WSO2 Oxygen Tank

January was an exciting month where we kicked off the year with a Webinar titled “New Decade, New Portal”. The Webinar highlighted our new product the WSO2 Gadget Server which is a new kind of portal that is simpler and more effective. If you missed out, you can still watch a recording of it here . Or even download it right now and give it a spin!

2009 was obviously the year that people started taking Cloud seriously. But before I jump into the Clouds, I want to look at the world of OSGi and SOA. Back in February last year, WSO2 launched our OSGi-based SOA platform Carbon. OSGi allowed us to really modularize our products. What this means is that people are using our WSO2 Carbon platform to run just the components they want using the P2 system. OSGi has also made it more productive for WSO2 to write code: this year we shipped 20 major product releases, including 5 new products (BPS, Gadget Server, BAM, Cloud Services Gateway, and Cloud Services Accelerator), as well as 15 minor releases.

What this means is that WSO2 now has a complete middleware platform - with the ability to create outstanding applications using the Web Services Application Server and Data Services Server, orchestrate them with the BPEL server, connect them using the ESB and now for the first time, build the User Interface using Gadgets and the Gadget Server, and govern and monitor the whole with the Governance Registry and Business Activity Monitor. The complete platform not only propels WSO2 to compete with the major middleware vendors: IBM, Oracle, and JBoss, but we actually have a key advantage. Those vendors have built their platforms through acquisition and by re-purposing old J2EE or pre-J2EE technology. The result is typically large complex and inconsistent technologies. By comparison WSO2 has a lean, consistent and highly integrated platform that makes it simpler, more effective and faster to build real solutions.

We started the year with Anne Thomas Manes declaring "SOA is dead". In fact, WSO2 (an SOA company) doubled our revenue over 2008, and my personal experience is that SOA is now the mainstream architecture for most businesses. Web Services are used everywhere very effectively, and this year I have seen early adopters building successful REST based systems as well.

It isn't just the technology behind the products that WSO2 accelerated during 2009. Our customer support system answered at least four times as many questions as the year before and issues as our customer usage grew dramatically. We beat our revenue target during a challenging year, and signed a significant number of Enterprise deals, showing that customers are now using our complete platform for the core of their enterprise IT.

So what of Cloud? Well, WSO2 has moved our core infrastructure over to cloud based providers, and we are certainly seeing customers moving to put private clouds in place. That was one of our key motivations behind offering our software in VMware and AMI formats. In addition, the Cloud Services Gateway makes it much simpler and more secure to extend your private systems with cloud-based processing by connecting internal and external clouds. And our biggest cloud move was to start down the line of offering all our systems as cloud-based multi-tenant services, starting with Governance. If you haven't spotted WSO2 Ozone, you might like to take a look - its a hint of where WSO2 is going next. So I'm looking forward to a Twenty-Ten that is even better than 2009!

In November, WSO2 launched Cloud Platform, for extending SOA into cloud computing. WSO2 products are now available as Cloud Virtual Machines. Users can now subscribe to Cloud Virtual Machine versions of WSO2 products, including WSO2 Cloud Service Gateway and Service Accelerator.

WSO2 Governance-as-a-Service is a hosted version of the Governance Registry product where users can configure the registry with no software setup or download. Each tenant/organization will be able to maintain their own theme, own metadata repository and own user store. WSO2 Governance-as-a-Service product is the first product in a family of service-based solutions planned by us in coming months.

Meanwhile, during the same month, WSO2 Carbon team announced Carbon version 2.0.2 based products with minor bug fixes.