WSO2 hosts ‘Open Day’ to celebrate opening of new premises

Friday, 6 December 2013 00:03 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

New office a reflection of vision to become the world’s No. 1 open source middleware provider WSO2 Sri Lanka today hosted officials representing the diplomatic circle, corporate sector, education industry, and the Government sector to an ‘open house’ to showcase its new, state-of-the-art office premises. The prominent glass building, located at No. 20 Palm Grove, Colombo 3, has become a landmark in the city, comprising unique features and facilities that go beyond the norms of Sri Lanka’s corporate culture, and give rise to continuous innovation.

“Our vision is to be the world’s No. 1 middleware provider, and to be able to successfully compete in this space, we need to meet certain standards. And these standards don’t only apply to technical expertise, but also our work culture and how we operate,” says WSO2’s co-founder, chairman, and CEO Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana. Each work floor of the seven-storey building depicts a theme; graffiti, ACM Turing award winners, automotive, nature, computer parts, and space. The themes themselves were selected by the staff via an open voting process that’s used for all decisions in WSO2. The rooftop includes a creche, a basketball court, and a fully-equipped gymnasium for office staff. The ground and mezzanine floors include a lounge/lunch area and recreation facilities. The highlight of the ground floor is a giant fish tank in the lounge/reception area that’s visible from the outside of the building as well. Driven by innovation Weerawarana says, “The openness reflects our extremely transparent culture. This industry is driven by innovation and this has been carried through in how we operate as well by way of providing the right environment to think out of the box.” Each floor theme too is linked to the function of the respective teams that occupy the space; for instance, car and computer parts relate to the engineering teams’ need to constantly ‘tinker with’ and hack on everything; the nature theme reflects the company’s natural and human approach to sales and marketing efforts; graffiti encourages internal support teams to be creative in managing human resource and administration tasks. WSO2 was recently named a visionary in three of Gartner’s Magic Quadrants. The recognition is a testament to WSO2’s dedication and efforts to revolutionise enterprise application development by providing comprehensive, data to screen open source products, that span the entire breadth of service-oriented architecture (SOA), yet remain lean, simple to use and inexpensive. Products built on a common foundation Today, there’s greater focus on enterprise IT because this facilitates change and aids with adapting to change; a key challenge faced by most companies today is the lack of resources to keep pace with the required changes in enterprise development, and WSO2, through its open source middleware, has been able to meet some of these challenges, adds Weerawarana. WSO2’s main advantage is that all of its products are built on a common foundation – WSO2 Carbon, a modular, reconfigurable, elastic, OSGi-based architecture, which in turn ensures a solid base for building large-scale enterprise applications, as well as seamlessly integrating with legacy and existing applications. WSO2 also hosts a variety of events such as webinars, workshops, conferences, and meetups for knowledge sharing and networking around the various open-source SOA and other business communities. The company’s key clients include The Boeing Company, eBay, Cisco Systems US, British Airways, Dialog Axiata PLC, Fidelity Investments, John Keells Holdings PLC, and the Dubai eGovernment.