WSO2 shares power of open-source software

By Kiyoshi Berman

The WSO2 Con Asia 2016 was held in Colombo from 16 to 18 February with the representation of over 80 companies. 

The WSO2 conference gives the opportunity for attendees to explore the only comprehensive and 100% open-source middleware available. Through the sessions, the audience would gain knowledge on how to scale and deploy solutions for a connected business, discover modern business practices with APIs, the Cloud etc, examine the power of expert support and meet and greet experts and peers as well.

The keynote speech was delivered by Sanjiva Weerawarana, PhD, the Founder, CEO and Chief Architect WSO2 on the topic of ‘Vision for the Connected Enterprise’.

WSO2 has been around for over a decade 

Recapping the history of WSO2 which was established in 2005 Weerawarana said, “We started in 2005 and there were only 12 people in the company at the time. Right from the beginning, we made a statement saying that we are going to build a set of products that big companies use in the Middleware space. We took this approach that it’s all going to be open-source. This comes from a long history of open-source work that I have been doing. That translates to – it’s freely available, we allow people to access it and use it without any constraint. Those who want commercial support and interaction with us can get it from us.”

“WSO2 was not just set up to reinvent technology. I started a foundation here in 2003 called Lanka Soft to help Sri Lankan developers create open-source software. When we started WSO2, we wanted to show that open-source software is not just for free but can also be made to a business model. We wanted to show that this kind of stuff can be produced from this side of the world, as most technology companies are based in the US.” 

“We also wanted to change how business is done. For example, we don’t have negotiated prices. We have a price list which can be downloaded from our website. It’s not about the technology alone; even though technology is the drive that created the desire to implement a business. We’re a venture funded company – so far of $ 45 million. However, in the context of technology companies, we’re still a small company,” he further explained.

WSO2 has been featured in 19 Gartner and Forrester analyst reports. Most large companies are not in more than one or two analyst reports and WSO2 believes they have got good recognition. Analyst reports are important because it views how people evaluate a company’s products. WSO2 has nearly 300 customers and has grown from 12 to 500 employees, not counting the interns. 

Weerawarana discussed the products developed by WSO2. “We started by building middleware but we don’t build the same middleware the others have. We look at a problem and say, what does a customer who’s trying to create innovative value added products and offerings for their customers, want from technology vendors? We try to figure that out and in fact build that.”

Some of the largest organisations are using WSO2 products. The very popular eBay uses 100% open source WSO2 ESB to process more than 1 billion transactions per day. West facilitates over 300 million omni-channel customer interactions a month via cloud platform powered by WSO2. ELM manages identities of 4 million Government program users with WSO2 Identity Server. SIBUR powers content integration with platform built using WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus. O2 maintains stronghold on customer satisfaction index by offering innovative solutions powered by WSO2.

WSO2 software is really open-source and free for anybody to use. Even Uber is one of its non-paying customers. This way it allows them to be a part of the technology direction. WSO2 prides itself for providing better support than IBM and Oracle, and it understands that there is no one solution for all technology problems. 

Vega High Performance Electric Car

The keynote presentation on the exciting project ‘Vega High Performance Electric Car – Challenges and Opportunities’  was delivered by Codegen President and CEO Harsha Subasinghe PhD and Codegen Research Scientist Beshan Kulapala PhD. 

The name Vega has been inspired by the Sinhalese term for speed.  

“We wanted to build a high performance super car, that was about two years ago. We committed to a date of building the car in one year because we didn’t know what kind of challenges we will face. Even now we put very aggressive goals in front of us so we really push ourselves to innovate with the resources we have in Sri Lanka,” Kulapala said as he introduced the project to the audience. 

