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WSO2, Power to You!

24 June 2014

I have just returned from the WSO2Con Europe in Barcelona and went open-minded and not with my usual scepticism. What surprised me was whilst WSO2 built an industrial grade Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), they profess that they do not provide solutions but a “philosophy”.  This philosophy is all about providing solutions for today’s problems all the while allowing customers to plan for the future. WSO2 not only provide an ESB, but over 20 products in their portfolio borne out of the Apache framework.

Included in the WSO2 product suite is an API Manager (a powerful tool that manages versions of APIs – providing innovation for enhancing APIs whilst managing existing versions, eventually allowing older versions to become deprecated). WSO2 offer tools such as App Store, where developers can publish their middleware applications into a store for future reuse.  Message Brokering is covered to provide thousands, nay millions, in fact billions of messages per day (eBay running with WSO2 process 4 billion+ transactions on a quiet day!). The Big Data box is ticked with their Complex Event Processor and Business Activity Monitor allowing Data Scientists to drool over all that data passing through the Enterprise Middleware.

To declare Identity as hot right now is a bit of an understatement! At SLA Mobile we are currently working with leading MNO’s, helping them to expose and extract value from their identity relationships with their subscribers. MNOs are becoming Identity providers in their own right, allowing single-sign federated ID for the vast amount of their offerings (for example Vodafone Red Safe & Secure applications such as Cloud, Content and Protect) and also other 3rd Party applications such as social media, cloud email etc. WSO2 are not just adopting Identity but blazing the trail with OpenIDConnect – the technology used by Facebook and the like for Federated Identity.

Fancy virtualising your Data Centre – then don’t worry, they have that covered too with their Private PaaS that can run on-premise, in a private or public cloud. In fact there are 20 products in the WSO2 suite, but here is the kicker – they are all Open Source (no gimmicks with dual licensing), cost effective support models and all from a single code base!

At WSO2Con Europe there were several exciting presentations around “Connected Devices”. Cars, household appliances, doctor/patients, etc. – the opportunity to connect “Internet of Things” (IoT) is unlimited!  In fact I did hear someone mention “Internet of People” in the case of patient’s information being shared with doctors, hospitals and even pharmaceutical companies. The mobile network operators are crucial in this arena since they can provide the central access point to utilise the connected devices: imagine driving home and your smartphone contacts your home heating to switch on 20 minutes before arriving home! No need to put the thermostat on a timer and risk arriving home late to house that has been burning fuel unnecessarily earlier in the day.

My impression is that WSO2 are an organisation of technology evangelists, which is great in appealing to the techies in customer organisations in a bottom up manner but the challenge, is convincing Senior Management who have invested heavily in proprietary solutions with large licensing and support costs. We are seeing a greater adoption of Open Source in the large organisations, which paves the way for visionaries such as WSO2 to break the stronghold of the traditional leaders in the space.

SLA Mobile are a trusted partner of WSO2 and can help you with making the right decision, deploying and integrating now and getting ready for the next big thing…


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