WSO2

WSO2 LLC is an open-source technology provider founded in 2005. It delivers software and cloud solutions that provide foundational technologies for application development and identity and access management (IAM). This represents an expansion upon its original focus on integrating application programming interfaces (APIs), applications, and web services locally and across the Internet.

In 2024, the company was taken private by EQT's fund, EQT Private Capital Asia.

History

WSO2 was founded by Sanjiva Weerawarana, Paul Fremantle, and Davanum Srinivas in August 2005, backed by Intel Capital, Toba Capital, and Pacific Controls. Weerawarana was an IBM researcher and a founder of the Web services platform. He led the creation of IBM SOAP4J, which later became Apache SOAP, and was the architect of other notable projects. Fremantle was one of the authors of IBM's Web Services Invocation Framework and the Web Services Gateway. An Apache member since the original Apache SOAP project, Fremantle oversaw the donation of WSIF and WSDL4J to Apache and led IBM's involvement in the Axis C/C++ project.

Fremantle was WSO2's chief technology officer (CTO) from 2008-2020, and was named one of ''InfoWorld'''s Top 25 CTOs his first year in the role. Currently, Fremantle serves as a consultant for multiple technology companies, including WSO2. In 2017, Tyler Jewell took over as CEO while Weerawarana focused on the Ballerina open-source project. In 2019, Vinny Smith became the Executive Chairman. Weerawarana returned to the role of CEO in 2020.

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, which held a majority stake in the venture. WSO2Mobile has since been re-absorbed into its parent company.

EQT AB's Asian private fund EQT Private Capital Asia acquired the company for over $600 million in May 2024. The acquisition was completed three months later.

Financial

In 2006, Intel Capital invested $4 million in WSO2, and continued to invest in subsequent years. In 2010, Godel Technologies invested in WSO2 for an unspecified amount, and in 2012 the company 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. In November 2021, WSO2 obtained $90 million in financing from Goldman Sachs Asset Management Private Credit. In May 2022, WSO2 completed its Series E funding with an additional $93 million investment from Info Edge.

Open-source engagement

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.

WSO2 first introduced Ballerina, an open-source, general-purpose concurrent and strongly typed programming language with both textual and graphical syntaxes, optimized for integration in 2017. General availability of Ballerina 1.0 at https://ballerina.io was then announced in 2019. In a March 2023 product review, ''InfoWorld'' rated Ballerina 2201.4.0 (Swan Lake) 4 stars (out of a possible 5).

Products

WSO2 products are released under the Apache License Version 2. Like the Apache project itself, WSO2 follows open development principles and publishes architecture and development discussions.

Early development

WSO2's first product was code-named Tungsten and was meant for the development of web applications. Tungsten was followed by WSO2 Titanium, which later became WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

In February 2009, WSO2 introduced the WSO2 Carbon componentized framework based on the Open Source Gateway Initiative (OSGi), designed to serve as the basis for all WSO2 software products. Version 5.3.0 of the open-source WSO2 Carbon Kernel was released in December 2022 and updated in January 2023.

Current offerings

WSO2 offers a platform of middleware products for agile integration, application programming interface (API) management, and identity and access management.

In June 2015, WSO2 announced its first generation of software as a service (SaaS) versions of its open-source products. As of Q1 2023, products include:
*WSO2 API Manager, a full life cycle API management platform which has incorporated the integration functionality of WSO2 Enterprise Integrator, since version 4.0 was introduced in 2021.
*Choreo, a SaaS internal developer platform to create, deploy, run, and govern APIs, integrations, and microservices on Kubernetes. WSO2 also offers Choreo API Manager and Choreo iPaaS.
*WSO2 Micro Integrator, an integration engine with a low-code graphical designer.
*WSO2 Identity Server, which provides identity management capabilities with a focus on customer identity and access management (CIAM).
*WSO2 Private CIAM Cloud. A cloud-hosted, managed service.
*Asgardeo, an identity as a service (IDaaS) focused on CIAM.

Operations

As of 2023, WSO2 has offices in: Mountain View, California; Austin, Texas; London, UK; São Paulo, Brazil; Sydney, Australia; Munich, Germany; Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Mumbai, India; Singapore, and Colombo, Sri Lanka. The bulk of its research and operations are conducted from its main office in Colombo.

References

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Software companies of Sri Lanka
Software companies of the United States
2005 establishments in California
2024 mergers and acquisitions