¡Hola new WSO2 Partners

Posted on October 23, 2012 by Jonathan Marsh

What do the companies GFI Spain, Ibertech, LightHouse Technology and Services, Open Sistemas, TCP Sistemas, and Ubiquando have in common? Other than being instrumental in delivering localized best-in-class IT solutions using WSO2’s 100% open source middleware in Spain and Latin America, they are all now official WSO2 partners!

We are honored to partner with these premier innovators in the Spanish and Latin American markets in delivering proven SOA and integration solutions tailored to meet the requirements of enterprises in these regions. We are seeing strong investments in agile IT across Spain and Latin America, which is being matched by a rapid increase in demand for our open source WSO2 Carbon and WSO2 Stratos platforms.

These companies will use WSO2’s middleware along with their own software to provide customers with SOA and application integration solutions that can be deployed either on-premise or in the cloud. We’ll be happy to help you engage with any of our partners for your next project. 

For more details on these partners and more check out the WSO2 Partners page on our website.

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Vote WSO2 Customer, AAA Mid-Atlantic for SuperNova Award

Posted on October 11, 2012 by Hasmin AbdulCader

We are thrilled that AAA Mid-Atlantic has been recognized by the SuperNova awards for its innovative Auto Buying Tools app, which lets AAA members research, price and even purchase vehicles from their mobile phones.

Powered by  WSO2 Carbon middleware the Auto Buying Tools app integrates with vehicle information providers and applies the different rules, policies and promotions specific to each of the 41 AAA clubs serving a total of 53 million members in the United States.

The public vote accounts for 70% of the score that determines the winners in each category. Do join us in supporting AAA Mid-Atlantic by voting for this innovative project at constellationrg.com/cast-your-vote-2012-supernova-awards.

Learn more about the Auto Buying Tools app and WSO2 middleware in this WSO2 case study on-demand webinar with AAA Mid-Atlantic conducted earlier this year.

- Hasmin AbdulCader, Director of Communications, WSO2

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WSO2Con 2013 CFP now open

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Hasmin AbdulCader

It might be a bit of a challenge to get an elephant to cross London Bridge but WSO2Con will be just as exciting in 2013 as it has been in the past few years!

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Our annual user conference takes place February 12 – 14, in London, UK with a simultaneous live stream event in Colombo, Sri Lanka. With presentations from both cities, interactive Q & A sessions and panel discussions, this year’s agenda hopes to provide an excellent opportunity to explore WSO2 products, learn how others are using WSO2 middleware and connect with peers and experts.

Call for papers is now open with an extended deadline of October 14, 2012. We invite you to submit a talk on any topic related to using WSO2 products for integration, SOA, API, mobile, data and analytics, application development, governance, business services, cloud computing, and REST. If you don’t see your particular area covered in this list, do send in your proposals anyway. We would love to hear your unique WSO2 case study or experience.

For more details and updates on WSO2Con 2013 you can follow us on twitter, like us on Facebook or keep an eye on the event website.

Posted in News, WSO2Con | Tagged WSO2Con | Leave a comment

WSO2 products’ summer release round-up

Posted on September 28, 2012 by Hasmin AbdulCader

Couple of weeks ago, CTO Paul Fremantle and Tech Evangelist Chris Haddad, conducted a webinar on the innovative advancements of the WSO2 Carbon middleware and WSO2 Stratos cloud platforms. Here are some highlights from their presentation

