WSO2

Industry	Middleware
Founder	Sanjiva Weerawarana, PhD; Paul Fremantle
Headquarters	United States
Number of locations	USA (Mountain View, CA), UK (London), Brazil (São Paulo), and Sri Lanka (Colombo, Jaffna)[1]
Key people	Sanjiva Weerawarana, PhD - Founder, CEO & Chief Architect; Paul Fremantle - Co-Founder & CTO; James Clark - Director
Number of employees	470+
Website	http://wso2.com/

WSO2 (sometimes stylized as WSO₂) is an open source technology company providing service-oriented architecture (SOA) middleware. It is best known for its Enterprise Service Bus, API management, governance and analytics offerings, some of which are notably used by eBay, Boeing, Experian and others.

WSO2 was founded by Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana and Paul Fremantle in August, 2005, and has been backed by investment from Intel Capital, Toba Capital, Pacific Controls and others. As of 2015, WSO2 has offices in USA (Mountain View, CA; Bloomington, IN), UK (London) and Sri Lanka (Colombo), with the bulk of its research and operations being conducted from its main office in Palm Grove, Colombo. The company rose to prominence after eBay revealed that a key element of their transaction processing software used the open source WSO2 ESB.^[2]

WSO2 products are released under the Apache License Version 2.^[3] Like the Apache project itself, WSO2 follows open development principles and airs architecture and development discussions public mailing lists. The company is noted by Gartner^[4] as being one of the leading competitors in the application infrastructure market.

History

The WSO2 office at Palm Grove, Colombo

WSO2 was set up by Sanjiva Weerawarana,^[5] an IBM researcher who was one of the founders of the Web services platform. Sanjiva led the creation of IBM SOAP4J, which later became Apache SOAP, and went to architect other notable projects, including Apache Axis, Apache WSIF, the IBM Web Services Gateway and IBM BPWS4J. He was joined by Paul Fremantle, one of the authors of IBM's Web Services Invocation Framework and the Web Services Gateway. Paul, an Apache member since the original Apache SOAP project, oversaw the donation of WSIF and WSDL4J to Apache and led IBM's involvement in the Axis C/C++ project. He became WSO2's CTO in 2008.^[6] Paul was subsequently named one of Infoworld's Top 25 CTOs in 2008.^[7]

WSO2's first product was code-named Tungsten, and was meant for the development of web applications. Tungsten was followed by WSO2 Titanium, which would later become WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus.^[8] In 2006, Intel Capital invested $4 million in WSO2^[9] (Intel would continue to invest over the years). In 2010, Godel Technologies also invested in WSO2 for an unspecified amount,^[10] and in 2012 they raised a third round of $10 million.^[11][12] Official WSO2 records point to this being from Toba Capital, Cisco and Intel Capital.^[13] In August, 2015, a funding round led by Pacific Controls and Toba raised another $20 million.^[14][15]

A subsidiary, WSO2Mobile, was launched in 2013, with Harsha Purasinghe of Microimage as the CEO and co-founder.^[16] In March 2015, WSO2.Telco was launched in partnership with Malaysian telecommunications company Axiata^[17] with Axiata holding a majority stake in the venture.^[18] WSO2Mobile has since been re-absorbed into its parent company.

Historically, WSO2 has had a close connection to the Apache community, with a significant portion of their products based on or contributing to the Apache product stack.^[19] Likewise, many of WSO2's top leadership have contributed to Apache projects. In 2013, WSO2 donated its Stratos project to Apache in 2013.^[20][21]

Products

WSO2 products make heavy use of Java technology and are built on top of Carbon, the company's SOA middleware platform. Carbon makes use of Apache Axis2 and encapsulates SOA functionality^[22] such as data services, business process management, ESB routing/transformation, rules, security, throttling, caching, logging and monitoring. WSO2 products are built on top of this platform.

API Management

• API Manager—API management platform for creating, deploying and managing APIs to expose data and functionality of backend systems
• API Cloud—Hosted API management service

Integration

• Enterprise Service Bus—Allows developers to connect and manage systems and software in accordance with SOA Governance principles.
• Data Services Server—Provides a Web service interface for data stores.
• Message Broker—Translates, validates and routes messages between systems.
• Business Process Server—A graphical console to manage business processes and human tasks
• Business Rules Server—A platform for implementing and managing business services

Analytics

• Data Analytics Server—Real-time, batch, interactive and predictive analytics using enterprise data. Formerly WSO2 Business Activity Monitor.
• Complex Event Processor—Real-time event processing and detection. Uses WSO2 Siddhi and Apache Storm.
• Machine Learner—Explorative data analysis using models to generate predictions. Uses Apache Spark.

Identity Management and Security

• Identity Server—Connects and manages multiple identities

Management and Governance

• App Manager—Facilitates the process of creating, deploying and managing applications
• Governance Registry—Storage, cataloging, indexing, managing and governing metadata related to enterprise assets

Mobile and IoT

• IoT Server—Internet of things platform
• Enterprise Mobility Manager—Device management and business policy enforcement for mobile devices

Foundation Servers and Frameworks

• Enterprise Store—Asset storefront, publishing and asset lifecycle management capabilities
• Storage Server—Multi-tenant structured and unstructured data storage to development projects
• User Engagement Server—A platform for creating dashboards and microsites for visualizing data

Not all components are used as stand-alone implementations; many are used to supplement the capabilities or add functionality to an implementation of the Enterprise Service Bus. WSO2's business model is based on the provision of support and engineering services for solutions implementing any of the above.

Online Services

In June 2015, WSO2 launched WSO2 Cloud—online portal with SaaS versions of its open-source products.^[23]

The following services are currently available:

• API Cloud—API management service to develop, host, and administer API programs.
• App Cloud—application hosting service.

Customers can host their APIs in the following regions:^[24]

• US East,
• US West,
• Brazil (São Paulo),
• EU (Ireland),
• EU (Frankfurt),
• Singapore,
• Japan (Tokyo),
• Australia (Sydney),
• South Korea (Seoul),
• India (Mumbai),
• China (Beijing).

See also

• Apache Software Foundation
• Amazon Web Services
• Google App Engine
• Azure Services Platform
• Information Technology in Sri Lanka

References

External links

• WSO2 home page
• WSO2 Cloud services: API Cloud and App Cloud
• WSO2 Product Documentation