Time for me to stop commenting about politics and other sensitive topics

I've been cautioned and advised by several good friends that I should take a chill pill on commenting about various political things. Some of the topics I've been quite vocal about are high profile things involving high power people .. and I might be beginning to get noticed by them, which of course is not a good thing!

I get frustrated by political actions that I find to be stupid and I don't hesitate to tell it straight the way I think about it. Obviously every such statement bothers someone else. Its one thing when its irrelevant noise, but if it gets noisy then I'm a troublemaker.

I'm not keen to get to that state.

Its not because I have anything to hide or protect - not in the least. Further I'm not scared off by the PM telling private sector people like me to "go home" or "be exposed" but publicly naming private individuals in parliament is rather over the top IMO. Last thing I want is to get there.

I have an immediate family and an extended family of 500+ in WSO2 that I'm responsible for. I'm taping up my big mouth for their sake.

Instead I will try to blog constructively & informatively whenever time permits.

Similarly I will try to keep my big mouth controlled about US politics too. Its really not my problem to worry about issues there!

I should really kill off my FB account. However I do enjoy getting info about friends and family life events and FB is great for that. So instead I'll stop following everyone except for close friends and family.

Its been fun and I like intense intellectual debate. However, maybe another day - just not now.

(P.S.: No, no one threatened me or forced me to do this. I just don't want to come close to that possibility!)

Understanding the (Sri Lankan) IT Industry

In the last 3+ weeks there's been war raging in the IT Crowd in Sri Lanka about the proposed CEPA/ETCA thing: Basically the part of a free trade agreement with India which might allow Indians in the IT and ship building industries to work freely in Sri Lanka. I know nothing about building ships so I don't have any opinion about whether the proposal addresses a real problem or not. I do know a thing or two about "IT" and am most certainly opinionated about it :-).

I also know little real info about CEPA/ETCA because the government has chosen to keep the draft agreement secret. Never a good thing.

There have been various statements made by various pundits, politicians, random Joes (Jagath's I guess in Sinhalese ;-)) and all sorts of people about how the Sri Lankan IT crowd is

• Scared to their wits that their jobs will be taken by Indians
• Looking for the state to give them protection from global competition
• Unable to compete with the world's IT industry without help from Indians
• Unpatriotic because a lot of them leave the country after getting quality free education
• Living in a bubble because some of them get paid Rs. 150k/month straight out of university
• Etc. etc..

I will address a lot of these in subsequent blogs (hopefully .. every time I plan to blog a lot that plan gets bogged on).

The purpose of this blog is to try to educate the wider community about the mythical thing called the (Sri Lankan) "IT industry". For each area I will also briefly touch upon the possible Indian relationship. Of course this is all my opinion and others in the industry (especially in the specific areas that I touch upon) may vehemently disagree with my opinion. Caveat emptor. YMMV.

So here goes an attempt at a simple taxonomy:

• Hardware Resellers/Vendors
• Hardware Manufacturers
• Software Resellers/Vendors
• Software Manufacturers
• System Integrators - Local Market Focused
• System Integrators - Outsourcers
• Enterprise Internal IT Teams
• IT Enabled Services (ITES) and Business Process Outsourcers (BPO)
• Universities
• IT Training Institutes

This became way more of a treatise than I intended. I'm sure its full of things that people will disagree with. I'll try to update it based on feedback and note changes here.

Hardware Resellers/Vendors

IBM Sri Lanka has been in Sri Lanka for more than 40 years I think. I imagine they came when Central Bank or some big organization bought an IBM mainframe. I remember seeing Data General, WANG, and a host of other now-dead names growing up (70s and 80s). 

These guys basically import equipment from wherever, sell it to local customers and provide on-going support and maintenance. 

Some of these players don't sell entire computers or systems but rather parts - visit Unity Plaza to see a plethora of them.

Not too many Indian hardware brands being sold in Sri Lanka AFAIK but probably MicroMax (the phone) is an exception. So having the Indian IT Crowd here really has no impact on this segment.

Hardware Manufacturers

These are people who make some kind of "IT thing" and sell it locally or export it. When it comes to technology no one makes all of anything any more - even an iPhone consists of parts from several countries and is finally assembled in China. Same with any computer you buy or any phone you buy.

There are a few people here who "make" (aka put together / assemble) computers and sell under their own brand. There are also a few who export them (I believe).

There are also some others who make specific hardware devices that target specific solutions - best is the company that makes various PoS type systems that get sold as Motorola.

Fundamentally not many hardware manufacturers in Sri Lanka yet AFAIK. In any case, they're not likely to be affected by Indians being in Sri Lanka as this is a very specialized market and its unlikely the specialized skill will migrate to Sri Lanka given that skill base has excellent opportunities anywhere. If at all, electronics related graduates in Sri Lanka do not have enough good career opportunities yet as we don't have many companies buildings things yet.

Software Resellers/Vendors

Takes Microsoft Sri Lanka or the 100s of other agents of global software brands that sell their wares in Sri Lanka. These guys get a cut out of the sale in some fashion. 

Yes of course some of them sell (very good) Indian software. For example, a bunch of banks use InfoSys' Finnacle (sp?) core banking system.

Software, used well, can increase any organization's productivity (after all, software is eating the world and all that). If there are Indian companies which have technology that can be used to improve LK orgs productivity - by all means do come and sell it here! That may even require Indian engineers to come and install / customize them - no problem at all.

So, this segment will simply welcome more Indian presence in terms of companies. In terms of the Indian IT Crowd coming here for this segment - I guess experienced sales people are solutions engineers to help sell and deploy the Indian products are always welcome. To be successful the company will need to send good people (good luck selling software if the sales engineer sucks) - and good people are welcome anywhere.

I should mention the global SaaS software products (e.g. Salesforce, Netsuite, Google Apps, Office 365 etc.). Most of those don't have regional sales teams etc. - you just go to the website and sign up and use it. However, they will often have local system integrators who know how to help deploy, tune, customize and integrate those systems to whatever enterprise systems are already in place.

Software Manufacturers

These guys make some kind of software product and sell it to whoever will buy it. More and more are selling them online as SaaS offerings only.

Competing in the software product market means you just need to build a better product or at least have a good enough product that's cheap. To create great products you need great people who think and innovate faster and better than anyone else out in the world. More and more pretty much every product competes globally as even the smallest customer can simply use globally available SaaS offerings (some made in Sri Lanka even). 

Every idea someone has for a product in Sri Lanka is guaranteed also conceived by at least multiple Indians. And multiple Americans. And multiple Europeans. Etc. etc..

"Ideas are cheap. Execution is not." - Mano Sekaram at a talk he gave at the WSO2 Hackathon a few years ago.

To make products and get them to market is not easy. Will having some Indian employees help? SURE - if they're awesome people. The 2m people who applied for a clerical job really wouldn't help. Will marketing experience help? Of course - but again high quality product marketing experience is hard to come by in Sri Lanka, in India and even in California (speaking from personal experience). 

Despite idiotic politician statements about how advanced the Indian IT industry is, they are much more a global outsourcer and BPO operator than a product development country. That's changing rapidly but the numbers in the product side of the equation are much lower than the other side. In fact, I'd venture to say that as a %ge there are more product companies in Sri Lanka's IT ecosystem than in India's. In any case, the word "advanced" is very hard to quantify in the software world.

So sure, let anyone come - but good luck getting too many jobs in product companies that have no patience or interest with mediocre people. You need a few superb people to build a great product and fewer great people to market and sell it. If you're a super engineer or a marketer in India, there are tons of opportunities for you in India already, so the only way you'll come is if we offer a better total package: Check out WorkInSriLanka. I hope you come and stay and never leave! 

For WSO2, we're a BoI company. If we find a high quality person from ANYWHERE who wants to work in Sri Lanka we can bring them over. Piece of cake really - visa wise. We will NOT pay higher salaries for foreign people though - something that I know many do and something I soooooo detest. Sri Lanka seems to love reverse discrimination.

System Integrators - Local Market Focused

These companies take software and hardware from whoever and produce solutions for customers. These are systems that solve a particular business problem for some organization. For example, the vehicle registration system at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

The work these guys do involve working with the customer to understand the problem domain, figure out a good solution architecture, figure out which technology to apply and then to build the full solution. All very important stuff!

Who works in these places? Typically a combination of business analysts, architects, engineers of all kinds (software, QA, UI etc. etc.), project managers and so on.

