Cloud computing boom lifts WANdisco WANdisco has reported record subscription bookings for the first quarter as the company continues to capitalise on the booming market for cloud computing. The company, one of only three technology IPOs in London last year, said in a trading update on Thursday that subscription bookings for the first quarter were $3.04m - up 96 per cent from the same quarter last year and beating the previous quarter's 76 per cent growth rate. New customers included Société Générale, Maxim and FutureWei, a division of Huawei, while existing customers Sony and McGraw-Hill spent more. WANdisco's software allows companies to synchronise the computer programs and documents emp­loyees use in different locations, making it well positioned to cash in as companies shift to cloud computing and a mobile workforce. During the quarter WANdisco also introduced its first "big data" products, which have been in development since the company bought AltoStor for £3.2m in November last year. AltoStor's founders, Konstantin Shvachko and Jagane Sundar, were important contributors to Hadoop, the open-source software used by companies such as Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and eBay to manage and move vast stores of data. WANdisco has combined this software with its own data synchronisation service to create a new product called NameNode, which tracks the location of data in the cloud and co-ordinates access to it. The market for big data services such as NameNode is expected to grow from $5bn now to $50bn in the next five years, dwarfing WANdisco's traditional market. But Thursday's update did not include any insight into early sales of NameNode. Investors showed little reaction to the update, nudging shares in WANdisco up 2.5p in afternoon trading to £7.68. George O'Connor, an analyst at Panmure Gordon, said investors were probably waiting for feedback on the new products that would begin to emerge in the second quarter. These are great bookings numbers, but they're really a reflection of the classic side of the business that it floated on. What the market is particularly keen on now is the big data side of the business," he said. Shares in WANdisco have tripled in value over the past year. Mr O'Connor said that, given technology investors traditionally sell in April, the company was doing well to increase its market value.