WSO2 Launches Industry’s Most Comprehensive Cloud Middleware Solutions with Debut of WSO2 StratosLive PaaS and Launch of WSO2 Stratos 1.5 Platform

Palo Alto, CA – July 18, 2011 - WSO2 today announced the debut of the WSO2 StratosLive platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and the launch of WSO2 Stratos 1.5, the newest release of WSO2’s 100% open source cloud middleware platform software. Together, they provide the industry’s most comprehensive cloud middleware solutions for enabling service-oriented architecture (SOA) and composite application development and deployment in the cloud.

WSO2 is the only company to offer a complete PaaS both as on-premise software and as a hosted service—running the same production-ready code wherever it best suits customers’ privacy, service-level agreement (SLA), and deployment requirements. The WSO2 StratosLive PaaS is the new hosted service powered by WSO2 Stratos, which is now in use by enterprises, independent software vendors (ISVs), and systems integrators around the world. StratosLive is the only available and supported PaaS to provide a complete enterprise deployment and integration platform, including application server, enterprise service bus (ESB), database, identity server, governance registry, business process manager, portal server and more.

WSO2 Stratos provides the same capabilities to organizations that want the benefits of a PaaS running on their own premises. WSO2 Stratos builds on and extends the award-winning 100% open source WSO2 Carbon enterprise middleware platform by taking the proven WSO2 Carbon code and adding cloud functionality for self-service provisioning, multi-tenancy, metering, and elastic scaling, among others. Today all WSO2 Carbon products, including the latest features from the recent WSO2 Carbon 3.2 platform release, are available both as part of the WSO2 Stratos cloud middleware platform and as cloud-hosted versions with instant provisioning on the WSO2 StratosLive public PaaS.

WSO2’s unique approach enables developers to migrate their applications and services smoothly and safely between on-premise servers, a private PaaS, a public PaaS, and hybrid cloud environments—providing unprecedented deployment flexibility. It also means customers of WSO2 StratosLive and WSO2 Stratos know that they are running their applications on the same code-base that handles more than one billion transactions per day at a leading online retailer.

WSO2 StratosLive, now in production, is a proven PaaS road-tested by nearly 1,500 beta users over the past year. It is available today with a range of subscription levels to meet the varying needs of organizations, from start-ups to Global 1,000 enterprises.

“The cloud is a compelling platform for enabling enterprises to combine the agility they’ve gained by employing SOAs and composite applications with an extended reach and greater cost efficiencies,” said Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, WSO2 founder and CEO. “At WSO2, we’re delivering on this promise by providing the only truly open and complete PaaS available today with our WSO2 StratosLive middleware PaaS and WSO2 Stratos 1.5 cloud middleware platform. Our open standards approach, based on a common set of open source code, gives developers the flexibility to deploy wherever they need today and in the future, whether it’s on-premise or in private or public clouds.”

WSO2 customers and partners already are seeing benefits from their early use of WSO2 StratosLive and WSO2 Stratos. At a US bank, the IT group has been using WSO2 Stratos to facilitate rapid application development and collaboration. Meanwhile, a leading systems integrator is using WSO2 Stratos as the basis for rapid delivery of middleware to project teams, as well as delivering a vertical industry application via a SaaS model to customers.

PaaS is the model that extends existing infrastructure clouds beyond providing virtual machines to offering higher level facilities, such as virtual application servers, ESBs, or messaging fabrics. WSO2 is leading the PaaS space by delivering the world’s first fully integrated complete PaaS—one that goes beyond simply hosting applications to providing all the major components of modern SOA-based enterprise platforms.

With WSO2 StratosLive, WSO2 also frees enterprises from a common PaaS risk: the potential to be locked into a particular service provider. WSO2 protects customers by being the first PaaS provider to offer the complete run-time as an open source project. WSO2 Stratos—launched in November 2010 as the industry’s first open cloud middleware platform—allows organizations to deploy the same code that runs StratosLive on their own premises or elsewhere to provide a private PaaS.

Finally, by adding full production support for customers using the public StratosLive service, WSO2 has created the first open PaaS to offer production support on-premise, on a private cloud and in the public cloud.

“Developers use the cloud to develop apps faster, and PaaS promises to automate away another layer of configuration complexity,” said James Governor, co-founder of analyst firm, RedMonk. “With Carbon, Stratos and now StatosLive WSO2 is delivering common PaaS infrastructure for public or private cloud delivery of service-oriented architectures.”

WSO2 StratosLive and WSO2 Stratos 1.5 each provide a comprehensive platform designed specifically for the demands of extending SOA and composite application development and deployment to highly scalable cloud computing environments. WSO2 Stratos 1.5 is the newest release of WSO2’s 100% open source downloadable cloud middleware platform software. WSO2 StratosLive is the new middleware PaaS that provides all the functionality of WSO2 Stratos in a public cloud hosted by WSO2.