Sri Lankan enterprises are quite slow to adopt software technology. This (IMO) is primarily because labor costs are low, because customer expectations are still not hard meaning competition is not that intense as it is in say US. That will change and we will need a LOT more people to integrate and build solutions for local companies. Can we meet the demand with local skill - my guess is yes. If we need a few more, the integrator companies can easily import people too.

There is one segment of this market that is special however. Small enterprises are also picking up low end solutions. These are often implemented by the owners daughter/son or niece/nephew type person. Basically some trusted computer geeky relative who "automates" the place in some form. That used to be with an Access database + VB type thing .. not sure what is in play today in that space.

That market is critical to help develop the local IT Crowd as it gives business (aka employment) to many many relatively low skilled yet value-adding people. The people working in these places don't need 4 year CS degrees. They're simply people with a bit of knowledge (acquired from a tutory type place) and a good knack for computing. Its critical to support and protect this community because they deliver technology to the wider mom&pop / small kade business community. 

I think a bunch of lower cost people from India working in Sri Lanka in this market could be a negative thing as it could threaten employment for low end IT workers. However, many of these deals are struck based on trust and relationships so it'll be really hard for anyone to break in.

System Integrators - Outsourcers

These guys take work from a foreign country (typically a more wealthy country but could be one that simply has a dearth of technical capacity) and bring it here to do the work. Virtusa is of course the largest (~3000 or so people AFAIK) but there are TONS of smaller players employing a few 10s of people and a few dozen or so in the 100s range I think.

The smaller ones always start with a single contract the owner managed to get from his/her work in the foreign country or thru a friend/relative outside. Do one task well at 1/5th to 1/3rd the price in the US and you can clearly keep get more business. Capitalism at work.

The bigger of these companies are great places to work for the best of the best. They may give opportunities to learn a ton of stuff, travel, develop soft skills etc. etc..  Lots of passionate employees who will not move easily.

The middle sized ones (> 25, < too many 100s) are usually great companies. They pay people well, they provide a quality work environment, they have passionate employees and often specialize in one or few areas (e.g. Alfresco or Mobile apps or whatever) and therefore command a higher charge out rate. 

The small companies (<= 25) tend to be more sweat-shop like from what I've seen - pay the people as little as possible and use crazy micro project management to deliver. No passionate employees typically. Its just a job that gives a paycheck for people who are relatively low skilled (and low initiative powered too).

Virtusa has offices in India too with like 7000 people I think. If they want to hire Indians they can hire them there. If they want to bring people down here they can do it and undoubtedly do it already. (You need to go thru the Board of Investment but its trivially easy. FAR FAR FAR easier than hiring a foreigner in the US .. or I imagine India.)

Does this part of the IT Crowd get affected by possible mass migration of the Indian IT Crowd to Sri Lanka? Not for the Virtusa's of the world IMO. However, for the smaller players, the small company CEOs who are milking money off the small outsourcing contracts, yes getting cheaper invisible people will be better for them. That could indeed mean a reduction in employment opportunities for the lower end of the technical community who work in these places as there indeed will be Indians willing to work for less (see Two million apply for 300 clerical jobs and 80% of Indian Engineering Graduates are Unemployable as recent examples).

It would be great to have multiple Virtusa's in Sri Lanka. In 2009, Mphasis (apparently India's 7th largest service provider then) tarted operations in Sri Lanka with intent to hire 2000 but AFAIK have packed up and gone or are nowhere as big. I'm sure someone who knows will reply and I'll add a note.

Would Infosys or TCS or whatever open up here if they have to bring people from India to Sri Lanka? I can't see why .. then why not just execute that in India itself. What am I missing in that equation?

So I cannot see the larger players affected by this. The smaller players (and by that I mean the really small ones .. < 25 people) will probably benefit by getting cheaper workers. Will we see tons of iOS developers in LK with this? No, because they're a scarce commodity anywhere. Period. For the middle sized guys (> 25, < too many 100s) certainly getting more senior, experienced people from India will be a good thing. However, I see that as no different from attracting any national to come to Sri Lanka to work. I ABSOLUTELY want that - that's why I helped form WorkInSriLanka and am still part of it. 

High end people (of ANY origin) moving to Sri Lanka is critical for our future .. we need to become a net brain importer and not an exporter. However, they will come only if (a) you pay them properly and (b) if the quality of life is really good. These are things that WorkInSriLanka is addressing / informing about.

Enterprise Internal IT Teams

This literally the IT Crowd in the companies. (Haven't seen the awesomely funny British comedy? Check it out.) 

Well actually often they do much much more than that crowd. The IT Crowd guys are only IT operations - they keep computers running, keep networks running etc.. That's absolutely critical. But now more and more companies are using information as a key business strategy. What that means is that internal IT is becoming more and more important. Companies cannot afford to buy prepackaged solutions nor simply outsource to others - they need to innovate inside the company to create real business value for themselves in a way that differentiates them from their competitors.

Not easy stuff.

You need really good people. Not 100s, but a good number of really really good people and a bigger number of good people. You also need a visionary to be the CIO/CTO to drive that effort. Not at all easy.

Sri Lanka is still in transition to that. Some big companies are doing it really well, but there's a massive dearth of really innovative CIOs in Sri Lanka yet. We're developing them as they move up the ranks but IT was kept away from the business and that needs to change for this to work. 

Is it a possibility to import talent for this from India? Of course! However, they are not cheap as those people have 1000x more work in India than here! What will happen to less skilled people who might come to this space? Good luck getting a job.

For smaller companies, they don't have enterprise IT. Then they have the IT guy - the jack-of-all-trades who knows how to help with Powerpoint to debugging why he can't get to FB to cleaning up after he stupidly clicked on yet another get-rich-quick email. Those guys don't have (and don't need) CS degrees or IT/IS degrees. They need some training and lot of experience. They also get paid very little (think 25-50k/month). 

Those guys could get crunched if we allow hundreds of such people to come from India. That would be just stupid.

IT Enabled Services (ITES) and Business Process Outsourcers (BPO)

This is where the numbers are. Order a pizza in Texas? An Indian will answer. Call Delta airlines with an issue? An Philippino will answer. Call HSBC about an issue. A Sri Lankan will answer.

These started off as call centers but more and more they take an entire process (e.g. claim processing for medical claims) and run the entire process in a lower cost location. All you need is a good network connection and a lot of (young) people who will work for a little amount and work odd hours and be happy with it. Sri Lanka also claims to be the largest producer of UK qualified accountants after UK .. and so does a lot of financial process outsourcing too.

There's also high end parts of this market - research outsourcing, analytics outsourcing etc.. Great. Do more. 

Sri Lanka produces 300-400 THOUSAND 18 years each year. Only like 25,000 get to a university of some kind (who are the ones who have a chance at a higher value job). The rest need work. 

This low end kind of ITES/BPO work is great .. it gets them a salary and if the country keeps devaluing the LKR they even get salary raises every year! Keeping people employed prevents them from wanting to join revolutions.

Some BPOs claim that they couldn't scale enough in LK because they can't find the large number of passionate, English capable young people. Probably true. 

MAYBE its possible to import them from India, but presumably only those that couldn't get jobs in the myriad of Indian BPOs. However, how that helps provide employment to the droves of young people who need work in Sri Lanka I do not know.

Universities

These guys of course produce the IT guys. We have state universities, private universities that grant their own degrees and a plethora of private ones that provide a learning environment to get a foreign university degree.

As with anything the quality varies. The top govt engineering / science universities and the top private ones produce AWESOME graduates who are absolutely as good as the best in any country (India, US included). WSO2 is lucky that a bunch of these guys join us :-). 

But my focus here is on the teachers. We need more PhDs to teach in our universities - ask Jaffna Univ CS dept for example. Will Indian PhDs (good ones) come and teach there? Great if they want to! Salary is pretty poor but its what it is. Even private universities will happily hire teachers. 

We also need top research focused scientists to come here so we can improve our research capacity. I don't think opening employment to Indians will make a single IIT professor to come :(. Even right now, they can come (visa is easy) - so please, if you want to come and teach in Sri Lanka reach out thru WorkInSriLanka and we'll help you! And don't ever leave.

India has absolutely fantastic universities. If they want to come and set up shop in LK and offer education to our people - great! India also has a LOT of crappy universities (see the article about unemployable graduates) - we certainly don't need them here.

