Opening Keynote
CEO of WSO2 Tyler Jewel took the stage and opened the conference with the first keynote. His story was all about the API Driven World. Open Source is here to stay if the acquisitions of Redhat and others testify. Is IBM going to bluewash Redhat? This was the first question Tyler put to the audience. Redhat allows employees to contribute to open source even if that would not be to the benefit of Redhat. The year has been great for WSO2 and North America is now no longer the biggest slice of the business, 53% of business is now international with customers in 63 countries. Open source is doing well in emerging as well as established markets. According to Jewell, APIs are the most important elements of projects allowing easy connection to services in all kinds of industries, from banking to government and really everything in between.
APIs go beyond technology. 25% of all internet traffic flows through APIs. When you look at digitally driven organizations it is all APIs together with the other elements of the integration stack, like the Enterprise Integration, Stream Processor and Identity and Access management. APIs are a fundamental part of integration. The success of WSO2 API Manager has not gone unnoticed. Forrester has named WSO2 API Manager a leader in the Magic Quadrant.
Trillion APIs
The 50 billion APIs will turn into a trillion APIs. The reason is the scale of disaggregation in order to meet demand. Microservices make that a reality. As far as agile goes, everybody is doing agile, but no one is getting the benefits according to WSO2’s CEO Tyler Jewell. Integration and middleware are bottlenecks to agility. This is of course the introduction to Ballerina and Microservices in general but it is important to realize that middleware and integration will be used in conjunction with Microservices. What is beyond microservices? Cells (the building blocks for the composable enterprise), but more about that later.
Ballerina
Originally, we were hoping that version 1.0 of Ballerina would be available end of 2018, now it is told that it would be sometime (mid?) 2019. But there are, according to WSO2, already customers in production with Ballerina (10 in total), unfortunately names could not be disclosed.
Composable Architecture
There is also a lot of mention of Agile. Agility is the keyword and one of the driving forces behind ballerina. Cells (with a reference to the human cell) are a focus point for WSO2, Tyler showed an overview of two architectures: the layered architecture that we know (current WSO2 stack) and the composable architecture that is new and actually being built. A lot of R&D effort goes into that.
Streaming SQL in the real world
The Stream Processor is one of the big four of WSO2’s products. This talk focused on the use cases of stream processor in real scenarios like real time analytics, streaming data aggregation and so on. Other use cases could be tracking the elephants in Sri Lanka who are endangered.
For retail, there are a number of use cases like Offers, Advertisements and Targeting that will possibly increase share of wallet, general sales and so on for online transactions. For the transportation industry, a use case was introduced on ride sharing, finding anomalies in ride sharing data in real-time. Other examples in healthcare take reasonably simple problems (e.g. patient monitoring) and add stream processing / machine learning to that in order to improve the level of patient care and cure.
Finally, a real-time dashboard was created that shows relevant data about football players in a match that was done about 4 years ago in conjunction with Fraunhofer.
Farfetch
Farfetch is a platform for luxury brands. They use WSO2 technology to take the content from brands and make it available via their platform. They have 2,6 million consumers who buy the real luxury products from brands and boutiques across the world. It is an intriguing business model for really expensive products. Not all luxury brands are equally active in the online space.
They have plugins to existing systems Linx Shopify and Magento and connections to brand systems from brands like Gucci. Their growth in sales and revenue forced them to invest in a new version of their platform that utilizes an event based architecture but is still capable to connect to all kinds of legacy systems.
We are not talking about cheap merchandise at Farfetch, as you can see from the screenshot below. But it is a symbiotic relationship between FarFetch and the Brands and boutiques.
Want to see more? Below you can watch our video report of day 1 of WSO2Con Europe in London.
Curious about what happened on day 2? Read on here.
