After Sonic ESB pioneered, WSO2 ESB continuously innovated

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Chris

After Sonic ESB pioneered the Enterprise Service Bus market and created technology to more readily integrate applications using Enterprise Integration Patterns, WSO2 continually added innovations to the core ESB pattern and created the highest performance, lowest footprint, fully interoperable and flexible ESB, WSO2 ESB.

Progress Software recently lowered their sights on supporting enterprise integration developers, and Progress is has publicly announced intent to sell Progress Sonic ESB, Actional services management, and FuseSource. Progress’ recent strategy shift places Sonic ESB, Sonic MQ, Actional, and FuseSource customers at risk of further obsolescence.

Where did Progress’ corporate strategy fail? By growing through ad-hoc acquisition and superficial integration instead of organic platform development. Progress played a failing game espoused by IBM, Oracle, and Software AG. Progress acquired competitive threats and then invested the minimal amount required to create a ‘SOA Suite’. As often the case, the strategy led to multiple overlapping products, competing business units, lost internal talent,
and a disjointed customer experience.

At WSO2, we have consistently taken a different approach. Our complete, composable, and cohesive platform was built through organic development, which continually enhances our core platform, incorporates market-leading innovations, and delivers a seamless customer experience. Our WSO2 Enterprise Platform enables complete data to screen enterprise integration, SOA, BPM, API management, web application development, and Cloud.

Our WSO2 ESB, WSO2 Governance Registry, WSO2 Business Activity Monitor, and WSO2 Identity Server provide a production proven, high performance SOA middleware foundation. We welcome you review our case studies and learn how WSO2 ESB processes more than 1 billion transactions per day for eBay, streamlines the development and maintenance of smart power grids, supports T24 core banking systems, and enables consolidated reporting across
enterprise applications.

Our Offer to Progress Sonic ESB and Progress FuseSource Customers

WSO2 desires to assist Progress Sonic ESB and Progress FuseSource customers choose a viable, stable, and supported middleware platform. We are offering free Evaluation Support to current Progress Sonic ESB and Progress FuseSource customers, and would be pleased to demonstrate how our market leading WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus and WSO2 SOA Platform meets your evaluation criteria. Feel free to contact us via our Progress customer offer landing page, our contact form or send us an email note.

Chris Haddad, VP Technology Evangelism Chris’s blog: http://blog.cobia.net/cobiacomm/

Posted in Customers, News | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

WSO2 API Manager Beta program launched

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Jonathan Marsh

Chris Haddad, Vice President of Technical Evangelism for WSO2, has introduced the new WSO2 API Management beta program in his blog.  At the end of the post he reveals that…

WSO2 has begun recruiting beta customers for the new WSO2 API Manager product scheduled to launch this summer.  Ideal candidates for the WSO2 API Manager beta program are enterprise IT professionals who are planning or evaluating infrastructure to offer APIs to third parties—whether externally or within the organization. WSO2 requests participant commitment to provide use cases and feedback. For more information please visit the product Web site at http://wso2.com/products/api-manager and contact us at mailto:bizdev@wso2.com to join the beta program.

WSO2 API Manager will enable enterprises to extend their data, processes and services out to customers, partners and other business units via APIs while providing the ability to secure, protect and monitor API resource interactions. WSO2 API Manager also will enable developers to rapidly find, subscribe to, and evaluate the APIs that enterprises make available.  Using WSO2 API Manager, enterprises will be able to:

  • Offer APIs to their customers and partners, as well as other internal users.
  • Display and promote APIs in an API store
  • Enable developers to sign up and subscribe to APIs.
  • Collect usage, performance, and quality of service metrics to analyze and understand how APIs are being used.
  • Use a policy-based approach to securing APIs, managing access, and throttling usage.

Re-invent your software delivery and re-invigorate your SOA initiative by adding WSO2 API Manager and encouraging API adoption.

Read the full post, explaining the importance of API management to SOA adoption, “WSO2 API Management Platform Re-invents Software Delivery” at http://blog.cobia.net/cobiacomm/2012/03/22/wso2-api-management-platform-re-invents-software-delivery/.

