WSO2Con is a conference held by WSO2 from September 13th to 15th 2011 (for more details, see event report). FOSS User Magazine had an interview with the CEO of WSO2 to find out more about this event.
By Ramindu Deshapriya
Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, the Founder and CEO of WSO2, is one of the most widely-celebrated Sri Lankan personalities in the IT world. He is known as an innovator who changed the face of how the businesses use the World Wide Web today.
Dr. Sanjiva founded WSO2 after having spent nearly 8 years in IBM Research, where he was one of the founders of the Web services platform. During that time, he co-authored many Web services specifications including WSDL, BPEL4WS, WS-Addressing, WS-RF and WS-Eventing. In recognition for his company-wide technical leadership, Dr. Sanjiva was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology in 2003.
Dr. Sanjiva has been involved with open source for many years. Dr. Sanjiva was the original creator of Apache SOAP and has been part of Apache Axis, Apache Axis2 and most Apache Web services projects. He is a member of the Apache Software Foundation.
In 2003, Dr. Sanjiva founded the Lanka Software Foundation, a non-profit organization formed with the objective of promoting Open Source development, not usage, by Sri Lankan developers. He is currently its Chief Scientist and a Director. LSF’s success stories include many Apache Web services projects and Sahana, the predominant disaster management system in the world.
In recognition of Dr. Sanjiva’s role in promoting Open Source participation from developing countries, Dr. Sanjiva was elected to the Board of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) in April 2005, where he served for 2 years.
Dr. Sanjiva also teaches and guides student projects part-time in the Computer Science & Engineering department of the University of Moratuwa. He’s a member of the Faculty of Engineering Industry Consultative Board of the university.
Prior to joining IBM, Dr. Sanjiva spent 3 years at Purdue University as visiting faculty, where he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1994.
1. Could you give us an overview of WSO2 and what you do?
WSO2 is an enterprise middleware company. What that means is that we’re a product company and we build tools that are used by other people to build enterprise middleware applications. We offer a high degree of security, a high degree of reliability and a high degree of integration to already existing systems and web services as well as data stores. We don’t expect our products to be used just by a bunch of people, but by other applications in the future as well.
We started off with a few products, and our mission was to understand what enterprise middleware needs to be, and to create and orthogonal basis for middleware. Eventually we want to make it a perfect basis. Everything we do could be done using tools from IBM, Oracle, JBoss or Microsoft. But we have approached the problem in a different way; we’ve approached it in a way of looking at the whole space and trying to create a basis for it. Most other vendors simply have created a product and then bought other products continuously and added them to their platforms. The advantage of our approach is that we have ended up with a clean architecture that is a basis, which would mean that we have created a path towards getting towards perfect middleware. Another big difference that we have from our competitors is that we give away our products for free, under an Open Source license. This is based on our belief that the Open Source methodology of development is better and results in better software, keeps us honest, and all of our conversations are public, so that everyone knows what we’re doing.
On the topic of the history of WSO2, we started in August 2005, so we’re 6 years old now, and we started with the idea of building this set of products. Of course when we started, we couldn’t build all of them, so we started with a couple of products first; the Application Sever, the Enterprise Service Bus, and the Business Process Server. While doing this, we realized that we needed to create a core component platform. So after a couple of years, we broke all our products in to pieces and re-built them in a component manner. That’s how we came up with the Carbon platform that we build everything on. Carbon is a modular set of components that you can wire together to form a product very easily, and the first version of Carbon was released in February, 2009. We have a large set of customers: eBay is our highest volume customers with over a billion messages a day, and we have customers all over the world such as in the US, in Austrailia and Europe. We have Sri Lankan customers too: Odel has a mobile Point-Of-Sale system that utilizes WSO2 software on the back end. John Keels outlets aggregate daily settlements using our software and ICTA has utilized WSO2 software on the back end to build Lanka Gate.
2. What was the motivation behind organizing WSO2Con?
The primary motivation was to highlight our technology and the adoption of the technology. Last year at WSO2Con (which was the first time we held the event), we had WSO2 people talking about our technology. This time, we had an open call for papers for users and customers to submit talks. As a result, we have 23 people coming in from outside to give talks on how they have used WSO2 software. We also have 20 WSO2 people talking about software, so the conference has turned in to a two-track affair, with the talks being divided in to two tracks, excluding keynotes. Our objective through this is to give the attendees a general understanding of the platform that WSO2 builds, how people are using it, and what it's good for.
3. You organized WSO2Con last year (2010) as well. What were the challenges you faced that time?
The main problem is getting the right audience; there are so many conferences and events in Sri Lanka as well, and when you look at a potential audience member, they have so many choices and it takes a lot of effort to get them to find the right place to come to. Second, we want this to be an international conference, and the economy of the world has deteriorated in the past few years, so it's very hard for people from overseas to convince their companies to allow them to travel to Sri Lanka and attend WSO2Con.
4. So who are the exact target audience for WSO2Con?
Since the content is rather technical, the target audience are developers to architects to IT managers, in short, a technical audience including students.
5. What is the outcome you expect from WSO2Con?
Part of the outcome we want is to build up the brand for WSO2, as you know, branding is a long-term process, and this is another step of that. We want to get all the great case studies from our customers, and hey, if we get a few new customers out of this, we're not going to complain.
6. What is the potential you see for organizing big, international level conferences in Sri Lanka?
I think that Sri Lanka, as a country, doesn't have a reputation for offering high-end technical events. We get a lot of technical events, but they are different from what you get in the US. We'll run WSO2Con next year in the US, or maybe somewhere in Europe, but the structure and content would be the same as what we're doing in Sri Lanka this year.Last year, the New York Times and National Geographic rated Sri Lanka 1st and 2nd respectively in international travel destinations. That's a very good, positive thing. However, we are exactly on the other side of the world from the US, so traveling here from the US is a very tough thing. So it takes serious commitment to come here for a conference of 3 days, which would take 3 additional days of travel. Of course for other countries it wouldn't be much of a problem.
It's going to take time to get the audience in Sri Lanka accustomed to how a conference should function as well. One of the key things about going to a conference isn't about just listening to the speakers, it's about meeting other people, talking to them, learning from them, and networking. In another country, when you go to a conference, you'll be staying at the hotel and basically living at the conference. However, in Sri Lanka, when you have a conference in Colombo, most of the attendees are from Colombo, so they'd go home as soon as the formal agenda for the conference is over each day. I really want to have a big technical conference in Sri Lanka out of Colombo. Of course that changes the cost involved, but we'll see.
So for Sri Lanka to become a destination for high-end technical conference, it's going to take some more time. India, on the other hand, has a better reputation than Sri Lanka as a conference destination.
7. Any final thoughts you'd like to share on WSO2Con?
We aren't anywhere close to breaking even on this in terms of cost, but we knew that and planned for that beforehand. There were a lot of requests for student registrations as well, but we had to set up a process to filter and limit the amount of student registrations. However, we're streaming the entire conference over the web, so anyone can watch.
The key part of any conference is about networking with new people and learning something. You don't leave after tea or after lunch, but you should leave each day empassioned with something after meeting new people and having fun. Even more than getting new customers, that is what I want as the outcome of WSO2Con. At WSO2Con, people should be able to learn, make new friends, and have a good time.
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