Sunday Dec 15, 2024
Sunday Dec 15, 2024
Wednesday, 11 February 2015 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana
By Hiyal Biyagamage
Q: You have two offices in Colombo now and you have come a long way to open an office in Jaffna. What was your reasoning for this ‘leap of faith’?
A: Actually, it was all about people. I firmly believe that Jaffna has the potential to produce brilliant engineers. There are no other IT companies here so I see it as a great opportunity for us to explore human resource skills. It is also a chance for WSO2 to do something good for the society plus recruit the best of young minds. In the software world, it is nothing at the end of the day. 
Somebody asked me about the hardware capabilities of the Jaffna office and I said we have no major hardware. It is just several laptops and the internet connection with few ports. It is a very different world now. Everything comes out from people. It is a battle between people who can challenge the world and who cannot. At WSO2, we are recruiting people who can do that.
Q: In a press conference last year, you mentioned about your big projects with Mercedes Benz and Boeing Airlines. You stated that these projects would be up and running by the end of 2014. Were they successful?
A: Yeah, those projects were successfully rolled-out and they are 100% functional. If you buy a Mercedes Benz S400 model or above; the entire back-end system of its ‘Connected Car’ system has been developed by WSO2.
Q: What is the future outlook of these global-scale developments?
A: We work with eBay, Cisco Systems, Amazon, Fidelity Investments which is all about retirement planning and mutual funds, AMP Bank in Australia and few others. In the next couple of years, WSO2 will provide new solutions to these companies. We have a growing line of international customers which is not yet huge but I see the future prospects are very high
Q: You base your company around product engineering. Even the recent SLASSCOM report talks about Sri Lanka’s capacity on becoming a niche software product engineering destination.
A: We are solely a product creating company. We define the product, build it, market it, sell it and support it. That is the difference between WSO2 and other companies. The SLASSCOM report takes a different view which is about outsourcing product engineering. We don’t outsource anywhere.
Q: In that case, how do you view the country’s prospects for creating unique software products? Are we lagging behind?
A: I guess we have a big scope to look at. Creating a product is all about understanding a specific problem and solving it. We should look at clear strategies on how to design distinctive software products. It is not a hard thing. I do not see that we are lagging behind but to become a robust product engineering destination; we need proper leadership and people have to work tirelessly and deliver outputs.
Q: Before starting WSO2, you were researching about new middleware technologies at IBM Research. What was the most important lesson you learnt there?
A: I would say less about technology and more about how not to run a company. The stuff we do at WSO2 is stuff that has not been done before by any company. IBM is a great company but they did stuff which I did not agree with; especially on certain policies. When I founded WSO2, I had no barriers and I got the chance to define all kinds of policies and practice them on a different space. When you think of engineering people rotating between marketing and support services; that practice has become one of the unique aspects in our company. Our policies define WSO2’s pricing model and how we work with customers and I couldn’t have defined such policies in a different place.
Importantly, I learnt about middleware because of IBM. I got to know a lot about the core middleware products and extract clear technological sense of middleware, thanks to IBM.
Q: Many Sri Lankans don’t know about your work on developing the Web services platform and expansions done for the Apache Software Foundation. How do you view your contribution towards open source industry standards?
A: Again, these initiatives happened when I was at IBM. I represented IBM in several tech conferences and when you go as IBM, people think, ‘Oh that guy is from IBM. He must know what he is talking about’. It does not matter much but then you would figure it out if you intelligently communicate and participate. Then only, you would be able to contribute to open technology standards.
Best thing is you get to know people from the industry. I got to know people from all kinds of companies and they got to know what kind of a person I am. When you look at the whole scope of open source technologies; it is great. It gives you that wonderful chance to establish credibility, based on who you are and your work versus your company or your education. That is really something that anybody in Sri Lanka could build up as a great brand.
Q: You founded the Lanka Software Foundation in 2003. Do you believe that open source developments in Sri Lanka have come up to a level where we can challenge the world?
A: I think so. Globally, open source is no longer a special case right? Even Microsoft uses open source. I don’t see open source as something special anymore. When Lanka Software Foundation was initiated, people in Sri Lanka didn’t understand how to create an opening for open source technologies. Now it is different. So there is nothing we cannot achieve through open source technologies now but it requires people who are committed for open source development.
Q: What is the future for connected businesses in Sri Lanka?
A: Sri Lanka is still low in the spectrum of digitalising business operations. Primarily, it is because of cheap labour cost. We don’t bother about digitalising business operations when labour cost is cheap. When it gets higher, businesses are forced to become a lot more integrated and connected. As a market for connectivity in software we make; we are very immature. Largest companies do have some opportunities but it would take some time for them to adopt these concepts. I believe our market is not yet matured enough.
Q: The earlier Government had a vision to achieve $ 1 billion IT exports by 2016. If the new Government wants to modify it; will it have an impact on the industry?
A: I am not a big fan of such targets or any number crunches. But it is good to see that organisations like SLASSCOM has convinced the Government that the IT industry is a major force for country’s economic growth and indicated there is a future in it. What we need is the Government to support the industry, not to get in the way unnecessarily.
Q: How do you look at WSO2’s future?
A: I think it is great. We are still very small in the market we are competing. Our goal is to become world’s number one open source middleware provider, which is not an easy task. So much work to do and it is a long way to go.
Q: Last year, Gartner Inc. put WSO2 in the ‘Visionaries’ quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant. How important was it to you?
A: It is important to know what customers care about WSO2. Personally, I don’t care much about it and it makes no difference to me. It is great to be included in such rankings and potential customers would now look at WSO2 from a positive perspective. But on a personal level, I don’t encourage people to get motivated by winning awards. It is like working for money. You get the pay cheque and then what?
