WSO2, Lanka's open source company with a difference
25-Nov-2007
by Gamini Warushamana
WSO2 Incorporation is different to most software companies in Sri Lanka in that everything is open not only for professionals in the company, but also to the whole world.
There are no business secrets or Intellectual Properties for codes that are written as solutions for numerous problems in this open world. You can see the codes they write on the same day through its web site and you can download them free.
This is how the opensource software company which is not very common in the industry works.
The work culture of the WSO2 is different to other companies. There are no particular working hours, attendance or sign off time. In addition to the flexible working pattern there are facilities to play games and entertainment. The new WSO2 office at Flower Road, Colombo 7 has all these facilities.
The chairman and founder of the WSO2 Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarna said this is similar to the working culture in the google company. We are in a pure knowledge business and these working conditions and freedom are essential for this kind of knowledge work. More web related
Dr. Weerawarna defined his company as a new kind of middleware company which is more web related.
We provide open source Service Orient Application (SOA) platforms. They are complete opensource middleware stack based on XML and web services. With the WSO2 web service framework we create a suite of products that offer the full range of transactional middleware including a web service, application server, enterprise bus and mashup server and more.
We also create a complete web services stack in C to complement our Java stack which offers a highly embeddable and performant platform, fully interoperable with Java and scripting languages such as PHP, Perl and Ruby.
Dr. Weerawarna, a pioneer of web service and open source technology explained how the business model WSO2 operates. As an opensource company anyone in the world can download our software free.
However, if your business is running on a software and you make money on it you may not want to face problems every hour with your software. Therefore free software alone is not enough and you need answers to your problems. We offer our software free and sell insurance package or maintenance packages optionally. Then we are responsible for all your software problems and ensure that they are bug free.
For instances WSO2 deployed opensource packages can have silver, gold or platinum support packages. In silver package it offers 9am-5pm support time on business days, two business days as response time, five incidents and one contact person through email and some other features.
The gold package has more facilities and the platinum package provides the best service including 24X7X365 support time, unlimited incidents, email and phone contacts with unlimited contact people and many more.