WSO2

History

WSO2 was founded by Sanjiva Weerawarana and Paul Fremantle in August, 2005, and has been backed by investment from Intel Capital, Toba Capital, Pacific Controls and others. As of 2015, WSO2 has offices in USA (Mountain View, CA; Bloomington, IN), UK (London) and Sri Lanka (Colombo), with the bulk of its research and operations being conducted from its main office in Palm Grove, Colombo. The company rose to prominence after eBay revealed that a key element of their transaction processing software used the open source WSO2 ESB.

WSO2 products are released under the Apache License Version 2. Like the Apache project itself, WSO2 follows open development principles and airs architecture and development discussions public mailing lists. The company is noted by Gartner as being one of the leading competitors in the application infrastructure market.

WSO2 was set up by Sanjiva Weerawarana, an IBM researcher who was one of the founders of the Web services platform. Sanjiva led the creation of IBM SOAP4J, which later became Apache SOAP, and went to architect other notable projects, including Apache Axis, Apache WSIF, the IBM Web Services Gateway and IBM BPWS4J. He was joined by Paul Fremantle, one of the authors of IBM's Web Services Invocation Framework and the Web Services Gateway. Paul, an Apache member since the original Apache SOAP project, oversaw the donation of WSIF and WSDL4J to Apache and led IBM's involvement in the Axis C/C++ project. He became WSO2's CTO in 2008. Paul was subsequently named one of Infoworld's Top 25 CTOs in 2008.

WSO2's first product was code-named Tungsten, and was meant for the development of web applications. Tungsten was followed by WSO2 Titanium, which would later become WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus. In 2006, Intel Capital invested $4 million in WSO2 (Intel would continue to invest over the years). In 2010, Godel Technologies also invested in WSO2 for an unspecified amount, and in 2012 they raised a third round of $10 million. Official WSO2 records point to this being from Toba Capital, Cisco and Intel Capital. In August, 2015, a funding round led by Pacific Controls and Toba raised another $20 million.

A subsidiary, WSO2Mobile, was launched in 2013, with Harsha Purasinghe of Microimage as the CEO and co-founder. In March 2015, WSO2.Telco was launched in partnership with Malaysian telecommunications company Axiata with Axiata holding a majority stake in the venture. WSO2Mobile has since been re-absorbed into its parent company.

Historically, WSO2 has had a close connection to the Apache community, with a significant portion of their products based on or contributing to the Apache product stack. Likewise, many of WSO2's top leadership have contributed to Apache projects. In 2013, WSO2 donated its Stratos project to Apache.

Products

WSO2 products make heavy use of Java technology and are built on top of Carbon, the company's SOA middleware platform. Carbon makes use of Apache Axis2 and encapsulates SOA functionality such as data services, business process management, ESB routing/transformation, rules, security, throttling, caching, logging and monitoring. WSO2 products are built on top of this platform.

In June 2015, WSO2 announced software as a service versions of its open-source products.