  • WSO2 Carbon core 4.0 released with many improvement and new features
    • Enhanced Deployment Synchronizer
    • Deployment performance improvements
    • Managements and worker node separation
    • JDK 1.7 support
    • Better integration with Tomcat 7
    • Upgrading Equinox SDK (OSGI Runtime) to v3.7
    • P2 Repository: Features grouped by product
    • Multi Tenancy in Carbon
“The Carbon platform is your reconfigurable modular middleware. Recently we’ve seen lots more customers actually wanting to de-couple different parts of a product to vertically scale while at the same time horizontally scaling. This capability is proving to be a major benefit of the Carbon platform.”
– Paul Fremantle  
  • WSO2 Carbon products available now based on v4
    • WSO2 API Manager 1.0
    • WSO2 Application Server 5.0
    • WSO2 ESB 4.5
    • WSO2 Governance Registry 4.5
    • WSO2 Business Activity Monitor 2.0
    • WSO2 Elastic Load Balancer 2.0
“We are rapidly evolving all of our products simultaneously on top of single cohesive code base. This is unparalleled in the industry to have such coordinated releases on a single platform.”
– Chris Haddad
  • WSO2 Stratos 2.0 Platform as a Service will include
    • Support for multiple languages and runtimes
    • Support for more IaaS providers (vmWare, EC2, OpenStack, CloudStack, Rackspace etc.) via Jcloud
    • Enhanced manageability
“We are embracing a heterogeneous environment were you can run PHP in the cloud environment and take advantage of the rich set of PaaS foundation services that Stratos offers. Also you can plug-in any application server or asynchronous  server and cloud-ify  the application environment by having an mechanism that ties back into the pass foundation and Startos controller services.”
– Chris Haddad
“The key differentiator for Startos is its inherent multi-tenancy. There are other PaaS offering that have the polyglot language support but what they don’t have is the concept and modeling of multi-tenancy. That plus the richness of the set of Stratos services that the cartridges have available to you make us really stand out.”
– Paul Fremantle

You can watch the full recording of the webinar here: wso2.org/library/webinars/2012/09/wso2-carbon-wso2-stratos-summer-release-roundup

 - Hasmin AbdulCader, Director, Communications

Posted in Carbon, Cloud, News | Tagged WSO2 API Manager, WSO2 Application Server, WSO2 Business Activity Monitor, WSO2 Carbon, WSO2 Elastic Load Balancer, WSO2 ESB, WSO2 Governance Registry, WSO2 Stratos | Leave a comment

Re-invigorate your SOA initiative with internal API service adoption

Posted on September 4, 2012 by Chris

You’ve heard the benefits of managed APIs when enterprises extend their data, processes and services out to customers and partners via APIs. Consumer self-service, automated key management, and monetization opportunities are just a few of them. 
But have your considered API management as a strategic component within your SOA initiatives?
Ten years after the rise of SOA, many enterprises have identified and published services as shared assets, however teams and partners often continue to invest considerable time and resources when building new solutions.  Many teams experience rapid portfolio proliferation and sprawl, but not enhanced portfolio efficiency or business agility.  Achieving business agility requires the growth of development partnerships and interactions, which should span both internal and external teams.
The WSO2 API Manager enables your internal development teams to extend data, processes and services across projects, departments, or divisions. Using WSO2 API Manager, your teams will be able to:

  • Establish their own API marketplace and promote APIs
  • Manage the API across lifecycle phases and enforce API Governance best practices
  • Use the API Store and OAuth 2.0 key model to self-subscribe applications, authorize subscribed applications, and provide a self-service key management and revocation environment.
  • Deploy a composable and componentized platform architecture enabling extreme scalability, flexible deployment configuration, and feature expansion.

To learn more about  internal API services adoption download the recently published white paper -  “Promoting service reuse within your enterprise and maximizing SOA success”

If you still need help to get going, consider our special APIStart package. 

 - Chris Haddad, WSO2 Technology Evangelist

Posted in API | Tagged API Managerment, whitepaper | Leave a comment

API Management: the missing link for SOA success

Posted on August 31, 2012 by Sanjiva Weerawarana

[This post first appeared on my blog at sanjiva.weerawarana.org/2012/08/api-management-missing-link-for-soa.html.]

Nearly 2 years ago I tweeted:
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Well, unfortunately, I had it a bit wrong.

APIs and service do have a very direct and 1-1 relationship: an API is the interface of a service. However, what is different is that one’s about the implementation and is focused on the provider, and the other is about using the functionality and is focused on the consumer. The service of course is what matters to the provider and API is what matters to the consumer.

So its clearly more than just a new name.

Services: If you build it will they come?

One of the most common anti-patterns of SOA is the one service – one client pattern. That’s when the developer who wrote the service also wrote its only client. In that case there’s no sharing, no common data, no common authentication and no reuse of any kind. The number one reason for SOA (improving productivity by reusing functionality as services) is gone. Its simply client-server at the cost of having to use interoperable formats like XML, JSON, XML Schema, WSDL and SOAP. 