IT Training Institutes

These are the literally hundreds (and maybe even thousands) of places that offer this course or that course on this or that. 90% of them in my opinion is crap. There's too little quality control. People are getting swindled daily by these jackassses who teach their children next to nothing and yet charge a ton of money. Even some local governments are in on it - I know in Dehiwala (my area) they run a program where literally 100s of people come for IT education. Each pays like Rs. 3000/month. Poor parents can't say no so they do it somehow.

Do we need more of these? Yes, IF THEY ARE GOOD. We need to get our house in order, put regulations in to quality control these places and then of course its great if more teachers come and teach more. 

India has absolutely fantastic training institutes. Would be great to get them to open shop here.

India also UNDOUBTEDLY has at least 10x crappy places than we do. Most certainly we don't need them here - we already have enough people robbing money from poor parents who desperately want to educate their children in "IT".

(p.s.: Blogger.com has the world's WORST editor. I'm bailing to medium.com soon.)

Thinking about moving to Sri Lanka?

Then you need to be at the WorkInSriLanka Conference next Monday!

Check us out at http://workinsrilanka.lk/conference and of course on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/WorkInSriLanka:

WSO2 moving to a new building in Sri Lanka

After many many months of painful work, we are finally starting work at our new location in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Here's a picture taken from my cell phone yesterday afternoon:

The most awesome thing is that we will all be in one building again in Sri Lanka! That's after more than 3 years when we started adding new offices .. we had three here until yesterday; today we have one!

We still have quite a bit of work to do to finish everything .. including a nice surprise coming in the front at the street level :-). The cage you see on the roof is our enclosed rooftop basketball court! The rest of the roof is taken up by the gym and the creche - will take another month to be fully ready. I'm waiting for the punching bag.

Today's not our official opening day - that's next Wednesday with Paul Fremantle also present. We are moving in today however and will have a small ceremony (lighting the lamp and kiribath table).

Its taken just over 8 years of incredible hard work by a super team of passionate people to get us here. Thank you to everyone who made it possible - including our customers, investors and of course the killer (past and present) team! 

This is only a small step along the way however ..

Congratulations Dr. Dasarath Weeratunge!

It gives me great pleasure to post extremely belated (he completed in December last year!) congratulations to Dr. Dasarath Weeratunge on his completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana (where I got my Ph.D. too). Dasarath's Ph.D. was in compiler optimization (don't have the exact topic) and was co-advised by Suresh Jagannathan and Xiangyu Zhang. Dasarath is now working in Intel Labs.

I advised Dasarath's final year project when he was an undergrad at Univ. of Moratuwa - he worked on what became Apache Kandula, a WS-Atomic Transactions implementation for Apache Axis. Later he also contributed to Apache Axis2 and worked on making Kandula work with Axis2. He joined Purdue in August 2005 IIRC.

Congratulations Dr. Malinda Kaushalye Kapuruge!

It gives me great pleasure to post extremely belated (he completed in October last year!) congratulations to Dr. Malinda Kaushalye Kapuruge on his completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Swinburne University in Australia. Kau's thesis topic was "Orchestration as Organization: Using an organisational paradim to achieve adaptable business process modelling and enactment in service compositions" and was supervised by Prof. Jun Han and Dr. Alan Colman. Kau's going to stay on in Swinburne as a Research Scientist for some time.

Kaushalye worked in WSO2 for 2 years from 2006 to 2008 before going to grad school to pursue his Ph.D. work. Congratulations and good luck!

(I'm going to post a few catch up congratulations so I can be up to date :-).)

Launching WorkInSriLanka.lk Initiative

Over the last many months, I've been privileged to be part of a fantastic team of volunteers working on a new effort:

This is an effort to help people who are considering moving to Sri Lanka to work and live. 

Me? Move to Sri Lanka?? What?!

Yes, Sri Lanka. No more war. No more bombs. No one trying to (systematically .. yeah we have our share of crazies) kill anyone. Great weather. Majorly improving infrastructure. A second airport (with no flights yet .. but that's ok everyone's gotta start at the bottom!). A real, honest-to-goodness highway (dinner in Galle tonite?) and many more coming. Apartments everywhere. Parks all over Colombo.

Compare that to where you're living? Do you go thru a metal detector to your workplace? Not in Sri Lanka any more. We had a long period of that .. but no more .. war finished in 2009, nearly to the day today (May 18th is the anniversary).

Anyway :-). Our objective is to first be a one-stop-site for anyone who's considering moving to Sri Lanka. Everything you need to know from what kind of jobs are available, how much does housing cost, how much do cars cost to kids schooling to visa stuff. All there, all in one place. All done in an objective, volunteer, independent kind of way. The site is still in its infancy of course .. more to come but its got a lot of stuff already!

With regards to jobs- if you're a senior person returning we will even help you get into the "network" to get into the loop of things. We have a pretty connected set of friends who are helping to get that done. We're also partnering with pretty much every industry body so that we can reach into all of those networks.

Going beyond the information portal we want to become an advocacy group to promote what's good about moving to Sri Lanka and also to work hard on breaking down more barriers. Even ex-Sri Lankans returning have some major barriers in the system now and we want to work towards removing them. 

This was a totally volunteer group of people from all over the place. Check us out at the site!

We had a fantastic launch event on Tuesday (May 14th) evening. We had the Governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka come and give the keynote talk and then had a superb panel. More on that coming soon at the site itself.

Check it out and give us your feedback - plenty of places in the site to do that. Enjoy surfing!

http://workinsrilanka.lk/.

WSO2Con 2013 is here!

After months of planning, WSO2Con 2013 is starting today in London. We already ran the tutorials in Sri Lanka last week - today (Tuesday 12th) is tutorials in UK and then the main conference is Wednesday 13th and Thursday 14th.

Yes this is a globally distributed conference! We have nearly 500 registrants (which is at least 50% more than we expected) in the two locations and they are connected via 4 high quality video streams so we have 2-way video interaction. The amount of technical details underneath is incredible - we will blog about that later. We even have one speaker doing his presentation from New York as he was unable to travel .. if everything goes off without a hitch that'll be a technological marvel :-).

We have 4 fantastic external keynote speakers:

Eben Upton, Founder & Trustee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation talking about the hottest little computer in the world. Oh and BTW, if you haven't heard yet, we've been putting together around 40 node R-Pi cluster and that system will be live running WSO2 middleware powering the WSO2Con app. Azeez has been blogging about it.

Brian Behlendorf, Founder of Apache, CollabNet and a long time god of open source (and my friend and also WSO2 Advisor) and currently Senior Advisor for Science and Technology at the World Economic Forum talking about how open source can still save the world.

Pankaj Srivastava, Vice President of the Cisco Industry Solutions Group talking about how they are building next generation cloud and embedded business systems. Guess what stuff they use :-).

 Yefim Natis, VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner talking about their view of Platform as a Service. Yefim leads Gartner's analysis on PaaS and has a super clear view of the future.



In addition, Paul and I will be doing keynote talks as well - I will be talking a bit about WSO2, our vision and most importantly how we see the future of enterprise computing. Paul will be talking about how to achieve that vision incrementally via a pragmatic milestone plan.

In addition we have nearly 20 external speakers (selected from over 50 submissions which we got in response to our open call for papers) and another 20 WSO2 speakers covering all aspects of our product platform.

We also have some super cool sponsors for the first time this time. Thank you to our Gold Sponsors Suse and Yenlo and our Silver Sponsors Grid Solut, Wipro and Redpill-Linpro.

The App

Oh yes the conference app .. we have a conference app that lets you do a bunch of stuff including rating talks and chatting to others. This too of course was written our stuff (and PhoneGap) and the back end will run on the Raspberry Pi cluster. Crazy? Yes. But super fun and majorly cool :-). Search for WSO2Con in the Google Play Store or you can use it with a browser here: https://wso2con.com/m/.  You need to have a WSO2 user account to log in - get one at https://wso2.org/user/register. Unfortunately the wonderful people in the Apple App Store haven't yet approved the updated version :-( .. we're keeping our fingers crossed it will happen today at least.