The related news release is at http://wso2.com/about/wso2-begins-recruiting-beta-customers-for-new-wso2-api-manager-product.

Jonathan Marsh, VP Business Development and Product Design
Jonathan’s blog: http://jonathanmarsh.net/blog

Posted in News | Tagged | Leave a comment

November Workshops go Global

Posted on November 8, 2011 by Jonathan Marsh

The November WSO2 Workshop event schedule is the broadest and deepest yet, spanning five continents and seven different countries.  If you are planning to attend, I’m sure you will agree with our prior workshop attendees that the event is well worth it.  More on the workshop format and who should attend here.
View WSO2 Workshops – November 2011 in a larger map

Many of these workshops feature Paul Fremantle (WSO2 CTO) and Ganesh Prasad (author of the popular Practical SOA for Solution Architects paper.  Here’s the complete November schedule – check out our events page for registration and more information.

  • Nov 1st: Belo Horizonte – Minas Gerais, Brazil “Understanding the Stratos Cloud Platform”
  • Nov 5th: Sao Paolo, Brazil “Understanding the Stratos Cloud Platform”
  • Nov 8th: Vancouver, BC, Canada “Carbon and Stratos: understanding cloud-enabled modular middleware”
  • Nov 14th: Melbourne, Australia “Practical SOA for the Solution Architect”
  • Nov 15th: San Francisco, CA, USA “Carbon and Stratos: understanding cloud-enabled modular middleware”
  • Nov 17th: Sydney, Australia “Practical SOA for the Solution Architect”
  • Nov 21th: Canberra, Australia “Practical SOA for the Solution Architect”
  • Nov 22nd: Frankfurt, Germany “Carbon and Stratos: understanding cloud-enabled modular middleware”
  • Nov 24nd: Geneva, Switzerland “Carbon and Stratos: understanding cloud-enabled modular middleware”
  • Nov 26th (tentative): Colombo, Sri Lanka “Carbon and Stratos: understanding cloud-enabled modular middleware”

Not in your area?  Let us know where you’d like to see workshops (either public ones or private ones for your organization).  Our schedule continues to expand – so if you can’t make it to any of the ones above, we’d love to explore holding one in your area too.

Jonathan Marsh, VP Business Development and Product Design
Jonathan’s blog: http://jonathanmarsh.net/blog

Posted in Events | Tagged | Leave a comment

WSO2 Joins Cloud Security Alliance

Posted on November 2, 2011 by Prabath Siriwardena

Cloud Security Alliance LogoAfter watching the good work of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) for more than a year, WSO2 has joined as a Corporate Member.

As you know, WSO2 offers the very first completely open source Platform as a Service (PaaS). Taking our Carbon-based middleware platform to the next level, WSO2 Stratos offers the most complete, enterprise-grade, open PaaS, with support for more core services than any other available PaaS today. Unlike many cloud platforms, WSO2 Stratos, the software behind the WSO2 StratosLive Java PaaS, is available as a fully supported product that can be installed and run on-premise.

WSO2 Stratos provides the core cloud services and essential building blocks, for example federated identity and single sign-on, data-as-a-service and messaging-as-a-service and more, required for developing SaaS and cloud applications.

Building a cloud PaaS is actually quite a challenge, but no pain, no gain!

We took up the first challenge of getting our Carbon stack running on OSGi runtime, not an easy task and one that some vendors were unable to complete, but one that we found necessary to build cloud nativity deeply into the platform, and to enable incremental upgrades and addition of the platform as a live entity.

Security represents one of the biggest challenges we faced making Stratos a reality.  We had to rebuild the foundations of the system to focus on tenant isolation, data security, restricted operations, tenant-based user stores, standards-based security models, integration with other *aaS models among other concerns. Stratos today supports many of the most popular open standards related to security and identity management including SAML2, OpenID, OAuth, XACML and WS-Security.