There are two primary reasons for this pattern being so prevalent: first is due to a management failure whereby everyone is required to create services for whatever they do because that’s the new “blessed way”. There’s no architectural vision driving proper factoring. Instead its each person or at least each team for themselves. The resulting services are only really usable for that one scenario – so no wonder no one else uses them!

Writing services that can service many users requires careful design and thinking and willingness to invest in the common good. That’s against human intuition and something that will happen only if its properly guided and incentivized. The cost of writing common services must be paid by someone and will not happen by itself.

That’s in effect the second reason why this anti-pattern exists: the infrastructure in place for SOA does not support or encourage reuse. Even if you had a service that is reusable how do you find out how well it works? How do you know how many people are using it? Do you know what time of day they use it most? Do you know which operations of your service get hit the hardest? Next, how do others even find out you wrote a service and it may do what they need? 

SOA Governance (for which WSO2 has an excellent product: WSO2 Governance Registry) is not focused on encouraging service reuse but rather on governing the creation and management of services. The SOA world has lacked a solution for making it easy to help people discover available services and to manage and monitor their consumption. 

API Management

What’s an API? Its the interface to a service. Simple. In other words, if you don’t have any services, you have no APIs to expose and manage.

API Management is about managing the entire lifecycle of APIs. This involves someone who publishes the interface of a service into a store of some kind. Next it involves developers who browse the store to find APIs they care about and get access to them (typically by acquiring an access token of some sort) and then the developers using those keys to program accesses to the service via its interface.

Why is this important? In my opinion, API Management is to SOA what Amazon EC2 is to Virtualization. Of course virtualization has been around for a long time, but EC2 changed the game by making it trivially simple for someone to get a VM. It brought self service, serendipitous consumption, and elasticity to virtualization. Similarly, API Management brings self service & serendipitous consumption by allowing developers to discover, try and use services without requiring any type of “management approval”. It allows consumers to not have to worry about scaling – they just indicate the desired SLA (typically in the form of a subscription plan) and its up to the provider to make it work right. 

API Management & SOA are married at the hip

If you have an SOA strategy in your organization but don’t have an API Management plan then you are doomed to failure. Notice that I didn’t even talk about externally exposing APIs- even internal service consumption should be managed through an API Management system so that everyone has clear visibility into who’s using what service and how much is used when. Its patently obvious why external exposition of services requires API Management.

Chris Haddad, WSO2′s VP of Technology Evangelism, recently wrote a superb whitepaper that discusses and explain the connection between SOA and API Management. Check out Promoting service reuse within your enterprise and maximizing SOA success and I can guarantee you will leave enlightened.

In May this year, a blog on highscalability.com talked about how “Startups Are Creating A New System Of The World For IT”. In that the author talked about open source as the foundation of this new system and SOA as the load bearing walls of the new IT landscape. I will take it to the next level and say that API Management is the roof of the new IT house.

WSO2 API Manager

We recently introduced an API Management product: WSO2 API Manager. This product comes with an application for API Providers to create and manage APIs, a store application for API Developers to discover and consume APIs and a gateway to route API traffic through. Of course all parts of the product can be scaled horizontally to deal with massive loads. The WSO2 API Manager can be deployed either for internal consumption, external consumption or both. As with any other WSO2 product, this too is 100% open source. After you read Chris’ whitepaper download this product and sit it next to your SOA infrastructure (whether its from us or not) and see what happens!

Sanjiva Weerawarana, WSO2 co-founder and CEO
Sanjiva’s blog: sanjiva.weerawarana.org

Posted in API, API Management, SOA | Tagged WSO2 API Manager | Leave a comment

“Celebrating 7” with pictures

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Hasmin AbdulCader

I joined WSO2 in the same year it was founded, way back in 2005. Here’s my top 7 of what makes WSO2 cool – in pictures from the last 7 years.

1. Hard working people

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2. Getting well deserved recognition

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3. Growing from strength to strength

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4. Equal Opportunities

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5. Beyond the office walls and computer screens

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6. Not forgetting the less fortunate

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7. Fun above all else spacer  

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Feel free to post a blog and tweet #mywso2top7 with your top 7 of what WSO2 means to you.