Putting it together

This event, like every previous WSO2Con event and all WSO2 events, is being organized by our internal marketing team. Hasmin (Director of Communications) is the general chair and she lives in Saskatoon, Canada and most of the rest of the team are in Sri Lanka! Harindu is out event God and he doesn't seem to lose hair yet. The "advance team" (of Harindu and Tasha) moved to London about 3 weeks ago and have been operating out of our Portsmouth office putting the final touches together. The rest of the marketing folks operating the UK event started arrived a week ago. There's another team managing the event in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lanka event is at a rather odd time since it starts at 2:00pm and runs until 10:30pm! We were very keen to have a live, bi-directional telecast in Sri Lanka as that's where we are based and that's where we have our team and a large community of supporters, users, and customers.

Coming back to London, overall we have nearly 50 WSO2 folks flying in from all over the world to London! I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the infinite amount of work done by Maryam and our outsourced travel team lead by Zakir .. its not easy to manage all of this while still running the daily operations of the company.

Thank you to all the wonderful team at WSO2 for putting this together! And thank you to everyone participating (whether in London, Colombo or just watching over the Internet) ... we're doing this for you.

I look forward to a fun week :-).

Congratulations Dr. Ajith Ranabahu!

It gives me great pleasure to post belated congratulations to Dr. Ajith Ranbahu on his completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. Ajith's Ph.D. topic was Abstraction Driven Application and Data Portability in Cloud Computing and his advisor was Prof. Amith Sheth. You can watch his Ph.D. defense on YouTube ... a sign of the times!

Ajith is of course one of the 6 founding members of the Apache Axis2 team and the 5th to finish his Ph.D.! Now only Deepal (at Georgia Tech) is left to finish and it'll be an amazing record when he completes too :-). Ajith also worked inWSO2 for an year before leaving for grad school where he continued to work on Axis2 and WSO2 Tungsten (now WSO2 App Server) and where he was championing building developer tools (which I used to dismiss ;-)). He initially went to University of Georgia but moved to Dayton when Amith moved to Dayton. Ajith plans to stay on at Dayton for a while and is looking towards a research career.

Congratulations Dr. Nabeel Mohamed!

It gives me great pleasure to post belated congratulations to Dr. Nabeel Mohamed on completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University.

Nabeel was an employee in WSO2 for a short time before he left to pursue Ph.D. work and is the first of many who have worked in WSO2 and gone onto doing Ph.Ds to complete the degree. Nabeel's Ph.D. thesis topic was "Privacy Preserving Access Control for Third-Party Data Management Systems" and his advisor was Prof. Elisa Bertino. The topic is of immense applicability for cloud data protection. Nabeel is staying on in Purdue as a Post-Doctoral Researcher right now.

Congratulations Dr. Chathura Herath!

It gives me great pleasure to congratulations Chathura Herath on completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indiana University on the topic Programming Abstraction for Resource Aware Stream Processing in Scientific Workflows. Chathura is a student of Prof. Beth Plale.

Chathura was also one of the original members of the Apache Axis2 crew and is now the 4th of the original group of 6 to finish their Ph.D. degrees. He joins Srinath (in WSO2), Jaliya (in Microsoft Research), Eran (heading to Wall Street) to finish off leaving just Ajith (in Wright State) and Deepal (in Georgia Tech) in the pipeline. Chathura is heading towards an academic career. 

Are you attending WSO2Con 2011?

WSO2Con 2011 is happening in Sri Lanka at the awesome Waters Edge Conference Center (just outside the capital Colombo) from Monday, September 12th to Friday, September 16th. Have you signed up yet? If not here are a bunch of reasons to do it NOW!

The Program

The overal agenda is a combination of superb keynotes, talks by users about various solutions / case studies, talks by WSO2 folks about various new and up and coming cool things, couple of superb panels and of course some pre- and post-conference tutorials to help get an overview first and then an indepth understanding of various topics. Here's a circular view of the week:



This year we ran an open call for papers and selected nearly 20 external speakers to present their stories from amongst a large number of submissions. The speakers are coming from more than 10 countries (14 if I remember right) from North America, South America, Europe, Asia (including Sri Lanka, of course) and Australia/NZ. With attendees coming from various other countries too this is a truly global event with one hell of a program.



I would be doing a great dis-service if I didn't highlight our keynote speakers. We have 4 outside keynotes from IBM, eBay, Google and Cognizant. Paul and I are doing keynotes too. These folks who are coming in to give the keynotes are highly accomplished individuals who will undoubtedly have superb stuff to say .. listening to them itself will justify the trip!

The Place



Sri Lanka is one of the hottest tourist destinations in the world today. In one small accessible package, Sri Lanka offers everything from awesome beaches to great surf to archeology to history to mountains to hang gliding to hot air ballooning to just plain going native. After having ended a 30-year horrendous war more than 2 years ago, we're now one of the safest places in the world! Interestingly, while most places in the world are increasing their security levels Sri Lanka is massively opening up.

We still of course have ways to go to build up many key infrastructure aspects in the country. In a way the whole country is under construction right now .. but not in the way that you wouldn't have the best time of your life here! Coming now will save you a lot of bucks too .. tourism in Sri Lanka WILL get much more expensive in the next 5 years!

Certainly don't just take my word for it. Instead, how about:

• New York Times says Sri Lanka is the #1 travel destination in the world (2010)
• National Georgraphic says Sri Lanka is the 2nd best island in the world (2010) [they're wrong of course and we're number 1 ;-) .. but I do admit Galapagos is incredibly cool]

Who am I to argue with places like New York Times and National Geographic telling you to come to Sri Lanka!

The conference hotel we've chosen is Cinnamon Lakeside in Colombo. This is one of the best (5-star, of course) hotels in Colombo and sits next to the Beira Lake in Colombo. In addition to being a great hotel smack in the middle of Colombo, it also houses several superb restaurants. Do not miss Royal Thai.

The conference itself is being held at the very very cool Waters Edge Conference Center, about 10km (6 miles) out of Colombo. Its a very large facility and is in fact part of a golf course and is home to all the high-end events in Colombo. We will have buses organized to shuttle you to/from the hotel to the conference location.

The People

One of the best things about going to a conference is of course the opportunity to hang out with like minded people .. some of who will end up becoming your buddies for the rest of your life. At WSO2Con 2011 you will have the opportunity to interact with people from 20 countries, people who are total geeks, people who are world famous and of course the people from WSO2 who create and develop the products you love.

In order to make sure you get maximum time to interact and engage with each other we are also organizing several evening events. Don't plan to leave as the sessions finish!

The Deal

We want you to come from wherever you are in the world. At the same time, we realize its not easy to get travel approval these days with an unknown budget to travel to an exotic destination ("you want to go to a conference where?").

So, in order to make that process easier we're offering a complete, soup-to-nuts package that covers everything:

• round-trip (economy class) airfare
• up to 6 nites hotel accommodation at the conference hotel
• all ground transportation in Sri Lanka
• all meals within those 6 nights
• (oh yeah) a full conference pass including both tutorial days

How much? They are priced based on where you're coming from:

• Anywhere from South Asia: $1,900
• Anywhere from Europe, Australia or New Zealand: $2,400
• Anywhere else in the world (America, Africa, rest of Asia, Arctic region, Antarctica etc.): $2,900

If you've ever paid and attended a 5-day event anywhere in the US you know that you easily spend more than $2,900 for that week all told. This is an incredible value .. even your manager will grok it :). AND you get to spend a week in Sri Lanka as a bonus!

We OF COURSE are hoping lots and lots of folks from Sri Lanka will attend! We don't have airfare included rates for that :) .. you just have to register at the regular rates (and we give a special discount to most LK organizations - government, SLASSCOM members, AMCHAM members, IESL members, etc. etc.).

What are you waiting for? REGISTER NOW and reserve your spot :-).

10 years since returning to Sri Lanka

Today marks the 10 year anniversary of our returning home to Sri Lanka.

I went to the US in 1985 where I lived for a total of nearly 16 years .. first arriving on August 18, 1985 to go to Kent State University for undergraduate studies. I lived in Kent, Ohio for 4 years, finishing both a BS and an MS, and then moved to West Lafayette, Indiana for 8 years where I was a PhD student at Purdue for 5 years and then visiting faculty for 3 more. Then I joined IBM Research in August 1997 (starting August 4th) and moved to Yorktown Heights, New York and finally left the US on August 4th 2001 and arrived back home on August 6th, 2001. That's 10 years ago today :-).

Wow, 10 years .. time flies when you are having fun!

I remember that there were pieces of airplanes on the ground at the Colombo Airport when we landed - the dreaded LTTE had brazenly attacked the airport just 10 days before that destroying 3 Sri Lankan Airlines planes and damaging 3 more as well as damaging or destroying 26 Airforce aircraft and killing a bunch of people.