Cloud middleware products available with WSO2 StratosLive and WSO2 Stratos include the ten offerings first launched with WSO2 Stratos 1.0:

• WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus as a Service
• WSO2 Data Services as a Service
• WSO2 Business Processes as a Service
• WSO2 Business Rules as a Service
• WSO2 Business Activity Monitoring as a Service
• WSO2 Mashups as a Service
• WSO2 Application Server as a Service
• WSO2 Portals as a Service (based on WSO2 Gadget Server)
• WSO2 Governance as a Service
• WSO2 Identity as a Service

With the launch of WSO2 StratosLive and WSO2 Stratos 1.5, WSO2 adds four new cloud middleware products:

• WSO2 Data as a Service provides both SQL and NoSQL databases to users based on both MySQL and Apache Cassandra. This allows users to self-provision a database in the cloud and to choose the right model for their applications. MySQL provides compatibility with existing JDBC and SQL code, while Apache Cassandra extends the model to provide elastic scalability, key-value paradigm support, and highly consistent read-write performance under load and scale. In both cases, WSO2 Data as a Service is offered as a full multi-tenant capability, providing increased efficiency, lower costs, and instant self-service provisioning.
• WSO2 Complex Event Processing as a Service is the full multi-tenant cloud version of WSO2 CEP Server, which launched in June 2011 and supports multiple CEP engines, including Drools Fusion and Esper, to enable complex event processing and event stream analysis. Using it, developers and architects can easily create queries and analyses of real-time event streams to drive real-time business decisions and alerts.
• WSO2 Message Broker as a Service is the full multi-tenant cloud version of WSO2 Message Broker, which launched in June 2011 and supports message queuing and publish-subscribe to enable message-driven and event-driven solutions in the enterprise. It uses Apache Qpid as the core messaging engine to implement the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) standard—the only widely supported open standard wire-protocol for messaging.
• WSO2 Cloud Services Gateway (WSO2 CSG), first launched as a separate single-tenant product, is now a fully multi-tenant product within WSO2 Stratos and WSO2 StratosLive. WSO2 CSG provides a managed, secure tunnel into the enterprise from the cloud. Applications of WSO2 CSG include protecting APIs, providing a firewall for services, ensuring private data access, bridging hybrid clouds, and offering security verification.

With WSO2 StratosLive and WSO2 Stratos, central cloud features are built directly into the core platform—including multi-tenancy, automatic metering and monitoring, auto-scaling, centralized governance and identity management, and single sign-on. The Cloud Manager in WSO2 StratosLive and WSO2 Stratos offers point-and-click simplicity for configuring and provisioning middleware services, so developers can get started immediately and focus on the business logic, rather than configuring and deploying software systems.

Additionally, the WSO2 Stratos cloud middleware platform features an integration layer that allows it to install onto any existing cloud infrastructure such as Eucalyptus, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), and VMware ESX. Enterprises are never locked into a specific infrastructure provider or platform.

The availability of WSO2 StratosLive and WSO2 Stratos 1.5 brings several new core platform enhancements.

• Software-as-a-service (SaaS) Web application support allows developers to build their own SaaS Web applications and use the multi-tenant WSO2 Identity as a Service to manage tenant identities. This frees developers to focus on the business logic rather than the underlying platform.
• Google Apps integration lets enterprises take advantage of their existing Google Apps accounts. Administrators can automatically link Google Apps user directories into WSO2 StratosLive, enabling OpenID single sign-on into WSO2 Stratos using an authorized Google Apps user name and password. Administrators also can allow users to directly access WSO2 StratosLive from Google Gmail.
• Metering and usage throttling builds on the previous metering functionality by empowering enterprises to easily manage tenants who are exceeding their in-plan capacity levels, either in terms of users or bandwidth. Using declarative rules, it is possible, for example, to use throttling to limit above-plan usage or simply bill the tenant for the out-of-plan use.
• Billing is a new service that lets companies generate monthly invoices and send email notifications when invoices either are due or have been paid. It also provides the super-tenant or administrator with a summary view, as well as alerts when customers exceed their credit limits. In addition to the billing functionality it shares with WSO2 Stratos 1.5, the WSO2 StratosLive PaaS also features PayPal integration to simplify the payment process.
• Multi-tenant logging is a new distributed logging capability. It allows each tenant to see the logs specific to that tenant. The logging capability automatically collects logs from all the WSO2 Stratos services, even when those systems are elastically scaled into new virtual machines.

WSO2 StratosLive and WSO2 Stratos 1.5 are in production and available today. As fully open source middleware solutions released under the Apache License 2.0, they do not carry any licensing fees. Production support for the WSO2 Stratos cloud middleware platform starts at $24,000 per year for each WSO2 Stratos installation. The WSO2 StratosLive middleware PaaS is backed by a standard service-level agreement (for more information on this, contact WSO2), and is available at three paid subscription levels: SMB, Professional and Enterprise, as well as a free Demo subscription. For details on subscription pricing, visit the WSO2 StratosLive website at https://stratoslive.wso2.com.

WSO2 StratosLive and WSO2 Stratos 1.5 are backed by a world-class technical team in which the experts that helped create the software provide support, leading to direct and immediate access to the people with in-depth knowledge of the middleware. In addition to production support, WSO2 service and support options include evaluation support, development support, and a special CloudStart^SM consulting program.

WSO2 is the lean enterprise middleware company. It delivers the only complete open source enterprise SOA middleware stack purpose-built as an integrated platform to support today’s heterogeneous enterprise environments—internally and in the cloud. WSO2’s service and support team is led by technical experts who have proven success in deploying enterprise SOAs and contribute to the technology standards that enable them. For more information,visit https://wso2.com and the WSO2 OxygenTank developer portal at https://wso2.com, or check out WSO2 on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, WSO2 Blogsand FriendFeed.