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Sanjiva Weerawarana, Ph. D
Founder, Chairman & CEO
Sanjiva founded WSO2 after having spent nearly 8 years in IBM Research, where he was one of the founders of the Web services platform. During that time, he co-authored many Web services specifications including WSDL, BPEL4WS, WS-Addressing, WS-RF and WS-Eventing. Sanjiva is currently a member of the W3C Web Service Description Working Group where he is a co-editor of the specification.
Not content with working on specifications, Sanjiva lead a team in IBM Research that did implementations of these and other specifications as they were being created. Sanjiva lead the creation of IBM SOAP4J, which was released just 2 days after the SOAP 1.1 specification was released and which later became Apache SOAP. He went on to architect and implement many other products, including Apache Axis, Apache WSIF, the IBM Web Services Gateway and IBM BPWS4J, a BPEL4WS implementation.
Sanjiva was a key driver of IBM’s Web services technical strategy and coordinated overall Web services architecture for IBM. In recognition for his company-wide technical leadership, Sanjiva was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology in 2003.
In March 2005, he and several others of IBM’s Web services leaders jointly published a book on the overall architecture of the Web services platform. That book was the first (and still only?) book to explain the design and architecture of Web services as a platform rather than as a set of point specifications.
While Sanjiva joined IBM Research in Hawthorne, New York, he moved to Sri Lanka in August 2001 but continued to work for IBM Research in New York, albeit from a bit far away.
Sanjiva has been involved with Open Source software both in IBM and in Apache for several years. In addition to the Apache Web services projects, Sanjiva is the father of Apache Jakarta BSF and also contributed to Apache Xalan. In recognition for his contributions to Apache, he was elected a member of the Apache Software Foundation in 2003.
In Sri Lanka, Sanjiva founded the Lanka Software Foundation, a non-profit organization formed with the objective of promoting Open Source development, not usage, by Sri Lankan developers. He is currently LSF’s Executive Director. Operating with very little funding, LSF has been quite successful, with more than 50 Sri Lankan developers becoming active Apache committers within a short period of time.
In recognition of Sanjiva’s role in promoting Open Source participation from developing countries, Sanjiva was elected to the Board of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) in April 2005.
Sanjiva also teaches and guides student projects part-time in the Computer Science & Engineering department of the University of Moratuwa. He’s also a member of the academic advisory board of the School of Computing of the University of Colombo and of the Faculty of IT of the University of Moratuwa.
Prior to joining IBM, Sanjiva spent 3 years at Purdue University as visiting faculty, where he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1994.