What a difference 10 years makes; guns have been silent and peace reigns loudly in Sri Lanka for more than 2 years now. Whether you like the current leadership team in the country or not, we all owe them an incredible debt of gratitude for putting everything aside and destroying the LTTE menace and creating a stable nation so we have (another) chance at becoming what Sri Lanka is capable of becoming.

I was of course still working for IBM Research when I came back .. working remotely from Sri Lanka. I finally quit on April 15, 2005 and started WSO2 a few months later. I started encouraging Sri Lankan developers to contribute to open source projects in fall 2002 and ended up starting the Lanka Software Foundation in early 2003 (along with friend, colleague and mentor Jivaka Weeratunge). LSF was of course instrumental in many projects that ended up in Apache and for Sahana, the tsunami-inspired disaster management system we created. (BTW IBM recently highlighted Sahana in their 100 year celebrations .. very cool!) I also started teaching as a volunteer visiting lecturer at the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the University of Moratuwa from around 2002, where many of the brilliant brains that contributed to LSF's projects, and later WSO2, came from. (We of course get brilliant people from many sources now .. but MRT still dominates!)

One of the things I'm really proud of is that so many people have benefitted from the work done in LSF to help get them into grad school for further studies. Counting WSO2 too, there are now more than 25 people in various places doing PhD's in Computer Science. Three have finished so far.

--

Many people have asked me at various times: "Have you ever regretted coming back home?". I can honestly say: NOT EVEN ONCE!

Don't get me wrong- the US was a great country to live in and I will never forget the superb education nor the wonderful experiences and friends I made in my 16 years there. However, this is home and there's nothing like home (for me). I love the fact that I can have some small impact on young people who can help Sri Lanka get ahead in its journey. I love the fact that I am not second class in any way in my home country. I love the fact that my kids are growing up here with roots in their home country - where they end up as adults is their decision, not mine. But at least they have a firm footing here as their home.

Moving back to Sri Lanka is not without its challenges. Many things that are easy in the US are not so easy here. At the same time, many things that are hard in the US are quite easy here. So its always a mixed bag .. what matters is your mindset about the journey: if you are committed to moving back then you can come back. If you are half-hearted and look for problems instead of challenges then you will run back to wherever you attempted to move back from.

I am writing this because I am very very keen to attract Sri Lankans living in other countries to come back home. We need our educated, experienced, connected, knowledgable Lankans to come back home and help us rebuild after the 30 year nightmare that ended 2 years ago. The opportunities here are absolutely amazing and this is the start of a boom period .. now is as good as ever to come back home.

OF COURSE Sri Lanka is not a perfect place. Neither is the US (can you say "debt ceiling"?) nor any other place. The advantage Sri Lanka offers to Sri Lankans is that this is our home. Whatever hard work you do will have tremendous impact. Sri Lanka is a small country .. that means the impact of your work is much more direct and immediate too. Every problem is an opportunity if you take up the challenge!

I, along with Dulith Herath, Founder and CEO of Kapruka.com, along with SL2College (another non-profit project I'm involved in - founded by Nayana Samaranayake) are launching a "come back to Sri Lanka" effort soon. The idea is to help dispel many myths (that traffic is a nighmare, that everything is corrupt, that nothing is easy etc. etc.), get info about jobs and other opportunities, provide accurate and direct information and eventually help people who want to come back make the move and settle down (including things like kids school etc.).

BTW if you're a hardcore passionate techie wanting to come back then I know at least one great place to work ;-).

The last 10 years have been amazingly fantastic for me. The last 6 years have been most special because I have helped create a company that now employees more than 125 people here (and soon more here as well as in the US, UK and some in Europe). Thank you Paul for much of that!

The move was made easier by many many people who helped get settled in, helped get connected to various places and helped in various other ways. You are too numerous to list (and I know I will screw up by missing some key people) but please know that I know you played a crucial role in how well the last 10 years have gone. From the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU.

Congratulations Dr. Eran Chintaka!

It gives me great pleasure to congratulate Eran Chinthaka on his completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indiana University on the topic User Inspired Management of Scientific Jobs in Grids and Clouds. His advisor was Prof. Beth Plale.

Eran is of course one of the founding team members of Apache Axis2 in the Lanka Software Foundation. Of the original 6 person core team who created Axis2, he's the 3rd to finish his Ph.D. (joining Srinath (back in WSO2) and Jaliya (in Microsoft Research)) and the other three are getting close to finishing up their PhDs too. Eran worked in WSO2 for a couple of years before leaving for his Ph.D. and I hope that when he finishes his Wall Street stint he'll come back home and join us again :-).

Congratulations Dr. Chinthaka!

Cricket World Cup - kudos to Sri Lanka Cricket

I had the fortune of landing a ticket for Saturday's quarter final match between Sri Lanka and England. Someone who had 2 grandstand tickets got sick and I was lucky to be asked whether I want it at list price :). At Rs. 4000 each I felt they were pricey but then at the event I met a friend who had paid double that for his ticket! I will comment on the ticket selling process later.

First of all, the stadium atmosphere was just incredibly amazingly fantastically electric and rocking. Being there is nothing like watching at home .. despite being able to see the match poorly, the environment is of course unbeatable. The fact that Sri Lanka gave England a total drubbing was awesome, even though as a result the game became quite non-competitive .. but I'll settle for non-competitive games up to the final and thrilling victory in the final (vs. to have it stolen like the last time).

This post is not about the quarter final match - its about Sri Lanka Cricket, the embattled organization which runs the sport in Sri Lanka.

As most people in Sri Lanka know, the organizers were hammered very very hard in the press before the World Cup started about their preparations, about how the stadiums were completed last minute and about every aspect of team selection to overall management. I'm not an expert on cricket- so I have no useful views on the cricketing aspects and will leave them alone. However, I do want to comment on the overall organization of the event.

I have made it to 3 matches in Colombo - the first was the loss to Pakistan, the second the rained out draw with Australia and the third of course the drubbing of England.

All these were held at the newly refurbished Kettarama Stadium of course- an absolutely AWESOME stadium now! I have been there a few months ago and it was a nightmare to get in and out. Now its a breeze and reminds me of the convenience of getting in and out of Purdue's Mackey Arena (for basketball). Once you are inside, the view is breathtaking. The atmosphere is amazingly electric. Every match was sold out (of course) to a capacity crowd of 35,000+.

I didn't make it to Hambantota for the first match but the news from there was that the brand new stadium there was absolutely amazing as well. The words from a friend (usually a skeptic) was "money well spent".

Same has to be said for Pallekalle in Kandy. That's again a new stadium (or a refurb'ed old ground; not sure) and while its not as built up as Hambantota or Colombo the location is just amazing and all the reports are that the place was fantastic.

There was not a single time in all the matches in Sri Lanka where something went wrong with the logistics. All the comentators have been giving kudos about the venues and the amazing environments offered by them.

I too was caught up in the press vendetta against Suraj Dandeniya (the head of the World Cup organizing team in SLC). While the work was indeed completed last minute it is time to give this gentleman a tip of the hat and acknowledge the amazing work they have done to deliver perfectly for Sri Lanka. Press  stories have a way of finding individuals guilty without judge or jury and this vendetta was played out by most of the newspapers in a merciless manner. Maybe Suraj has refused some passes for the press and their buddies? Who knows.

Yes yes I know there's one more match to be played in Sri Lanka. That's the one where Sri Lanka will whack the New Zealanders home :-). I am confident that too will go off without a hitch! At one level "may the best team win" may apply but, honestly, to hell with that .. Sri Lanka has to win to set up an amazing final in India against (most probably) India. Nothing like that victory!

(The NZ team has done amazingly well to get to the semi-finals and they've always stepped up big at the big occasions. Their country also suffered a massive earthquake recently .. only to be overshadowed by an even bigger one. If they go on to winning the tournament they'll again get some all-important PR for the recovery efforts there. To that extent I want NZ to win. Yeah, treacherous.)

Now about those ticket sales.

Fundamentally, this is a no-win situation for the organizers. 35,000 tickets for the match where 500,000 at least would love to watch in person. So no matter what approach is taken, there will be 465,000+ who will be crying foul!