“Simply our objective is to produce a world-class high-performance all electric super car, right here in Sri Lanka for the first time. When we started this about two years ago there were many ideas. In sports cars there’s a lot of technology involved. Multi-disciplines come together, mechanical engineering, electronic and electrical materials, chemistry for batteries and other materials for the car and so forth. A vehicle is an ideal place to do a lot of innovation that the majority of the world uses,” he added. “We have three goals with the Vega prototype that we’re building – one is to do 0 to 100 kpmh under 3.6 sec, a top speed of 240 kmph and a range of 240 kpmg per electric charge. If you look at the Nissan Leaf today, once you charge the vehicles you can do about 150-180 km so this is also a completely electric car with no petrol tank or combustible engine so once it’s charged we want it to run 240 km per charge.” 

Kulapala explained the nature of the team behind this tremendous project. 

“We have eight full time employees that is a part of this team. We have a material engineer, two mechanical engineers, two electrical engineers and about two electronic program managers. Apart from this team, we have a number of student interns and trainees who are part of our project. Right now we have 23 from about six different universities. We had the honour of having some of the WSO2 employees doing their sabbatical with us. This project is developed by ordinary Sri Lankan youngsters who have done extraordinarily well in their studies at their universities. The team comprises of guys who have come from all parts of Sri Lanka and all walks of life as well.”  “If you want to do something new and innovative, the limit is endless and everybody can be a part of this process.”

Technology behind the Vega High Performance Electric Car 

Kulapala also explained the technicalities of the design and development of the car with the aid of their design graphics.  

“Something that we really want to tell all the software folks is, because we will have access to all the senses on the vehicle, we activated the brakes, accelerators, you can start writing autonomous navigation code or accident prevention code, something smarter than what’s available today,” he affirmed.  

“Apart from the car, we are also building electric vehicle charging infrastructure. All the technology that goes into the motor controller matches very easily to the power electronics areas of fast charging. All chargers are IoT devices which connect to the web using low bandwidth connectivity. With IoT devices it enables us to have a membership system.”

Codegen President and CEO Harsha Subasinghe shared at the WSO2 Forum more details about this super fast car that is in progress.  “When I went and had a look at the Lamborghini Aventador, it had 600 bhp and it’s about 1,500-1,600 kg of weight. Ours is about 1,500 kg of weight with 900 bhp so we thought why our target can’t change from 3.6 sec to 2.1 sec. Then we realised, why we can’t we reduce the weight of this car to about 1,000 kg so we will have better acceleration,” he said.  

“The coolest part would be if we can charge the car in about 10 minutes. So then we thought if we can have a software configurable battery where you can do serial and parallel, where it goes to parallel when you want to charge it and it goes to serial when you want to drive it. You can reconfigure the batteries using the software rather having pre-configured batteries,” he added. 

If this project succeeds, the whole world is going to know that Sri Lanka has developed a car of 2.1 sec, and that would give us a tremendous push.

Regarding the weight reduction, the research team is considering using Nano-technology. At the moment, the team is trying out the Carbon infusion material. If this works out, the weight of the chassis can be drastically reduced to go down by 400 kg. Sri Lanka is not known for Nano-technology around the world. We think by doing this part, we can give it a tremendous boost.

“We also thought that we might be able to do 3D printing for all these panels. All we have to do is design the car and 3D print the panel and fit it into the car. This is quite ambitious but we are trying our best to get there,” he explained. 

Since there is a power supply problem in Sri Lanka and only 30-40Amp is available in the outlets, it would take a lot of time to charge 100KW of power. The team is experimenting with a method to store a large amount of energy and then download all that energy into the car. For this, they are trying to build a super capacitor to be able to store that kind of energy. 

The team is also looking into Drone technology. The ambitions also extend to reach the capacity of the Formula One e-racing level.  Overall, with this project which uses cutting-edge technology, Codegen aims to take Sri Lanka into the international automobile arena. 

Technical sessions 

The conference continued with sessions that were geared to the technical professions. Frank Leymann Ph.D. the Director, Institute of Architecture of Application Systems at University of Stuttgart presented on ‘At the Heart of Services – Loose Coupling and Its Architectural Benefits’. Isabelle Mauny, the VP – Product Management at WSO2 spoke on using analytics to improve customer experience. Day one of the Conference included three different streams with technical sessions.   

– Pix by Upul Abayasekara