daihozen

As announced earlier, the workshop that we (my business partner Rahul Singh and I) organised on "Dead Simple SOA" took place yesterday (Saturday the 8th Dec), and here's what we learnt from it. Fundamentally, the ideas we are trying to popularise are seen as useful and worth pursuing. That was a very welcome piece of validation. However, we do need to refine our message and target our audience better. We got largely positive feedback from the two participants (the low registration rate is itself a symptom of poor messaging and targeting), but also some valuable feedback on how we could improve it. 1. There are two sets of messages in the workshop, and this dilutes its appeal. This is because the draft white paper on which the workshop is based (" Slicing the Gordian Knot of SOA Governance ") itself deals with two separate (though related) themes. One theme is "How to do SOA". This had a number of new and useful ideas that the participants commented fav...

(I write this piece with a bit of trepidation as I don't know how it will be taken, but I mean it with the very best of intentions and wishes for my ex-colleagues.) Looking over the list of my FaceBook friends, I am struck by how many of those I connected with during my brief assignment with WSO2 (Aug-Dec 2011) have moved on to pursue graduate programs of study at US universities. Just like Macquarie Bank in Australia was once called "The Millionaire Factory" for making so many employees rich through bonuses, this little company is rapidly becoming an Intellectuals' Factory. If they succeed in staying in business over the next decade, they will have seeded some very powerful and influential links in academia and the higher levels of the technology world. Which brings me to my main point - does WSO2 have what it takes to survive the next decade? I believe they do, and not just survive but also move up to the next higher level. But to do that requires a kind of thinking...

I've long held that the WSO2 suite of middleware products is one of the industry's best-kept secrets. But just what is it that makes these products so special? Well, if the mere fact that there exists a functionally comprehensive, 100% Open Source middleware suite isn't remarkable enough, there are plenty of other reasons why IT practitioners should take a good look at WSO2's offerings. I have had the opportunity for a few months now to work closely with the company's engineers and play with their products, using them to build (demo) distributed systems, and this is what I have found. There is significant innovation here that is really cool. There may be even more that I haven't discovered yet. 1. OSGi bundles, functionality "features", and the fluid definition of a "product" (WSO2 has no rigid products, although their brochures list about 12. The truth is that they have hundreds of capability bundles that can be combined with a common core t...