KuppingerCole European Identity Award 2011A few months back we received some recognition of this work, as a recipient of KuppingerCole’s European Identity Award 2011 for the Cloud Provider Offerings category.  The award recognizes WSO2 specifically for WSO2 Stratos Identity, citing the multi-tenant open source cloud service for its OpenID and XACML support and its innovative features, including the ability to migrate from on-premise to a full cloud service (and back).

Stratos has come a long way, with customers now adopting the platform, and we welcome the opportunity to both share our experiences with other cloud providers and be part of the conversation in moving cloud security forward.

The CSA is a not-for-profit organization with a mission to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within Cloud Computing, and to provide education on the uses of Cloud Computing to help secure all other forms of computing.

Among many of our community, questions about whether to move to cloud or not, whether to move to a private or public cloud and so forth mostly revolve around security concerns.  We are looking to helping address those concerns, and contributing to the standards and guidelines promoted by the CSA to educate users about ensuring the future of cloud is secure.

Prabath Siriwardena, Architect & Senior Manager – Carbon Platform & Security
blog: http://blog.facilelogin.com

Posted in Cloud, News, Security | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Gartner’s and Cobiacomm’s analysis of WSO2 SOA Governance

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Jonathan Marsh

image[First published at http://blog.cobia.net/cobiacomm/2011/10/25/wso2-soa-governance/]

WSO2, the lean enterprise middleware provider, announced that it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the “Visionaries” quadrant of a new report, Magic Quadrant for SOA Governance Technologies [1].

My analysis (from an ex-Gartner research team leader), the placement demonstrates WSO2 team leadership in defining a vision for policy based service governance. When publishing a service API for consumption, tracking published cloud-based service versions, monitoring service consumer connections, and delivering service-consumer interoperability, governance keeps the environment from devolving into chaos. Cloud based services, mobile devices, and multi-enterprise B2B interactions increase the environments where SOA governance technology must be applied. WSO2′s multi-tenant SOA governance infrastructure facilitates configuring models and policies associated with each participant’s business requirements. Many vendors have not yet modified their registries, repositories, and policy management systems to support multi-tenancy. As a result, organizations using single-tenant SOA governance tools are challenged to apply policies across diverse partners, customers, consumers, and internal corporate groups.

The WSO2 Carbon Governance and WSO2 Stratos Governance as a Service supports configuring a wide variety of design-time, development-time, and run-time policies. Built-in run-time policies include security access controls, authorization (via XACML), throttling, alerting, and caching, each of which accesses defined parts of the service message. The governance stack is also used to enforce software development policies when promoting applications and services across lifecycle stages (e.g. development to quality assurance, quality assurance to production). Granular cloud metering and billing is facilitated by collecting performance, faults, and business activity information in conjunction with the WSO2 Stratos Business Activity Management Service. WSO2 has posted good drill-down presentation describing how to use the governance registry.

The WSO2 Governance Registry not only interoperates and integrates with the WSO2 Carbon and WSO2 Stratos stack, but also with Cloud services hosted on other vendor stacks. Integration can occur at the network protocol level (i.e. HTTP, SOAP, FTP, AMQP, WebSphere MQ, POP3/SMTP, FIX, HL7, SAP iDoc/BAPI, and vendor-specific JMS variants), across multiple message formats (i.e. SOAP, XML, JSON, CSV, EDI, FIX, HL7, and REST), and multiple security and identity protocols (i.e. LDAP, SAML2, Kerberos, OpenID, OAuth, and XACMLA).

For more information, visit the WSO2 Governance Registry product page. To try out WSO2 Governance Registry as a Service for free, visit the StratosLive registration page.

[1] Gartner, “Magic Quadrant for SOA Governance Technologies,” by Paolo Malinverno and Daryl C. Plummer, October 17, 2011.

Chris Haddad, Vice President of Technical Evangelism
Chris’ blog: http://blog.cobia.net/cobiacomm

Posted in Analysts, Cloud | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

New role, new face: Chris Haddad joins WSO2

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Jonathan Marsh

As WSO2 navigates the boundary between start-up and scale-up, we’re finding that one thing doesn’t change — the core of WSO2 is community.  Our open source technology had its genesis in the Apache community, and has spawned our own OxygenTank development portal.  The essence of the astoundingly productive development model is openness, input, and contribution from the community.  Our business model is based on matching needs in the user community with the skills of our community of developer-employees.  Our marketing and communication is about providing valuable information to the community and welcoming new members into that community.

