Today I'll provide an update on Cirata's trading performance for the Third Quarter of Fiscal Year FY25. I'll also outline our transition from a two-product company to a data orchestration business, and our evolution into a growth-focused organization by highlighting key progress, achievements, challenges, and our outlook as we enter Q4. Q3 FY25 delivered strong strategic progress for the company, with the successful divestment of the DevOps assets, continued cost optimization, and enhanced operating leverage, the launch of Cirata Symphony, and the appointment of Dominic Arcari as Chief Revenue Officer to strengthen the leadership team and the go-to-market. Furthermore, the beginning of Q4 saw the announcement of the largest direct data integration contract in the company's history. Let me drill down into that key list of activity. I believe that strategy is best delivered through strong execution.
A phrase that resonates is, "Strategy is delivery." The company needs to continue the growth of the data integration business through expansion of existing customers and, importantly, new customer acquisition. This quarter, Cirata continued to make meaningful progress in our data integration business. De-risking contracts in flight during our Chief Revenue Officer transition and Cirata Symphony launch has been our number one priority. Whilst total bookings were in line with management expectations, the timing of a contract completion has influenced our quarterly results. We signaled at the start of FY25 and have been consistent throughout the year FY25 would be back-end loaded. Notably, however, the company has good early momentum into Q4. Cirata signed a $3.1 million multi-year data integration contract with a leading U.S. insurer.
This is the largest direct contract in Cirata's history, marking a significant milestone for Live Data Migrator product and reflecting the long-term customer commitment as they transition from our legacy Fusion platform to Live Data Migrator. Now, looking back at Q3, in August, Cirata successfully completed the divestment of the DevOps assets to BlueOptima. This transaction allows the company to focus fully on the core growth driver, data integration, while also providing additional financial flexibility. To remind us, data integration bookings grew in H1 by 220% year- over- year, and this is the source of future growth. This was followed towards the end of Q3 with the launch of Cirata Symphony, the company's new data orchestration platform. This expands Cirata's sales reach and addressable market.
The platform is a central component of the company's strategy to modernize enterprise data orchestration, enabling organizations to manage, integrate, and operationalize data with greater efficiency and scale. The customer-centered development of the Cirata Symphony platform has been led by our Chief Technology Officer, Paul Scott- Murphy. Paul has been talking with key customers directly involved in the development of Cirata Symphony throughout FY25. Important strategic customer relationships will continue to provide an environment for collaboration on future Cirata data orchestration platform functionality. On the financial front, cost realignment remains on track, with annualized overheads reduced to $12 million-$13 million as we enter Q4, over 70% lower than the peak and at comparable revenue levels. Cash burn has declined year on year, and the unaudited cash balance as of 30th September was $5.4 million, underpinning the company's progress towards break-even and sustainable growth.
For the first time since its IPO, Cirata is operating on a sustainable cost base. With the focused development of Live Data Migrator and the launch of Cirata Symphony, the company is strategically positioned to capture significant opportunities in a large and expanding market. More importantly, the company now has a clear and focused path for growth. I'd also like to take a moment to recognize the contribution of Aahlad, who was a founder of the company, as he transitions to his ambassadorial and consulting role for the company. He continues to be an important voice as Cirata shapes the vision for the future of the company. Looking ahead, the outlook remains unchanged. Bookings are expected to be back-end weighted, as evidenced by our early momentum into Q4.
Given the hard-won streamlined cost structure, blue-chip customer base, and focused product strategy, management is confident of Cirata's ability to demonstrate operating leverage and future growth. Thank you for your continued support. We look forward to keeping you updated as we progress through Q4 and beyond.
Stephen, thank you for the presentation. Let's just run through some questions. The $3.1 million contract with the U.S. insurer is the largest direct contract in Cirata's history. Can you provide some more detail on how this relationship might expand in the future and whether similar opportunities are in the pipeline?
Yes, sure. There's a number of reasons we believe this to be an important development for Cirata. I think we could and should be doing more in the disaster recovery space, and we see opportunities for that both with Live Data Migrator and Cirata Symphony. Disaster recovery has really hit the headlines with the spate of recent cyberattacks, particularly on retail, financial services, and automotive companies that have been in the news. Data security is increasingly an important area for the enterprise. Secondly, obviously, we're pleased that this customer not only elected to go with our Live Data Migrator offering, but also extended the term to a multi-year contract. Clearly, all our existing customers are potential points of growth for the company, and this is further evidence that our expansion strategy is working.
Now, Stephen, slippage would again seem to be a concern for Q3. Can you give investors confidence that these issues are being addressed?
Yes. In the past, I've made no secret of my disappointment with the contract management process in the go-to-market team since I arrived, actually. It was, in fact, a catalyst for wholesale go-to-market changes, which now have been completed, and I'm really pleased to see the go-to-market with our Chief Revenue Officer being led by Dominic Arcari. This quarter, we've had several competing priorities: the ongoing restructuring in the go-to-market, Dominic's appointment, the new product launch of Cirata Symphony, the DevOps sale, and also the cost restructuring that we've gone through. Through all of that, we made sure that the key in-flight contracts were not compromised. Dominic only joined in July and has done an excellent job getting his arms around those challenges. He personally led the U.S. insurer contract that we announced and is quickly rebuilding the sales team.
