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A new generation of digital businesses has emerged with novel products, services, and business models for interacting with consumers, employees and others, which are reshaping the landscape of many industries.
Meanwhile established companies are seeking to engage in digital transformations to remain competitive. WSO2 on Monday debuted the repositioning of its open source products to better address the technology demands of digital businesses. The company also announced product developments designed to bring greater agility to enterprises’ digital transformation initiatives, including:
Repackaging WSO2’s modular software to align with key technology enablers for digital transformation—consolidating more than twenty products into five-plus comprehensive offerings.
Introducing three new public cloud offerings to take advantage of the agility and deployment flexibility enabled by the cloud.
Previewing a next-generation programming language for integration, which was created to support the closer alignment of business with IT in digital businesses.
The announcements were made at two general sessions held on the first day of the WSO2Con USA 2017 user conference, which runs February 20-22, 2017 in San Francisco.
“Already organisations worldwide, from digitally native startups to enterprises driving digital transformations, are standardising on our cloud-enabled, pre-integrated, open source software. And some 2.2 trillion customer transactions per year run through our platform,” observed Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, WSO2 CEO and Chief Architect.
“We’re now building on that success by re-aligning our current products and creating new technology solutions that empower organisations to rapidly evolve their digital business models by fostering agility, adaptability and innovation.”
In his keynote presentation, Dr. Weerawarana examined the three technology enablers for digital transformation: an evolving business model, a focus on the customer, and operational efficiency. He then unveiled how WSO2 has repackaged its product offerings to align with these enablers.
Integration for enabling digital businesses is delivered by WSO2 Enterprise Integrator, debuting today, which builds on and replaces WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (WSO2 ESB). It consolidates WSO2 ESB and other WSO2 Integration Platform capabilities into one software package for seamlessly integrating legacy systems, software as a service (SaaS) apps, services, and APIs. More details can be found in the WSO2 Enterprise Integrator press release dated February 20, 2017.
API management functionality for building internal and external developer ecosystems with API marketplaces is provided by WSO2 API Manager. It combines a consumer-like store where users can find and subscribe to APIs, along with complete API lifecycle governance for publishers and analytics and metrics to support decision-making and enforce service-level agreement (SLA) policies.
Identity and access management (IAM) capabilities for managing identity, security and privacy across the digital business is delivered by WSO2 Identity Server. Its federated approach to identity enables organisations to protect users and assets internally and across digital ecosystems.
Smart analytics for enabling the data-driven decisions of digital businesses and creation of new data products are provided using WSO2 Data Analytics Server (WSO2 DAS). It offers automated real-time monitoring and analysis followed by automated responses, and it can use location and context to enhance the customer experience. Smart analytics are integrated into all WSO2 products and cloud solutions through the WSO2 DAS functionality.
Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile devices become integral to enterprises’ digital businesses through the capabilities of WSO2 IoT Server, which launched in January 2017. It connects and manages all devices, providing the functionality to build an enterprise-grade solution so companies can focus on adding business value.
Cloud solutions from WSO2 empower enterprises with the agility to support their digital business initiatives and rapidly adapt to evolving market conditions. For details, see the WSO2 Cloud press release dated February 20, 2017. The four public cloud solutions include:
Enhanced WSO2 API Cloud based on WSO2 API Manager, in production
New WSO2 Integration Cloud based on comprehensive functionality from the WSO2 Integration Platform, in production
New WSO2 Identity Cloud based on WSO2 Identity Server, in beta
New WSO2 Device Cloud based on WSO2 IoT Server, in beta
Extending across all of WSO2’s offerings, Dr. Weerawarana noted, were a commitment to two forms of agility. First was supporting technology agility with 100% open source software that enables enterprises to control their technical future. Second was adoption agility through the cloud with its pay-as-you-go pricing and ability to outsource technical operations.
WSO2 also uniquely offers deployment flexibility, since the same software runs on-premises, in the cloud, and in hybrid environments. Enterprises can, for example, take their WSO2 software running on-premises and migrate it to the cloud for greater scalability. Conversely, they may choose to run WSO2 software in the cloud for a pilot project and then move it onto the organization’s on-premises servers when going into production.
Working with organisations, the WSO2 team has seen first-hand how the close alignment of IT and business within an enterprise undergoing a digital transformation is driving the need to simplify the ability to reuse, recompose and integrate services. This understanding set the stage for the preview demo of Ballerina that WSO2 provided conference attendees.
A new patent-pending programming language, Ballerina brings a Visual Basic level of simplicity to writing programs that integrate with data sources, services, and network-connected APIs—bridging the gap between technology experts and business professionals. Significantly, Ballerina will serve as the basis for a new generation of digital transformation technology products that WSO2 will begin rolling out this year.
Ballerina features both textual and graphical syntaxes that uniquely offer the exact same expressive capability and are fully reversible. The textual syntax follows the C/Java heritage while also adopting some aspects from Go. The graphical syntax of Ballerina follows a sequence diagram metaphor. There are no weird syntax exceptions, and everything is derived from a few key language concepts. Additionally, Ballerina follows Java and Go to provide a platform-independent programming model that abstracts programmers from machine-specific details.
Ballerina supports high-performance implementations—including the micro-services and micro-integrations increasingly driving digital products—with low latency, low memory and fast start-up. Notably, common integration capabilities are baked into the Ballerina language. These include deep alignment with HTTP, REST, and Swagger; connectors for both web APIs and non-HTTP APIs; and native support for JSON, XML, data tables, and mapping.
Currently in version 0.8, the pre-production Ballerina language is available for developers to start trying out at http://ballerinalang.org.