As our community has grown, our ability to engage and serve that community also must scale up.  And since our community includes some pretty savvy folks, growing requires bringing on some pretty capable people.  I’m especially pleased to announce the latest data point in that trend:

Chris HaddadChris Haddad has joined our team in the role of Vice President of Technology Evangelism. Many of you may already be familiar with Chris’ work as a core analyst with Burton/Gartner specializing variously in Java, SOA, SaaS, PaaS, cloud, as those topics have each risen in importance to the industry.

Chris’ job will be (among other things) to help you — our community — understand better the trends, technologies, and tactics that make your technology investments pay off now and in the future.  Chris will also be bringing your stories back to WSO2, where they focus and improve WSO2’s technology and roadmap.

I encourage you to subscribe to Chris’ new blog, which will be full of his impressions as he broadens his exposure to the WSO2 platform.  Look for Chris at upcoming conferences, webinars, articles and more — or just drop him a line if you have a story to tell!

Chris, welcome to the WSO2 family!

Jonathan Marsh, VP Business Development and Product Design
Jonathan’s blog: http://jonathanmarsh.net/blog

Posted in News, Team | Leave a comment

Boston forecast: Cloudy with a chance of insight

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Jonathan Marsh

I’ll be speaking at the Wall Street Technology Association event in Boston October 27th titled “Cloud Computing in Financial Services.”  I’m presenting an interesting idea that we’ve seen emerging among our WSO2 Stratos adopters.  Here’s the abstract:

Beyond exposing APIs: Exposing your data and services through a Vertical PaaS

“Adopters of cloud platforms expect scalability, high utilization rates, better analytics for their internal applications, and conversion of capex expenses to opex. In addition to these we are seeing a demand where adopters are seeking more – cloud offerings not just providing an API to their services but a complete ‘Vertical PaaS’ including third-party application hosting with direct access to the core data and services of the organization. Offering a development and hosting platform deeply integrated with their data and services rather than a simple Web API increases the potential for monetization and wider application of their service assets. This talk introduces the concepts and motivations behind this idea and provides a few customer data points that may be early indicators of an emerging trend.”

Hope to see you there!

Jonathan Marsh, VP Business Development and Product Design
Jonathan’s blog: http://jonathanmarsh.net/blog

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

YANO (Yet Another New Office) for WSO2

Posted on September 18, 2011 by Jonathan Marsh

16 September 2011 saw the opening of another new WSO2 office – the second this year, with the expansion of the Colombo “campus” to a third building.  imageStarting this week, WSO2 will occupy the top two floors (with a third yet to be constructed) of the ICICI Bank building a couple of blocks from the existing Flower Road buildings.  The new facilities should go a long way to relieving the overcrowding of the existing facilities as the WSO2 team continues to expand, both within Sri Lanka and with imagegrowth in overseas offices and the addition of more remote employees around the world.

As customary, the opening ceremony includes employees at all levels who take turns lighting wicks in the jasmine-flower strung brass oil lamp.  The lighting of the five-foot lamp symbolizes the dispelling of ignorance (darkness), replacing it with knowledge – the greatest of all forms of wealth in Sri Lanka.  The lamp is topped by an image of a rooster further reinforcing the dawning of light as well as good fortune.

This simple ceremony seems especially fitting for WSO2, with our ceaseless mission to discover and invent technologies that will solve current and future enterprise problems and build the best foundation for enterprises to succeed in our rapidly-changing world.  And then make these innovations available to the world freely as open source.

image

After the lamp-lighting Paul and Sanjiva shared a few words of gratitude for the incredible accomplishments of the team so far this year – as well as a simagetern warning not to rest on our laurels as we have much to accomplish!  We can’t rest but must continue to “do what it takes to get it done” for our customers and users.

