LONDON (ShareCast) - (Sharecast News) - Cirata posted its strongest first-quarter bookings since 2019 on Wednesday, with total bookings rising to $3m for the three months ended 31 March - a 330% increase year-on-year.
The AIM-traded firm said the performance was driven by a significant rise in data integration (DI) contracts, including a $2m three-year enterprise-wide agreement with a leading UK retailer.

DI bookings accounted for $2.4m of the total, up 700% year-on-year and representing 80% of total bookings in the quarter.

In total, 14 contracts were signed, five of which related to DI, consistent with the same period last year.

Cash burn fell to $1.4m in the first quarter, down from $4.9m a year earlier, as the company implemented tighter cost controls and operational efficiencies.

Cash overheads declined to $4.6m, including $0.4m of non-recurrent items, with the annualised cash cost base exiting the quarter at $16m to $17m, less than half of the level seen in early 2023.

Cirata ended the quarter with a cash balance of $8.3m.

While DI bookings in North America underperformed relative to expectations, Cirata said it was addressing sales execution issues through enhanced training and a strategic pivot in its sales hiring approach.

The company said it was moving away from partner-centric roles in favour of enterprise-focused executives as part of its plan to improve sales productivity and shorten sales cycles.

Cirata's 'land and expand' strategy continued to gain momentum with strategic wins in the banking and retail sectors.

The company said its latest deal with a UK retailer involved the deployment of its enterprise-wide DI platform to support analytics, generative AI initiatives and hybrid cloud infrastructure using open data formats such as Apache Iceberg to ensure platform interoperability.

It also recorded its first win under its data migration-as-a-service (DMaaS) offering, securing a contract with a telecommunications provider in the United Arab Emirates via its partner Databricks.

The project would involve live data migration from Hadoop to the cloud, and represented a new entry point for Cirata's technology among new customers.

"As we signaled in January, the 2025 financial year represents a growth year built on solid foundations," said chief executive officer Stephen Kelly.

"This first quarter delivers a strong start to the year and represents a step forward in Cirata's recovery plan and drive towards growth.

"A much lower cash burn combined with the strongest Q1 bookings figure since 2019 give us increasing confidence."

Kelly said the validation from a leading UK retailer coming on the heels of its fourth quarter win with a top three US bank was a "strong endorsement" that customers were seeking petabyte-scale data automation with "the freedom" from vendor lock-in.

"The 'land and expand' strategy is working, and our DMAAS contract with our partner DataBricks for a regional telecom services provider is a great first step in driving new logo acquisition.

"Cirata needs to demonstrate more new logo wins - these are important strategic relationships as we move beyond Hadoop migration to deliver data automation and orchestration in a hybrid world.

"Cirata's vision is to support Global 500 companies to automate petabyte scale data supporting open table formats."

Conversations with customers and partners were "going deeper", Stephen Kelly said, adding that he was "delighted" with the early success seen through collaboration with "some of the largest companies" globally.

"Clearly there is more to do - I am not satisfied with our execution consistency, for example our North American plan fell short this quarter with slippage.

"With the significantly reduced cash burn and the best first quarter for over five years, the green shoots of all our hard work across the company are beginning to show."

At 1018 BST, shares in Cirata were up 9.83% at 19p.

Reporting by Josh White for Sharecast.com.

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