The WSO2 Impact
Last week in London at the Royal Garden Hotel, 330 professionals gathered for WSO2’s EU Conference. It was our 12th conference, 5th to be held in Europe, and my 4th. We hold this conference to help our customers, partners and employees better understand how to create an agile approach to shaping their digital business.
In my opening keynote, we discussed the nature of WSO2’s impact on digital transformation over the past decade. With 485 employees and 6 global offices, we are finding new ways to help people get regulated financial services through PSD2 compliance and API management (Deutsche Bank, Societe Generale), get better health care by managing patient info and drug usage (Prime Therapeutics), get convenient shopping experiences (Far Fetched), getting to places faster through tube digitization (Transport for London), get efficient public services with digitized taxation (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs), or become more productive through integration (Travis Perkins).
As part of this impact, 40 million identities login through our identity server. And given current projects underway with public sector and telco projects in Latin America and the EU, this will grow to more than 250 million in a few years. Dimuthu Leelarathne’s presentation on how IAM is a catalyst for digital transformation explains how identity has become the quiet backbone of nearly every transformation project.
Increasingly, APIs are now the leading driver of digital transformation initiatives. APIs provide a common way for partners, developers and customers to access digital assets. WSO2 API Manager has become our fastest growing product, managing more than 20,000 APIs which in turn reach another 200,000 organizations. Engineers from WSO2 held sessions on how APIs are impacting microservice architecture, crafting API strategies with marketplaces, cloud-native API management, API gateways for microservices, building an integration platform strategy, and container-native digital transformation architecture.
APIs will have an even bigger impact on our future. As developers become comfortable with authoring microservices managed through orchestration, services will become recursive, both consuming from endpoints and becoming an endpoint themselves. The very act of writing small units of code generate new APIs. Centralized API management may not be sustainable forcing governance down into the services built by developers. Micro gateways, registries and storefronts are emerging, embedding observability and control on the edge within each API into a topology of interconnected API managers.
If you are curious how APIs are altering the course of 6000 banks throughout the EU, see Seshika Fernando’s session on PSD2 and Open Banking.
WSO2’s Future Impact
Over the past few years, we have seen a new tension emerge:
- Rapidly changing developer consumption models
- Explosion of IT assets required for digital transformation
Did you know that there are now 286,000 SaaS applications and the average knowledge worker connects to 84 systems? These systems are now considered IT assets which must be integrated so that they become appreciating assets. But our range of IT assets has increased, where we must treat the billions of devices, millions of APIs, exabytes of data, billions of events, and billions of identities all as assets that are essential participants in our digital experiences.
IT managers are facing new challenges.
- How do you increase agility across legacy assets and emerging technologies?
- How do you enable developer choice while increasing release velocity?
- How do you build and deploy services with Google SLAs when you have 3rd party dependencies?
Digital transformation starts with unlocking your IT assets. But with so many different assets to be managed, there is growth in 3rd party providers, which has lead to significant infrastructure specialization to achieve hyper scale, which leads to a large number of specialized development frameworks required to program these IT assets.
It’s no wonder that according to IDG and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation that IT managers now report a 60% skill gap that is expected to increase in future years. The breadth and volume of technologies that a developer must understand has grown faster than our industry’s ability to absorb those technologies. With developers gaining bargaining power to choose their programming language, development methodology, and tool chain, IT managers are stuck in the middle choosing between recruiting available talent that bring unique development standards versus standardizing their IT stack for group-wise productivity.
At WSO2, we view APIs, events and streams as technologies that allow IT managers to standardize how all of their IT assets are made available to developers. These technologies are a standard language that allow developers to unlock any consumption model, programming language, and tool chain.
More than just technology, these assets are the foundation of the serverless IT operating model. Today, most digital transformation projects are still server-based which has your services deployed as servers with reserved capacity, up front commitments, and weak task isolation that creates an economic incentive for architectural bundling of tasks together. IT seeks out an optimal bundling of tasks to avoid over payment for idle server time. However, APIs, events and streams offer a simplification of IT architecture that allows for individuals requests to be aligned with microservices. This creates a potentially new type of operating model where costs are allocated per request, payments are made in arrears, and there is strong task isolation leading to economic behaviors that encourage us to split tasks instead of bundling them.
Serverless programming models, still in their infancy, offer the promise of altering the IT cost structure to align costs with transactions. We heard from dozens of customers and partners that they are beginning their serverless journey’s with WSO2.
Whatever your destination may be, APIs, events and streams are a way where you can advance your digital transformation journey. They unlock different programming models including servers, VMs, microservices and FaaS; allows your services to be authored in different programming languages; creates composable “digital building blocks” with recursive consumption built-in; and modernizes your distributed architecture without disrupting bi-modal IT.
If you haven’t already, I’d encourage you to consider WSO2 for your digital agility and transformation initiatives. We are the only provider that can connect all of your IT assets into APIs, events, and streams and then also provide a comprehensive governance. Our open source licensing model makes it easy to get started with WSO2 and forces us to align our subscription value to your project’s success.
In Paul Fremantle’s keynote, he dove deeper into the concepts of APIs, events and streams on how they are shaping an adaptive future for all of us. I wonder if we should be scared that he titled his session, “Darwin Ate My App”.
In Sanjiva Weerawarana’s keynote, he discussed the role of Ballerina, a new programming language designed to make it simple to program cross-cloud distributed transactions.
After my keynote, I was able to take private meetings with dozens of our customers and partners, and network with speakers and attendees. This group, collectively, makes up our ecosystem.
I’ve never attended a conference where so many people were grappling with digital projects of such complexity and scale before. It’s incredible that we see WSO2 at the heart of all these projects and the excitement the community feels for how we can contribute even more significantly in the future. I’m eager to participate in our next conference and to further this vision, together.
I’d like to send a special thank you to the more than 100 WSO2 employees who participated in conference planning, logistics, organizing and speaking. Such an event is not possible without all of your passion and commitment.
