with us today, but also working with us in throughout the whole organization. I think one of the important things to note is we are a product company. We are a real product company. We don't sell other people's software, we don't provide a service on somebody else's technology. We have 35 patents of technology that we own. We don't need anybody else. That's why our gross margin profile is virtually 100%, and why the turn on this inflection point is so steep, because we are selling IP. We're an IP licensing business.
Our go-to market has evolved, and you can probably see the boot is on the other foot to some degree with some of our partners. I know in the conversations I had in this room over drinks, that it was obvious to some people that the cloud vendors. Fo r example, are more reliant on us than they maybe were in the past. That I can tell you from my perspective and from the sales guys' perspective, feels extremely good. We're in a great position. The business model that we're using, as Erik just went through, commit to consume, they're not flaky, might pay you contracts. They're real. They are commitments, and we don't think about renewals. The word renewal is something that you use on a time-based thing with SaaS subscription deals. These are consumption deals. These are minimums. These are not.
You know, when we announce a telecommunications company does $11.6 million, that is not it. Far from it. We would expect to see that deal expand exponentially in line with the seismic changes happening in the market around automotive, smart meter technology, wind turbines, oil and gas exploration, IoT sensors that are gonna hit everything in our economy. Businesses that are transforming themselves from bricks-and-mortar companies, for example, are now gonna be data companies. The pipeline that carries that data is going to be WANdisco. That's why we're so excited. Thank you very much. We do have drinks up on the
Sixth floor, but only after you've taken a few more questions. You're too early. Get off it.
Yeah, okay. I like standing there and other people getting questions.
Well, I think Joe has a few that have been asked online. We've saved up from the beginning, we didn't have time.
Okay.
Thank you. The first question submitted via the webcast page comes from Michael Gifford at Charles Stanley. This is probably a question for Erik, and the question is: Can you discuss the cash cycle and cash conversion of the business? I am particularly thinking about R&D costs to stay ahead of the competition.
Can Erik have a microphone, so you.
Yeah.
I think the question is what does the fixed cost cycle look like, as opposed to revenue, and how does that accelerate? I think the important thing here to realize is there's a lot of leverage in the business. We have a fairly small sales force. We're expanding that carefully, as you've heard from the team. They're driving a lot of business. Frank himself is on target to do a very big number, just one person. On the research and development side, we expect those costs will rise in dollar terms, but not as a percentage of revenue, significantly. Revenue growth will outstrip the growth in operating expenses. We're an IP company with a lot of leverage in the platform itself.
As we expand into adjacent markets, for different file systems, things that we add on, there's a lot of things we reuse from what we've learned. A file system is a file system. I don't expect costs to blow out in any of the departments below the line in the sales and marketing, engineering, or even finance and administration.
Thanks, Erik. Yeah, as Erik mentioned, there's a lot of leverage here, where I go back to what I said earlier, we're an IP licensing company under the covers, so we don't need an Oracle style sales organization. What's also beautiful is that all of these IoT deals the architecture is identical across all of them. There's no special product requirements, et cetera.
Thank you. The next question comes from Brad Hathaway at Fairview Capital Management, and his question is, why haven't we seen any contracts announced since early July?
A couple of things to say to that. It is the summer and though that doesn't impact. We're not seasonal, doesn't really impact us. We have a lot going on. We have a very strong pipeline. I asked the guys here to not discuss individual deals because I don't want to insider our entire potential shareholder base and I have no intentions of really getting into the whys and wherefores. What I would say is that we are very excited about the potential pipeline. We have significant coverage to way exceed our own expectations this year. I would just say be patient for a few more weeks.
Thank you. The final question comes from Jeffrey Bernstein at Cowen. His question is, why is WANdisco's technology particularly critical to IoT edge applications versus sending data on trucks or using atomic clocks and timestamping?
Jeffrey, thank you. That's a softball question. The real answer is scale. We built a product before scale happened. An investment thesis here actually is why didn't this happen last year or the year before? 'Cause the data volumes weren't here. The IoT 5G networks, the minute that those datasets have grown exponentially to require technology that can move data at scale and these use cases that Frank alluded to earlier in automotive insurance, wind turbine maintenance, self-driving cars, vehicle automation, is timely. If I'm gonna give somebody a monthly insurance contract, which will happen by the way in the automotive space, the data can't arrive three months later on the back of a truck or six months later on the back of a truck, can it? It's timely.
Speed and scale are absolutely fundamental to the business use cases that these companies are now relying on. We, as we've said repeatedly, and I think this has come across, we're not worried about competition because nobody else can do this stuff. We're it. That's why we're winning all of these deals. Any other questions from the room? We have. Oh, go on.
Sorry, just talking about product development, because where are you gonna take this? What is the other functionality coming through? Your patents, obviously you can provide a service at the moment. What are your, you know, in Moore's Law and the rest of it? We're looking at where are you gonna be in three years' time in terms of data transfer and what will happen to commodity pricing? Where are we gonna see? Because data generally is a declining price point. What do you see as the maturity in this industry in terms of data pricing?
We're gonna see exponential data growth, as you said, for the next 10 years, actually. That doesn't necessarily mean that the unit price of value of our product diminishes. The greater the data volumes, the greater our value. We're not seeing any pricing pressure. These guys are not seeing any pricing pressure based on volume. Don't think volume discount with this company 'cause we're not gonna do that. You will see. You will see, I would expect to see deal sizes grow to levels that you don't normally see with a software company because of the nature of the space that we're in. In terms of product development, we have patents in our ability to do this. This is unidirectional data transfer.
We can also do active-active at the same scale that we're talking about here. When companies will eventually want to have applications that run across multiple clouds, for example, between AWS and Azure, and then depending on how the futures market around compute develops, that there will be one, companies can arbitrarily run a compute application in one cloud or another. That's just one example. We have other enhancements to the product coming that allow us to achieve exponential scale by leveraging scale that's already there in the serverless world in the cloud. I won't get too technical. But our ability to scale doesn't have any theoretical mathematical cap, and that is really interesting for us.
We're not frightened by companies that want to move an exabyte of data because we can verify that we can do that. In fact, Frank, you got asked a question by a customer in one of the deals that you closed. They said, well, tell the story. W Hat did they say to you? Can you move 20 petabytes of data?
Hands down.
You said, "Yeah, we can do that in a month.
Yeah.
That is, you know, as I said, the why didn't this happen before, why now, is the data volumes. We are relevant when data volumes are of size, hundreds of terabytes, petabyte, exabyte scale data. I think we can go for a drink up on the terrace. So it's out the doors on the sixth floor.