I can’t help but include a candid snapshot of Sanjiva prior to the ceremony demonstrating the breadth of his duties as CEO.  “Do what it takes to get it done.”  That’s a bit of knowledge we all acquire as members of the WSO2 team.

Jonathan Marsh, VP Business Development and Product Design
Jonathan’s blog: http://jonathanmarsh.net/blog

Posted in News, Team | 3 Comments

WSO2Con 2011 was a real Tweet!

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Jonathan Marsh

WSO2Con 2011 is winding down – last set of tutorials conclude today.  I may be biased but IMO this has been the best technology conference I’ve ever attended.  Great speakers from around the world, lots of insight and frank discussion, tons of intra-conference networking and info sharing, fabulous keynotes, and a great mix of the practical and the visionary.  And the conference organization was … outstanding?  impeccable?  jawdropping? … I’m kind of speechless!  You’d think our WSO2 event team had been doing this for decades.

And ripples of the event went out well beyond Water’s Edge – hundreds of sessions were viewed live through the simultaneous webcast (recordings will be available at some point.)  Facebook pictures are still popping up from dozens of attendees (what was the last tech conference you went to that included elephant rides?)  And twitter was going nuts – #WSO2con was used over 1000 times, and broke the top 100 of trending topics during the conference.  So I’d thought I’d share a few highlights as expressed through some of my favorite tweets:

image

image

image

(Paul answering a question about how we can compete technically against IBM’s R&D budget.)

image

(The question was about how we assign “resources” to projects and tasks.)

image

(Samisa talking about how a company of our size builds the impressive number of “products” and services that we do.)

image

image

(That’s on two units over the first two months of deployment, equal to approx 250K US $ – a very cool iPod-based point-of-sale app modeled after the Apple Store experience – read the just-released case study.)

image

(During Shankar’s building of a complete application in StratosLive during his session.)

image

(Dimitry made heavy use of free public forums during his evaluation and development.)

image

image

2ndn.jpgAnd here’s the image I referred to, I snapped during the Bathiya and Santhush closing concert:

Just a small taste – start planning now not to miss WSO2Con 2012.  I won’t miss it for anything!

Jonathan Marsh, VP Business Development and Product Design
Jonathan’s blog: http://jonathanmarsh.net/blog

Posted in Events | Tagged | 1 Comment

WSO2Con 2011 – More than just another tech conference

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Hasmin AbdulCader

You’ve probably seen the agenda which has over 22 guest speakers and over 30 presentations covering the unique convergence of SOA, Open Source software, mobile and cloud computing, along with IT strategies for improving productivity and competing in a global economy.

You’ve also probably taken note of the stellar keynote sessions taking place on all three days of the conference by distinguished guests from IBM, eBay, Google and Cognizant Technologies.

What you probably don’t know yet is that WSO2Con 2011 is more than just a technology conference.

Held in the beautifully landscaped Waters Edge Resort, amidst a golf course, the 3 day conference also includes the most entertaining evening networking sessions you’ll ever come across.

Day 1: Cultural performances that showcase Sri Lanka’s rich set of cultural dances that are diverse and unique. From lithe graceful movements to the more vigorous, they reflect the complex rhythms of various drum beats. There is also a special appearance of a jumbo guest that should not be missed!

Jam with the WSO2 crew on Day 2. The team has been tuning up guitar strings, and vocal cords for an evening of smooth tunes and moving local flare. Even if you don’t play an instrument or have a voice of a nightingale, you can still join in the fun by singing and clapping along.

Ending the conference in style, one of the biggest names in the Sri Lankan music industry will perform. Mixing Sinhala, Tamil and English lyrics in their originals, bringing out their contemporary style and revolutionary music, this internationally acclaimed duo will make the evening definitely one to remember!

Can’t be here live? No problem, watch all sessions online, as and when they happen. Log in to http://wso2.org/events/wso2con-2011-colombo starting at 9PM Pacific time tonight!

Hasmin AbdulCader, Director, Marketing
http://www.twitter.com/hasmina

Posted in Events | Tagged | Leave a comment