Customer Stories

CASE STUDY

Achieving Digital Agility With WSO2

HIGHLIGHTS

  • TechSoup achieved digital agility with a faster time to market of their products
  • The new system is scalable and sustainable

Goals

  • Align TechSoup’s technology  and business strategies  
  • Upgrade existing legacy middleware and reduce both costs and technical debt
  • Improve performance, availability, and scalability and achieve sustainability
  • Introduce products and services to the market faster

Industry: Non-Profit
Location: USA

About TechSoup

TechSoup provides transformative technology, digital solutions, and other resources for nonprofit organizations around the world. TechSoup is also the founding member and leader of the TechSoup Global Network, which has supported 1.2 million NGOs across the world. Data and validation services provided by TechSoup link companies, foundations, and governments to NGOs everywhere. To date, TechSoup has facilitated the delivery of $13.5 billion (fair market value) of in-kind tech and funding to the global NGO sector.

Deployment and Approach

A change in the technology strategy at TechSoup, with a move to the Cloud, microservices, and DevOps, prompted the company to upgrade the existing integration system to achieve its business objectives. As part of this process, TechSoup wanted to consolidate web services (while retiring unused web services), and implement content-based routing and a better versioning strategy for its services.

During the evaluation stage, the team at TechSoup decided on using WSO2 Enterprise Integrator due to its scalability and compatibility with legacy systems. WSO2 Enterprise Integrator contains messaging routing, data transformation, and service mediation capabilities (similar to the previous Enterprise Service Bus solution at TechSoup). In addition to these capabilities, WSO2 Enterprise Integrator also consists of integration runtimes, business process modeling, and visual tooling capabilities. Most importantly, WSO2 is an open source integration vendor, and as such, the products provide the flexibility for developers to integrate applications easily and quickly.

The new architecture consists of WSO2 Enterprise Integrator along with Active MQ, Jenkins, and Ansible, deployed on-premise. WSO2 is deployed in a High Availability (HA) cluster behind a load balancer. Global platforms supporting critical business functions communicate to shared services throughout the enterprise through the WSO2 cluster in our hybrid private/public cloud environment. TechSoup also contacted the support team at WSO2 to assist with this project - particularly to help with the migration process and deal with any issues that arose during this time.

Using WSO2 has empowered TechSoup to achieve their goals at the start of this project. TechSoup has now built a scalable and sustainable integration system that performs as per their business needs. Technical debt has been reduced by the retiring of unused web services and all of these outcomes were achieved in a cost-effective manner. As a future expansion, the company aims to implement WSO2's cloud-based service.

RESULTS

  • TechSoup's new architecture has improved the company's business agility
  • From a performance perspective, the new system is easier to maintain with improved error handling and troubleshooting
  • A better versioning strategy, automated processes, and modularized services based on operations have all contributed to enhanced business operations

Implementing WSO2 was a key part of our technical strategic vision of decoupling our legacy monolithic application stack to leverage an SOA hybrid-cloud based application architecture, helping us now bring products to market faster with better performance, scalability, and resiliency.”

Michael Enos

Senior Director, Community and Platform

TechSoup

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