There have been stories about how people stood in line, bought the ticket and turned around and sold it to someone else. I see no way to stop that - and keeping the ticket price low (lowest was Rs. 50 for group stage matches in Colombo) meant that anyone could buy them without any problem - a good thing in general.

Personally I have no issue with blackmarket sales (and I don't understand why they are banned) - the only problem it highlights is that the original ticket was sold too low! Why doesn't Sri Lanka Cricket sell the ticket for Rs. 10,000 if it can get away with it and make more money? Maybe they should've also set up an auction at EBay or something where people can bid and buy tickets at whatever price above the minimum price. No I'm not suggesting doing that for all tickets but rather for a percentage- you give some on a pure lottery, some for those who stand in line .. and the rest to the best price via auction with batches sold daily. I don't understand why they created a secondary market in the first place when they themselves could've run both the primary and secondary markets. Obviously I don't know enough about market economics.

The real problem is that many tickets seem to have been sold only to "known parties". The Colombo powers-that-be who want to watch the matches shouldn't have been able to buy through back channels. If they don't want to stand in line they can certainly afford to buy the tickets on the blackmarket if they want and let some poor guy make some money. Why should these fat cats be able to buy tickets at list?!

When you are at the match (and I went to A lower the first time (Rs. 250), to C upper the second time (Rs. 100) and to the grand stand for the quarter final (Rs. 4000) its clear that most in attendance were way above average in economic terms. In practical terms, that suggests that a lot of blackmarket sales were happening. If someone's a true fan, there's no amount of money that would make them sell the ticket - so the people who sold the tickets were not real fans. Or they were true fans who felt the money was more economically valuable for them than the experience (maybe they had a sick child or needed some home repairs or whatever ..). Or they were savvy businessmen who stood in line and sold the ticket for a profit. The bottom line is that there's no way to prevent normal capitalism from taking place and the value balance ending up wherever it ends up.

So while I too am frustrated I can't get a ticket for the semi-finals, I am only upset about connected people getting tickets at list price through backchannel means. The rest of the system I have no concerns with - and next time (20-20 World Cup next year) I hope Sri Lanka Cricket does a combination of lines, lotteries and auctions to sell the tickets.

Talking about tickets .. anyone have a spare grandstand ticket for the semi final they want to sell me at list price? :-)

Congratulations Dr. Jaliya Ekanayake!

It gives me great personal pleasure to congratulate Jaliya on completing his Ph.D.in Computer Science from Indiana University in late December. His PhD work was on extending the applicability of Map Reduce to a larger class of problems. The software he developed as part of his work is available at http://iterativemapreduce.org/. Jaliya was a student of Prof. Geoffrey Fox.

Jaliya has already started work at Microsoft Research and works on applying map-reduce and other approaches to solve large scale systems problems.

Jaliya is the second person from the original Apache Axis2 team to complete his Ph.D. after Srinath. Jaliya is the original father of Apache Sandesha, the WS-Reliable Messaging implementation for Apache Axis. He, along with the rest of the original Axis2 crew, laid the foundation for a lot of the technology that WSO2 is built on. The remaining original Axis2 team members (and about 20+ others who have been at WSO2 at one point) are now in the pipeline to complete their Ph.D.'s over the next few years!

Congratulations and best wishes Jaliya for a bright future!

Celebrating 5 years of WSO2

While our official birthday is August 4th (pretty much a random date that I chose between the various steps of starting that we went through!), this week we’re going to be celebrating our 5 year anniversary with a bunch of events!

The entire WSO2 family has traveled (or are still traveling) to Sri Lanka – Paul is on his way from Emsworth, UK; Paul’s mom from Glasgow (Paul’s late father was of course one of our seed investors and we’re honored to have his mom be with us for this occasion!); Jonathan from Auburn, CA; Mahesh from Sydney, AU; Rebecca Hurst (our PR person, President of KineticPR) from San Francisco, CA; Pradeep Tagare (Intel Capital) from Mumbai, India and last (but never least!) James Clark from Bangkok, Thailand. We’ll miss one 3rd board member Alok Mohan who unfortunately couldn’t make it!

First up is to announce that we’re just about to cross the 100 employee mark! We have a bunch of new folks starting today .. um, yeah, 25 to be exact :). Yes, that’s a HUGE number of and we’re going to be working hard to get everyone properly integrated and settled in!

Actually when you add the 20 or so people on study leave from us working towards their PhD’s in Computer Science, we’re really about 125 employees .. but with the new group we’ll cross the 100 active members count. That’s a major milestone and its great to have it happen in sync with our 5 year anniversary as the new people get to experience our culture right out of the box.

To accommodate all the new people we’ve been doing some major office refurbishment / redesign in Colombo and have also signed up a 2nd location. That is just down the street from where we are at and we will be ceremonially opening that up later today as well! Its been a marathon effort by Udeshika and her team to get all the changes implemented and while its definitely coming down to the wire it looks like it’ll all be ready :). Awesome power of teamwork!

We’ll post some pictures of our offices soon!

Tomorrow (Tuesday 14th) and Wednesday are of course the dates of our first ever WSO2Con Conference!

We have prepared an excellent program for this and have nearly 300 people signed up to attend! We also ran a promo on WSO2 OxygenTank to give a free trip to attend WSO2Con and I’m thrilled to announce that Adam Firestone from SAIC, USA and Jagannath Nori from Inland Revenue, New Zealand were selected! I think Adam landed a few hours ago and Jagannath should be here soon as well. I look forward to meeting them in person soon!

After the conference on Wednesday night, we have organized an invitation-only Gala Dinner for business leaders, senior government officials, senior academics, and the diplomatic community in Sri Lanka to introduce WSO2 to them. I’m amazed at the strong response we’ve had from the top business leaders in Sri Lanka to our invitation! I look forward to presenting a very different kind of company to them :). We have engaged the best musical talent in Sri Lanka to help set the right environment for this event- Ananda Dabare, the lead-violinist of the Colombo Symphony Orchestra and Bhatia & Santush, the best of the best musical group in Sri Lanka!

After the conference and gala dinner we have invited partners and select others attending WSO2Con to participate in a 2-day technical workshop to give them a deep understanding of our entire platform. We have about 25 people participating in that and will have our new team join as well so they will also get a “bootcamp” session!

Finally, on Friday night comes the real celebration :). We have organized a full scale party for the entire WSO2 team, their friends and family, ex-employees etc. to get together and have fun! That’s going to be a (long) night of good food, drink and great live music and lots of dance!

Of course this celebration is nothing but a simple yet important milestone in our journey! WSO2 is really just begun .. and to use Shakira’s Waka Waka words:

You're on the frontline
Everyone's watching
You know it's serious
We're getting closer
This isn’t over

And to the WSO2 team, my message is:

The pressure is on
You feel it
But you've got it all
Believe it

Looking forward to an amazing, memorable week; followed by the next amazing 5 years!

10 years of SOAP!

This is a historic week for SOAP .. it was on April 26, 2000 that the SOAP v1.1 specification was published. Then, it was 10 years to the date today that we published IBM SOAP4J, the first ever SOAP implementation!

Wow time flies when you're having fun.

This is a good time for me to remember some of the various milestones that I've been part of in the last 10 years related to SOAP and WS-*, which of course lead me to where I'm now in WSO2. This is a rambling post that I'm writing down to remember some fun things that happened in the last 10 years. If I missed acknowledging anyone that was not intentional! If I misquoted or misrepresented anyone again please accept my apologies.

Matt Duftler, Paco Curbera and I wrote IBM SOAP4J. When Microsoft released SOAP 0.9 back in Nov/Dec 1999, I ended up getting involved with the IBM team that was formulating a "response". That was basically because I was an "XML expert" at the time in IBM as I was one of the representatives on the XSLT Working Group and had done BML (Bean Markup Language, very similar to Spring but several years before Spring) and other various XML things. In other words, I got involved with SOAP pretty randomly :).

Early in 2000 IBM decided to join with Microsoft to help push SOAP. IBM was already working (secretly) with Microsoft on what would eventually become UDDI, so it was a natural thing to do. Before the v1.1 spec came out, I helped refine the drafts and at that time my group in IBM Research started the Java implementation.

(On a side note, before IBM decided to join SOAP, we created an internal alternative .. called SCUM ;-). It (luckily) never saw the light of day!!!)

