WSO2 Customer Stories: How Datatel Solutions chose WSO2

We caught up with Dan Langton and Ken Anderson of Datatel Solutions after their joint presentation at WSO2Con 2011 to discuss the company’s use of the WSO2 middleware platform. Here is an edited version of our talk. See video for full interview. Date: Mon, 9th Jul, 2012 Level: Introductory Reads: 1026 Discuss this article on Stack Overflow

WSO2: Dan, could you tell us a little bit about what Datatel Solutions is doing?

DL: Datatel Solutions is a master agent. We sit in-between telecom carriers and independent agents on the field. Carriers don't really want to manage hundreds of thousands of different people, so they have companies like Datatel do that management layer for their external sales.

WSO2: Ken, what were the technology decisions you had to make when choosing a middleware solution?

KA: For us, there were a number of key factors from a technical perspective. One of them was support. The amount of support, the culture of support, those things were critical to our decision to go with WSO2. The second was benchmarking. We looked at JBoss; it did really well compared to JBoss. It's much more lightweight than a lot of the enterprise, expensive middleware platforms like IBM and SAP.

Also, it's a very simple system to use. Everything is very standardized. I felt like when I was using one server, I could jump over to the next server, and I knew how to configure and use it, just by using the first server. So when I was jumping into the Mashup Server versus using the ESB, I felt like, "Oh wow, it's a very familiar environment all the way around." It’s a very unified environment that made it really easy to use.

WSO2: Both of you mentioned there were important considerations beyond the technology. Could you outline a few of those for us?

DL: I look at it more from the business perspective. Since we're in channel sales, and a lot of our clients are very small. When we looked at IBM or TIBCO, or any of these large players with a big expense to get into the middleware platform, it just really didn't work for us. So we started looking at open source. And even when you're looking at open source, it comes down to who's going to support that open source? And then, does the open source have an OEM model? So from the business perspective, it really narrowed down to WSO2 as well.