WSO2: “Technology Platforms that Serve Business Should be Invisible to Business”

WSO2 is a software company founded in 2005 by Sanjiva Weerawarana. The company specialises in creating open source API management and integration solutions, and has had a significant impact on the way organisations manage their API ecosystems.

Even back then, Weerawarana was a well-known software developer and open-source advocate who had worked at IBM developing web services technologies. At that time, IBM was not exactly a company that was strongly committed to open source, but rather the opposite. This was not a wise decision, as evidenced by the acquisition of Red Hat years later.

So Weerawarana decided to found his own company and develop an open-source web services platform (WSO2 Web Services Framework, WSF) that would allow companies to implement and manage these types of services more easily.

Later, in 2011, WSO2 launched Enterprise Service BUS (ESB), an integration tool that became one of the company’s most popular products, followed a year later by API Manager, a platform for creating, publishing and managing APIs.

This product marked an important milestone for the company and positioned it as a major player in the API management market. It also allowed the company to start expanding globally. From Sri Lanka (Weerawarana’s home country and WSO2’s headquarters) it leaped to the United States and Europe to reach a larger number of customers.

In the years that followed, the company also expanded its portfolio with the launch of WSO2 Identity Server and WSO2 Analytics, creating an ecosystem of integrated solutions for API management, integration and security.

In 2021, with the explosion of hybrid and multi-cloud, WSO2 announced the availability of API Manager 4.0, an enhanced version of its API Manager with advanced capabilities for managing microservices and APIs in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It also made available WSO2 Choreo, a continuous integration platform as a service to improve the efficiency of the lifecycle of today’s critical components: microservices and APIs.

This year, the company has announced its decision to choose Madrid as its European headquarters, which is why this columnist had the opportunity to interview Sanjiva Weerawarana, CEO and Head of Product at WSO2, to find out more about this move and the strategy of this software provider, as well as the recent acquisition of WSO2 by the venture capital firm EQT.

Weerawarana is indeed the company’s global CEO, but he is also responsible for the products they develop, two roles that would normally be difficult for the same person to take on, but which he handles naturally.

In fact, he prefers to focus on the processes of developing and building the products they offer: “The usual thing is that a CEO leads the implementation of a lot of business policies and processes, but I don’t want to be there. I don’t like to be too involved in sales either. Obviously, when a customer wants to have a meeting I am always available, also to support the sales teams, but I have always wanted to be closer to the development of our products. That’s what I spend most of my time on.

Open source is in WSO2’s DNA

In these development processes, the open source model plays a key role for the manager. In his words, using open source was the only way for a small Sri Lankan-based company to compete with the big software developers by building good products.

“We have always stuck to the open source rules because I believe in them strongly. I believe in a model and principles that can also be converted into revenue through services and subscriptions,” he said, referring to the fact that his software is available for download without payment but can be monetised through subscriptions that bring security and commitment to businesses: “We will never move away from the open source model.

Moreover, he explained how important it is for companies to know what code they are running at all times, which is not the case with proprietary software: “For example, we have many customers in the public sector and government who want to know what is running and we give them the freedom to change what they want. This freedom is impossible when you use proprietary software.

Today, there is no longer a need to explain the benefits of open source. It is a model that allows you to innovate and also to detect improvements or problems much more quickly. Meanwhile, the business or monetisation model also became clear years ago by making use of value-added services, support and subscriptions.

New phase after EQT buyout

This was the understanding of the venture capital firm EQT, which in May this year acquired WSO2 for just over $600 million. When asked about this important move, Weerawarana stated that the main reason is to continue to grow as a company, to ensure product development and to increase the value of the technology they offer: “We have set a goal of quadrupling our revenues in the next five years and we want to achieve that. Having an investor as strong as EQT will enhance our capabilities and confirms that our commitment to open source was the right one.

This growth will not only be organic but could also come about through additional acquisitions of companies, as WSO2’s CEO told us.

Spain, the company’s headquarters in the European region

We recently received the news that WSO2 has chosen Madrid as its European headquarters, a decision taken after the UK’s Brexit. This move will mean a significant investment by the company in terms of employment and distribution of its solutions in the old continent, as Weerawarana said: “Spain has a strong economy and we already have several well-established customers through our ecosystem, so we have chosen Madrid to deploy our business throughout the continent”.

Another reason for this choice is the qualified talent they are finding, young people eager to develop their technology careers in our country. In this sense, the CEO of WSO2 pointed to the importance of returning to the office and reducing remote work as much as possible: “Last year we decided to return to the office. If someone works remotely, which is possible, they are not going to experience the same kind of personal satisfaction and enrichment as if they are in the office, where you can develop more social interaction that you don’t get in remote work”.

When it comes to recruiting new professionals who for some reason are not close to their offices, he said, “We will solve it somehow. Europe is a very large region and has a multilingual market culture, so these decisions can be made by the general manager in each region.

WSO2’s objective at its Madrid headquarters is to hire around 50 people in the medium term, although this will depend on business development over the coming months.

Platformless, WSO2’s vision for a simpler ICT world

In recent times, the message has become fashionable that all companies are software companies: technology must be at the service of business to improve business and increase revenues. This means investing heavily in IT departments and development teams to achieve this, something that not all companies can do, especially those that are not large corporations.

It is a problem that Weerawarana brought to the table during the WSO2CON USA 2024 conference. When asked by this writer about his intervention under the title “It’s time to go Platformless”, the CEO of the company explained that, in practice, the philosophy of being a software company implies maintaining significant resources to write code, deploy it, test it, manage the infrastructure… something that is not easily sustainable for those companies that are not dedicated to technology, but whose business is in any other sector: “It doesn’t make sense for a company in the food sector, retail sector or insurance sector to spend so many resources on making software, making it efficient, reusable, scalable, secure and resilient… They should not focus on this, they should focus on their business.”

The Platformless concept proposed by the executive is an extension or an evolution of what microservices and APIs have meant. Esencially, it is about developing a business using a modular ecosystem where the managers of these companies can easily select the components they need without needing to see what is “underneath” at a technical level: “It’s like connecting to a wireless network with our mobile device. We don’t need to know what’s going on internally on that network, we just want to be connected to communicate.

With the Platformless philosophy, companies don’t have to pay so much attention to certain processes or architectures: everything is already designed to work without the need to dedicate large resources because there are already specialised companies – such as WSO2 – that are dedicated to this so that they are “invisible” processes.

Weerawarana offers the example of WSO2 Identity Server, one of its most successful products today for Identity and Access Management (IAM), which makes it easy for organisations to access services with multi-factor authentication in a secure, efficient and monitored way without companies having to invest in such a large and complex system. “All they have to do is connect their services to this server and forget about the rest and focus on what really matters – their business.