I was also dead keen to release the source code for it. We worked hard to convince the IBM software group management that IBM would gain a lot by open sourcing the thing .. basically it was a chance to get an implementation out quickly which would allow people to play with it freely without fear. IBM had a process for approving open source contributions (of course). In an incredible chain of events, we managed to start and finish the process (including getting legal & IP clearance) in 3 days .. the code was ready on around April 25th and we took it thru the system and had it ready to go on April 28th! (Matt and I wrote most of the original bits and Paco came on board a bit later .. we had many late nights getting it done on time.)

So on April 28th, exactly 2 days after the spec was released, IBM announced the availability of IBM SOAP4J via alphaWorks, with full source code! I think the code was then under the IBM Public License but I can't remember for sure.

In May 2000, Matt & I attended WWW 9 in Amsterdam. That's where I first met Glen Daniels and also the ever-so-colorful Dave Winer. We also went for an interesting dinner, including a visit to an infamous "coffee shop" as well as stroll down the interesting parts of town! Later Glen was one of the first people to join the Apache SOAP project and became a major contributor very soon. Later of course he would lead Apache Axis, which was the first re-write of the Java SOAP stack.

While the source code was available, the project was still an IBM project - that is, it was not really open source. So then, with a lot of help from Sam Ruby, we ended up donating IBM SOAP4J to form the Apache SOAP project, then under the XML project. That was in June 2000 if I recall correctly.

In the meantime, Matt, Paco & I also came up with an interface description language for SOAP services. The original version was called XIDL and the later version (which was very much like WSDL but even more powerful) was called NASSL (Network Application Service Specification Language). The creation of NASSL had a huge impact on the direction of several Web services specs and the mindset IBM (in particular Don Ferguson, then chief architect of IBM middleware, now CTO of CA) drove into the specs: that the world of SOA was not just about SOAP. In fact Don was our God father .. he was the main guiding hand behind what we were doing.

Microsoft in the meantime published something called SDL (Service Description Language). Then we worked (secretly) with Microsoft to combine SDL with NASSL to form WSDL 1.0 and released it in September 2000. That was my first experience with inter-company techno-political negotiation! Quite fun :). Every time we hit a wall we'd escalate to Don and they'd escalate to Andrew Layman .. and Don & Andrew would have a "parental" meeting and resolve the conflict and the kids would be off playing again. A few months later IBM & Microsoft jointly contributed WSDL 1.1 to the W3C and set it off on the standards path. WSDL 2.0 (of which I was one of the editors and Jonathan Marsh, now VP Bizdev in WSO2, was chair of the working group) would come out much much later .. and unfortunately too late for wide adoption as WSDL 1.1 is with us (forever :-().

In January 2001, the W3C held their infamous Workshop on Web Services. IBM's position paper (written primarily by Don Ferguson) became a roadmap of what we ended up driving towards for the next 5+ years. I was a lowly Research Staff Member in IBM Research at the time, but Don (who was God of IBM Software Group) was an incredible mentor and he gave me opportunities that I can't imagine anyone giving a young kid (yeah I even had some hair). I now try to do that for other people .. probably not as well as Don. Rod Smith, who was then VP of Emerging Technologies in IBM, and an absolute STAR of IBM's executive family, became the spokesperson for IBM's Web services & SOA strategy. Rod is an amazing presenter and can articulate business value in incredible ways. The presentation that IBM gave at that workshop is here. As I made many of the slides (which is evidenced by how boring the slides are) I got my name put on it along with Don & Rod :-). If you read thru the paper and the presentation, you can see much of the WS-* vision laid out there!

In that presentation we had WSEL and WSFL. I was sitting next to Andrew while Rod was presenting and I remember his leaning over me and asking whether these were specs or placeholder names. I think I gave a mixed answer .. and that set us up to working on parallel specs and having to merge them. That's how WSFL and XLANG came separately and got combined into BPEL4WS.

It was during this time that I met Dr. Frank Leymann, Distinguished Engineer in IBM and head of IBM workflow technologies. Frank taught me how to spell workflow and gave Paco and me the opportunity to work with himself, Mark Thomas-Schmidt and others on WSFL. Paco and I got involved because we had in the meantime expanded BML work to add recursive composition and we convinced Frank that in addition to being a flow language, WSFL needed to define a service itself .. that is, it had to be a recursive composition language. WSFL didn't quite get that right but we got it right in BPEL4WS. Working on that spec was an absolute joy and a learning experience for me. Frank, Dieter Roller (now retired from IBM), Satish Thatte (Microsoft) and Jo Klein (Microsoft), Paco and I met a bunch of times to work out issues and merge XLANG and WSFL. Oh yes we needed parently supervision multiple times in that process too :-). Eventually we published the spec and my group of course did an immediate implementation (IBM BPWS4J, first impl of BPEL4WS) and had it ready on alphaWorks.

WSEL eventually got done as WS-Policy and then of course various policy domains (WS-SecurityPolicy etc.) got defined.

On the Apache front, there was incredible progress too. Apache SOAP was really a quick hack type thing. It used DOM, had a relatively constrained type mapping model and really had no support for SOAP headers. Glen lead the thinking about how to re-do it resulting in a large f2f meeting in Washington DC somewhere in December 2001 (I think). After that Glen and a few others started hacking hard on Axis which shipped sometime in 2002 and instantly became the #1 SOAP implementation in Java. Axis had its issues but it was dramatically more powerful than Apache SOAP and quite a bit more performant too.

I had run into Paul Fremantle in 1998 or so when he wrote an IBM Redbook on XML and XSL processing. I had also done BSF (Bean Scripting Framework, which is now part of the JDK as JSR 223 and is an Apache project). Sometime in 98/99 and Matt Duftler and I integrated BSF into the IBM JSP engine to make JSP pages multi-lingual. One of the languages we integrated to BSF was XSLT (via then LotusXSLT which became Apache Xalan) and Paul ran into this while talking about how to do XML and XSLT in JSP pages. He was either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid to even try that stuff at the time (!!!) but we started working together as he kept calling saying "the shit don't work"!

After Paul returned to UK, Paul took BML and made an EJB version of it called EJBML. I think we released the spec and code as part of BML but I can't find it any more. EJBML basically was inversion of control for EJB applications .. without us knowing that's what it was! Concepts from EJBML and BSC (Bean Scripting Components, which we even filed a patent for .. before I realized what patents were and stopped filing them) all went into SCUM (the SOAP competitor which never saw the light of day).

Paul then created Generalized Services Framework (GSF) which eventually got morphed and came out as WSIF - Web Services Invocation Framework, which later became another Apache project. WSIF was a runtime cousin of WSDL - had a pluggable binding model and standard API to interact with services, no matter how the wire interaction looked like. In fact, Paul and I wrote a CACM article in 2002 where we talked about taking COBOL stuff and making it into services thru WSIF. Interestingly, IBM actually shipped support for that in the early Process Server versions (which used WSIF for all invocations).

WSIF later became major input to JSR 109.

I also remember getting a request in early 2002 (approximately) saying "write up a JSR to standardize everything around WSDL and Java" (IBM and Sun were fighting at the time and the way the Java Community Process was set up, he who lead the expert group controlled all). That's what lead to JSR 110 - Java API for WSDL. Unfortunately, we didn't include language binding into that JSR .. and later Sun took control of that and went onto defining JAX-RPC JSR 101, lead by my friend Roberto Chinnici.

I moved back to Sri Lanka in August 2001, while still keeping my IBM Research job in New York. Around that time, I had convinced myself that implementing WS-* by layering it in front of J2EE as IBM was doing was the wrong way to do it. So in December 2002 (2001?) I remember giving a presentation to Rod Smith and David Bolokker suggesting a total rewrite of the entire WebSphere platform around XML and SOAP. Rod always thought WebSphere was too bloated and wanted to redo it but never could get resources to do it. Hey we were in research .. so no one could tell us what not to do :). So we started a project called the "Colombo Project" (because I was living in Colombo) which was to build a service execution platform from scratch.

In the meantime, I had helped start the Lanka Software Foundation in Sri Lanka to help Sri Lanka developers contribute to open source (not use FOSS but manufacture it). As I was working in Web services heavily, I knew where there were opportunities to write code. Axis/C++ was the first project done by LSF - 4 developers (donated by JKCS and Virtusa), 4 Pentium3 machines with 512MB RAM and a lab at Univ of Colombo due to the vision of (late) Prof. V.K. Samaranayake)).