As stated in our RNS, the pipeline is growing and improving in quality. That said, I won't sugarcoat the quarter. DevOps renewals no longer contributed post-divestment, and the major data integration contract we expected in Q3 closed just eight working days after the quarter end. It's worth noting, however, that only 10% of UK public companies report quarterly, but we chose to report quarterly because of transparency and discipline. They matter to us. Also, importantly, this quarterly cadence drives good discipline in the go-to-market business and exposes weaknesses where they exist. It's been a necessary, albeit painful, part of the rebuild of the go-to-market function internally and establishing the basis for a predictable and scalable growth business. Only one person remains from the original sales and sales consulting teams. The new go-to-market team understands that Cirata is building a high-performance culture.
Our goal is clear: a sales capability that can manage customer close cycles predictably with broader and deeper quarter-end pipelines. We're making strong progress towards that.
So tell us, how has your new Chief Revenue Officer impacted the business?
It's still early days, but Dominic has already brought a real discipline and cadence to sales, marketing, sales consulting, all the go-to-market functions. His arrival represents a clear step change for us. It's encouraging that he personally led the recent U.S. insurer contract win that we announced this week, and his sales model is already having an impact. If I reflect for a moment, it's taken longer than I expected in a smaller company to rewire every part of the organization around customer obsession, growth, and innovation. With a turnaround of this scale, sometimes if you can't change the people, you just have to change the people. And I wanted to set up everybody for success, starting with sales. Quality growth really does cure most evils. So I'm really pleased with how Dominic has hit the ground running in his first three months.
He's deepening customer relations and staying focused on the holy grail of new customer wins, customer acquisition. There's still plenty to do, but the signs of progress are clear.
We've seen Cirata successfully close the sale of the DevOps assets in the quarter. What's different now about Cirata?
As we discussed last time, the sale of the DevOps assets gives the company focus. We made no secret of the fact that data integration is the key growth driver for the business. The launch of Cirata Symphony, of our data orchestration platform, underpins that focus. DevOps was largely a renewals business, characterized by larger numbers of small-scale contracts. Cirata is not of a scale to manage two very different businesses. The Cirata data integration business will be characterized by larger-scale contracts, so fewer in volume and number of contracts, offset by the size. Going forward, the KPIs that we'll be sharing with the investment community will communicate not only total bookings in our quarter, TCV, total contract value, but also annual contract bookings, ACV, where there is a closer correlation to the timing of cash collections.
This will give investors a clearer understanding of the growth of the continuing operations of data integration and the impact of these multi-year contracts are having on our visibility as we start to scale.
So Stephen, can you say a bit more about the introduction of Cirata Symphony to the market?
I'm really proud of the team's focus on hitting the timelines for Cirata Symphony delivery. Obviously, this is very early days, but the inbound interest level has been really encouraging. The product development led by Paul Scott- Murphy, our Chief Technology Officer, has been informed entirely throughout the process with strong customer engagement that began well before the start of this year. Historically, we built products in a vacuum and with some good engineering, but detached from customer realities. We often failed to close the loop between technology and its applicability, resulting in gaps on the product- market fit. Paul's customer-led process and approach has allowed us to align customer priorities in the development of Cirata Symphony. The team have worked hard on both Live Data Migrator and now Cirata Symphony to ensure relevance and usability for extremely demanding customer environments and workloads.
However, as I stated earlier, it's important to make clear that nothing in-flight for our FY25 bookings plan is impacted by the new product launch. Cirata Symphony will be helping to drive our growth, customers, and new customer strategy as we move into FY26. As an aside, we put some links in the RNS release today that will take you to some great content on the website describing Cirata Symphony.
How should investors think about the timing of bookings in Q4 and into FY26? Do you expect more lumpiness or steadier momentum?
We've reiterated our outlook several times this year, and I flagged that it would be back-end weighted. To be candid, our revenue progression is likely to be lumpy until we have a wider base contributing to our top line. The top three banks from last Q4 FY24, the large U.K. retailer in Q1 FY25, and the U.S. insurer just announced are all multi-million dollar contracts. The challenge for us, simply put, is to do more of them. It's clear that the expansion of customers as part of the strategy is working as customers deploy Cirata technology successfully. Customer appetite for Cirata products grows accordingly. We need to crack the code on securing new customers, new customer acquisition, and this is a key priority. Using a gardening metaphor, the company will plant new acorns each quarter, cultivating them into future oak trees. That represents substantial long-term growth and revenue opportunities.
You've mentioned operating leverage. Can you expand on what you mean by that?
I think there's clearly data developing to support a strong hypothesis of operating leverage. The cost base has reduced from the peak of $45 million to between $12 million and $13 million, which represents over 70% reduction in expenses. This means we're operating with less than 30% of the baseline cost from its peak. The top line in FY23 and FY24 was flat. However, in the first half of FY25, the data integration bookings grew by more than 200%. We've just emerged from Q3, FY25, and the combination of Q1, Q2, and Q3 bookings grew by over 40% year on year. And additionally, we've early momentum in Q4. All of this coming from our data integration products, which is the strategic focus for the business. In addition, with the divestment of the DevOps business, we should start to see the data integration growth amplify.
We're not getting ahead of ourselves and realize we've tons more to prove, but the data points to progress.
Now, finally, Stephen, we do have to address the question of sustainability and cash. The lumpiness of the business must give you concerns about the timing of cash and therefore the sustainability of the business.
I think we have to consider how different this business is relative to the one we inherited in FY23. As I've said earlier, we've taken out over 70% of the cost base from the peak. We're now growing our bookings, and we think cash flow break-even is within sight. Did I think we could get here faster? Yes, candidly, I did. But we're now in a place where we get to shape our own future. Controlled cost overheads now trending towards $3 million per quarter. Product acceptance and strong support from key customers and the focused product strategy leading with Cirata Symphony. Everything is now in place for sustainable growth. We now need to execute.
Stephen, thank you.