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2017/03/08
 
8 Mar, 2017 | 3 min read

WSO2Con USA 2017 - ballerinas, blockchain, oxygen bars, and more!

  • Samudra Weerasinghe
  • Senior Lead Marketing Officer - WSO2

San Francisco met us with bitter, cold winds, but we didn’t let that stop us from hosting the best user conference ever! With a fully restructured agenda, major product and roadmap reveals and phenomenal entertainment, this year’s WSO2Con USA was bigger and better than ever.

This year, we even had an actual oxygen bar inside the WSO2 Oxygen Bar: a place where attendees were able to meet with WSO2’s solutions architecture and engineering teams to answer all their questions on integration, API management, analytics, identity and access management, and the Internet of Things.

The conference started off with a bang, literally. The Taiko drummers marched on to stage and gave a warm welcome to everyone in the crowd!

WSO2 Founder, CEO and Chief Architect Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana then presented the repositioning of WSO2’s product strategy to focus on providing a platform that enables digital transformation through integration, API management, identity and access management, smart analytics, and the Internet of Things.

Thomas Squeo, the senior vice president of digital transformation and enterprise architecture at West Corporation, followed this with another keynote. He explored how to digitally disrupt from within your enterprise by empowering your employees who will in turn engage with customers, transform your products and optimize operations.

Next, cue the ballerinas...

...which led to WSO2’s big reveal: Ballerinalang

Sanjiva examined Ballerina in detail: the general purpose, concurrent and strongly typed programming language with both textual and graphical syntaxes, optimized for integration. Following this, Sameera Jayasoma, the associate director, architect and lead choreographer of Ballerina showcased a few demos of the language in use.

The first day then broke off into the individual tracks; integration, analytics and strategy; with introductory, advanced and hand-on sessions as well as customer talks from Motorola Mobility and State of Arizona.

The end of day one was met with smooth Jazz sounds of The San Francisco Metro Combo at our networking event where attendees got to mingle with their peers and WSO2 experts.

The second day commenced with a keynote by State of Arizona Chief Technology Officer Jason Simpson who examined their cloud-first strategy towards becoming a digital government. He spoke on the challenges of moving their legacy technology and systems to the cloud with low budgets to meet the increasing demands of their users and went on to explain how State of Arizona overcame them.

This was followed by an insightful customer panel on bridging IT and business in digital transformation moderated by our very own Vice President of Solutions Architecture Asanka Abeysinghe. The panel consisted of Jason Simpson, the CTO of State of Arizona, Sri Harsha Pulleti, an integration architect at Motorola Mobility and Naresh Sikha, the chief architect at StubHub.

The second day’s tracks consisted of technical sessions on integration, analytics, API management, IoT and Security by WSO2 experts and many customer talks and panels including:

Yet another day of learning and exchanging ideas came to an end. But that wasn’t it for day two! Right after the sessions we went into the carnival themed conference party where attendees got to mingle, play old-school arcade games like Street Fighter, take funky pictures at the photo booth and dance the night away. DJ Nikkie Matteo scratched some killer beats but the band, Pacific Soul, stole the show and made everyone cut loose, footloose and kick of their Sunday shoes!

Day three went straight into the tracks that included technical sessions in the areas of IoT, security and devops. It also had a track specially for partners and one specially by partners. The customer and partner talks on day three included:

  1. IoT in Airline Operations, Suresh Subasinghe, Principal Architect, United Airlines
  2. Multi-tenanted, Role-based Identity & Access Management Solution at West, Pranav Patel, VP, Systems Development, West Interactive
  3. 0-60 with WSO2: API Management and User Authentication and Authorization Automation, Ismail Seyfi, Lead Software Architect, iJET International and Matt Barnes, Automation and Software Engineer, iJET International
  4. Enhancing Customer Experience with WSO2 Identity Server, Manoj Thirutheri, Director, SaaS and Tools Engineering, Nutanix
  5. Providing a Pathway from Stovepipe Systems to a Secure SOA Enterprise, Neil Custer, Senior Enterprise Systems Engineer, Eagle TG
  6. Rise to the Challenge with WSO2 Identity Server and WSO2 API Manager, Stefan Smeets, Enterprise Architect & Unit Manager, RealDolmen
  7. Journey of Migration from Legacy ESB to Modern WSO2 ESB Platform, Michael Enos, Senior Director, Techsoup and Ratnavel Sundaramurthi, Integration Architect, Aspire Systems
  8. Integrating Systems for University of Exeter Using Zero and the WSO2 Platform, Jack A. Rider, CTO, Chakray

We even had a session through Skype on Managing Verifone’s New Payment Device “Carbon” with WSO2’s EMM by Ulrich Herberg, a senior Java architect at Verifone, who couldn’t be physically present at the venue!

For the unconference sessions, Sameera had to get back on stage to do more Ballerina demos for the eager crowd. They just couldn’t get enough of it!

The attendees gathered in the main hall once again to listen to the last few keynotes of the conference.

Catheryn Nicholson, an engineer, entrepreneur, mother, and former U.S. Naval Officer, who is also the Founder of BlockCypher gave the first engrossing keynote on blockchain’s digital disruption and why developers, startups, corporations, academic institutions, and governments are all examining what blockchain technology can solve.

After exploring the past and present of blockchain technology and how it may influence your business, Catheryn made quite an exciting reveal on the future of blockchain and cryptocurrency. A group of open source developers with Harry Potter pseudonyms are currently developing a protocol (called Mimblewimble), which is still largely theoretical but has a lot of potential to solve a number of the clunkiness issues that bitcoin has. She predicts that the project will come out this year. So make sure to keep an eye out for that!

WSO2 Vice President of Solutions Architecture Asanka Abeysinghe, gave the closing keynote on a pragmatic approach to digital transformation through iterative architecture. He spoke of his experience as a consultant and evangelist of digital transformation and examined how to overcome technical and non-technical barriers to your vision by thinking big and acting small.

Before the final adieu, we made sure to recognize customers who have been with us for the past ten (of our eleven) years. Sanjiva presented Ron Murphy from eBay, Jey Bala from Kaiser Permanente, Prakash Iyer from Trimble, and Concur (who wasn’t able to attend the conference) with a small token of appreciation for taking our first steps with us, and helping us get to where we are today.

Stay tuned for news on our next conference, and hope to see you there soon!

Undefined