In 2003 (I think) LSF took 4 Univ of Moratuwa interns to do a project. The task I assigned them was to take Apache Axis and rewrite it using a pull architecture (using Alek Slominski's XmlPull library) and make it run 10x faster. The team consisted of Srinath Perera (now Dr. & an architect in WSO2), Dimuthu Leelaratne (now a senior member of WSO2's security team Jeykumaran Chandrasegaram (now in UK) and Vairamuthu Thayapavan (working in Sri Lanka).

They delivered and the resulting effort, AxisMora, was contributed in 2003 to Apache Axis to form the seed for the Axis2 effort.

LSF applied for a grant from the Swedish International Development Agency and got $100k for a 1year effort. That's what funded the original Apache Axis2 team in Sri Lanka. We started the Axis2 effort with a f2f meeting in Colombo where Glen, Paul, Dims and various other people came to help do the initial design of Axis2. Srinath (who had just graduated) lead the effort along with several others (all of who are now doing PhDs in the US!). Axis2 too has been an incredible success with it now being the most popular Web services platform in Java.

So going back to the Colombo project, we got a working system done sometime in 2004. Paul was the software group supporter for that project and was actively involved with us. In September 2004 I took Colombo thru the entire software group hierarchy trying to get it out as a new product direction. Unfortunately it was too threatening to WebSphere (I even made a business plan for IBM!) and so it was to be killed and "knowledge transferred" to various work going on in IBM. In fact that was probably the right business decision for IBM!

That's when I decided to quit from IBM. Paul, myself and another person (who didn't end up joining WSO2 (yet)) had a secret meeting at his mother's place in London on December 21, 2004 to figure out plans to start a company to take the Colombo idea forward. We had expanded vision by then - our initial plan was for 3 products: an app server, an integration server and a process server.

Then of course 5 days after that the massive Boxing Day Tsunami struck Sri Lanka and Asia in general. 40,000 people died in Sri Lanka within a couple of hours. That's how Sahana was born .. now the world's leading disaster management system. I was very involved with that stuff for a few months so my company plans got delayed.

I finally quit IBM (with a lot of sad feelings) on April 15th, 2005. WSO2 was eventually formed in August 2005 and started on a journey which its still on ..

IBM went onto re-do their internal SOAP stuff taking various ideas from Colombo etc.. 6 months after I left however, we were able to convince IBM to kill that and join Apache Axis2. A bunch of us (6 people including Paul and myself IIRC) went to Austin and gave IBM a week of deep deep Axis2, Neethi etc. training to get them started. IBM is of course now a major contributor to Axis2 and ships it in WebSphere and a ton of IBM products.

So going back to SOAP for a second, I've had the luck and privilege to be deeply involved with 3 generations of SOAP implementations (IBM SOAP4J / Apache SOAP, Apache Axis and Apache Axis2). While each iteration has done major improvements, I still don't think we got it right! Axis is pretty much the front line of SOAP implementation architecture (yes I know there are many impls now and their differences) but there's room for a significant new rewrite :-). [I have recently started to supervise an MSc thesis which is going to do some PoC work in Erlang to do just that .. let's see where it goes!]

I would be remiss if I didn't specifically acknowledge the incredible role the Apache Software Foundation (of which I'm a proud member) has had in furthering the SOAP, WS-* and SOA agenda. If not for Apache SOAP there would not have been such rapid adoption of SOAP. Apache Axis made sure that the open source impls would continue to lead. Apache Axis2 made sure that that happened again. A ton of supporting projects (Sandesha, Kandula, Neethi, WSS4J, Rampart etc. etc.) all exist in Apache to give full coverage of WS-*. Now there's also Apache CXF which provides another (independent) implementation. Going beyond SOAP, Apache also hosts Woden, the only impl of J-WSDL and a ton of other projects like Tuscany, Ode, Synapse etc. which totally round out the SOA platform.

In short, if not for Apache's major support, Web services & SOA would not be where it is today. Thank you.

Update: Corrected typo in SOAP 0.9 date.

On innovation by Indian IT firms - comment to TechCrunch

There was a TechCrunch post about workforce education where the author claimed that India does it better. I posted a long comment which is posted below. The main point is that India has a lot to learn from America on playing in the right part of the value chain. Training people to be better cogs in a wheel will get India nowhere (fast or slow).

You need to read the original post first.

Here's my comment:

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IMO there’s a huge fundamental flaw in your analysis. Firstly, I do agree that companies train less now and expect people to produce immediately. That’s simply reality globally – and the reason Indian companies train a lot up front is often because most new hires are unable to produce much (any?) without such training.

But that’s not the main issue I have with your analysis. You write:

“Additionally, the Indian R&D industry has been moving into the higher realms of innovation. In the aerospace industry, Indian companies are designing the interiors of luxury jets, in-flight entertainment systems, collision-control / navigation-control systems, fuel-inverting controls, and other key components of jetliners for American and European corporations.”

Well the R&D industry may be moving into “higher realms of innovation” but *whose* problems are they solving? Did they think of those problems and say they’re going to find a solution? As you yourself said they’re doing it “for American and European corporations.”

Therein lies the rub. All they’re offering is low cost paid labor. They are not scratching an itch they have. They are not innovating – they are simply delivering value to someone else in raw form so that they can refine it and make the real money.

That is what we in old colonial countries do so well – take our raw material and export it so that someone else can refine it and send it back as value added products for us (and the rest of the world to consume). I don’t need to tell you where the real value lies in that chain.

All you’ve described is that Indian now not only answer phones and transcribe documents (essentially low skill labor) but that they also solve hard analytical problems and do lab research for “American and European corporations”.

That is not innovation – that is just slave labor. Yes that’s right – to me that is simply selling bodies at whatever margin the Indian bosses can make something at.

Of the areas you mentioned, how many Indian brands exist in the world? How many products have Indians thought of and take it all the way to market in the west? Until India starts doing that, there’s nothing for America to learn from India. Right now, there’s TONS for India to learn from America.

India needs to stop selling its people and start finding problems and opportunities and start addressing them and competing globally with innovative products and services. That is the beauty of the US – that there are always new entrepreneurs who pop up with brilliant new ideas who go on to challenge & change the world. With every 100 of those there is one winner. If you don’t have hundreds popping up every year, the winners won’t be there. Of course there are a few exceptions in India but those numbers won’t be enough to really become a global player in the innovation driven IT world. (I know nothing about other industries so I am not going to comment.)

The real problem is that the Indian bosses are happy with their 30% margin. They’re happy because they can make billions more by hiring a few million more Indians to scale up. Ah but have you done a study of per-employee revenue generated by Indian BPO & services companies vs. major IT companies? My understanding is that its in the range of $30k/year. IBM does about $250k/year ($100B by 400k employees), Microsoft about $500k/year ($60b by about 120k employees) and Google about $1m/year ($20B by 20k employees). Do you think that doing R&D for “American & European corporations” will ever get Indian companies to the Google levels? Not a chance.

I’m a Sri Lankan who lived in the US for 16 years and returned home 8 years ago. In WSO2, the company I started with Paul Fremantle, we don’t treat our Sri Lankan team as “cheap labor”. They are part and parcel of the innovation engine we have created. In fact, they *are* the innovation engine we have created. We are now the only truly 100% open source alternative enterprise middleware platform to IBM, Oracle & Tibco. And a lot of the innovation came from young kids in Sri Lanka. We’re about to launch our entire middleware platform as a “Platform as a Service” offering – totally out innovating and going ahead of everyone.

Pretty much the only difference between us and a bunch of Indians in some Indian company is the mindset we bring to the table. We don’t view anything as “someone else will define the problem and we have to solve it”. Rather we look at it as “how do we do MUCH better than IBM/Oracle/Tibco and all the little guys out there”. We encourage and support people in thinking disruptively. We teach each other. We listen to the world. We reward risk taking. We give the freedom to work and think in a way that enables innovation.

With all due respect Vivek, you and other business school types are doing Indians a huge disservice when you tell them “bat on” with what’s going on. If India wakes up and starts challenging the world with innovation that originates from India then there will be something to talk about. Telling the world that India has cheap labor from low skills to PhDs is something I’d personally be ashamed to talk about rather than be proud of.

Sanjiva Weerawarana, Ph.D.
Founder, Chairman & CEO; WSO2, Inc.
Founder, Director & Chief Scientist; Lanka Software Foundation
Member; Apache Software Foundation
Director; Sahana Software Foundation
Visiting Lecturer; University of Moratuwa