Posted in News, Team, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

"Celebrating 7" as seen by interns

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Hasmin AbdulCader

From the veterans of WSO2 to the newbies…this week we have a top 7 list from our current group of interns at the Colombo office for our ongoing campaign of celebrating 7 years of WSO2. Every year WSO2 trains many interns from the local universities who eventually end up most often working for us too once they graduate.

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Flat Structure – It is flat as it can ever be. A simple example – at WSO2Con 2011(Where we participated as students) Sanjiva came to the conference room in the middle of a speech. For a seat he had to go through the hall. Instead he sat on the ground while 100s of other employees were sitting in chairs nearby. Then instead of giving a chair to their CEO, one employee took a photo of him to upload to twitter. Nothing else is required to explain how flat the structure is. And truly that is one of the reasons why we choose WSO2 for our internship.

2.

Open Culture – Things are pretty cool at WSO2. We can speak and ask help from anyone and they are always ready to help. That is a great advantage for us as we get the chance to talk and work with tycoons of the tech world. Its just amazing.

3.

Motivational working environment – We can see, that everyone is engaged in their assigned tasks very eagerly. They are driven by their own control and power. Administration operates in such a way (no micro management) that employees truly get the feeling that this is our company.This gives an environment for passionate workers to give their maximum and creative output towards the company.

4.

Guidance in learning environment – Mentors are always helpful and willing to guide us in the correct path. So we have a great learning environment as interns.

5.

The way employees are treated – When a company concentrates too much on the end outcome it has to force its employees and get the work done. At WSO2 however we see that employees are highly appreciated and this results in awesome outcomes.

6.

Smiling Faces – All the employees here are friendly and we are always greeted with friendly smiles making WSO2 a pleasant place to work.

7.

Fun – Having fun while working rather than just working. Occasional laughter is pretty often at WSO2 and Table Tennis, Carom boards and Foosball table will never have a break at lunch and tea times.

- WSO2 Inters 2012: Tishan, Ishara, Pulasthi, Denuwanthi, Thilini, Andun, Harsha, Sameera, Sammera, Sachini, Hasintha, Lasindu, Malinga, Nipuni, Chaamini, Prabath, Isuru, Sajini, Kanarupan, Rajith, Ishan, Buddhima, Hareesan, Sagara, Tharindu

Feel free to post a blog and tweet #mywso2top7 with your top 7 of what WSO2 means to you.

Posted in News, Team, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

“Celebrating 7” continues with CTO, Paul

Posted on August 13, 2012 by Hasmin AbdulCader

On our ongoing campaign of celebrating 7 years of WSO2, we have CTO, Paul Fremantle’s top 7 of what makes WSO2 great.

 

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1.

Our openness – we started open and seven years later we are more open than when we started! Since we started we moved our architecture mailing list out into the public, we do all our development discussion and bug tracking, builds and more in the open. It makes it much easier to collaborate. Of course we still have private bug trackers and email for managing customer information.

 

2.

Our culture – play hard and work hard. Each year we publish around 50 product releases and many service releases, together with marketing, PR, support and everything else a product takes, and yet we still find time to organize inter-house basketball matches, athletic meets, and even a car rally around Colombo.

3.

Our products – are AMAZING!

4.

Our people – we have so many talented people and its simply a pleasure to work with so many bright, dedicated and insightful developers, account managers, marketers, and designers.

5.

Our customers – inspire us to do harder, deeper, more impressive technical solutions every day, and make it a challenge and somewhere where I never get bored.

6.

Our vision – we continue to have a vision, that builds off our very first aims, to create a company that makes it easier and more effective to build distributed applications (in the cloud – yeah that is new in the last 7 years!) using a leaner open platform.

7.

Our global nature – we really try to operate as a single company worldwide, and we have done since we started with one person in Asia, one in Europe and one in the US. Now we have people in Spain, Canada, Florida as well as Palo Alto and Colombo.

8.

Our complete inability to stick to the “rules” and be constrained by the existing marketplace!

 

Feel free to post a blog and tweet #mywso2top7 with your top 7 of what WSO2 means to you.

Posted in News, Team | Leave a comm