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Thursday, 5 February 2015 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
WSO2, one of the prolific IT organisations in the country confirmed last week that its affiliations with renowned global corporations will be more fruitful in coming years. Head of WSO2, Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana told the Daily FT that a number of WSO2-backed solutions which are engineered by local developers will empower these companies in the next couple of years. Last year, Dr. Weerewarana said that a couple of major ICT initiatives which were implemented for WSO2’s global clients would be up and running before 2014. Those projects included the ‘Connected Car’ by Mercedes Benz, an electronic multi-functional assistant plugged into the vehicle and Boeing’s ‘Digital Airlines’, a software platform which is fully functioned with WSO2 technologies, to integrate all the parts of the airline eco-system; airplanes, airlines, airports and so forth. When the Daily FT asked about the progress of these projects, Dr. Weerewarana confirmed that they have been rolled-out successfully. “Those projects were successfully rolled-out by WSO2 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. We work with eBay, Cisco Systems, Amazon, Fidelity Investments which is all about retirement planning and mutual funds, AMP Bank in Australia and a 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,” said Dr. Weerawarana. The global enterprise middleware company unveiled its office in Jaffna last week, making it the first IT company in the country to venture out to the northern town. The move came after a recent successful rollout of technical training programs and workshops conducted by WSO2 for graduates and undergraduates at the University of Jaffna. “I firmly believe that Jaffna has the potential to produce brilliant software 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. Our goal is to foster a new generation of talented technology experts to meet today’s opportunities and challenges,” Dr. Weerawarana opined. With the opening of Jaffna’s office, WSO2 now has six offices across the globe with two in Colombo, two in USA (Mountain View and Blloomington) and one in London, United Kingdom. The Jaffna office currently has eight employees and the management has plans to increase it to 30 employees in the next five to six months. A special rotation scheme will allow employees in Colombo to travel to Jaffna and work in the Jaffna office for two weeks. WSO2 offices are known for their design and its open culture which drive innovation and provide the right environment for employees to think out of the box. Weerawarana also added that a key challenge faced by most companies today is the lack of resources to keep pace with the required changes in enterprise development, and WSO2, through its innovative open source middleware products, has been able to meet some of these challenges. “Today, there’s greater focus on enterprise IT because this facilitates change and aids with adapting to change. Our vision is to become the world’s No. 1 open source middleware provider. It will take some time but we are poised to get there soon with a unique team of employees and innovativeness,” said Weerawarana. Last year, American IT research firm Gartner put WSO2 in the ‘Visionaries’ quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for on-premises application integration suites.
