WSO2 Con, the official technology conference of WSO2, took place in three places around the world this year: in the USA (San Francisco) in July, Asia (Colombo) in August and Europe (London) in November. As a certified partner and retailer of WSO2, Xpand IT took part in the European event on the 13th to 15th of November, in the Hilton London Bankside hotel.
The European WSO2Con of 2018 was focused mostly on WSO2’s opinion on Agile Integration and API-oriented business contexts, in a world where integration needs are increasing with the blooming of systems and apps.
The three days of presentations comprised the strategic vision of WSO2 on integration, their architecture and applicability definitions, technical abilities and business applications of their products, and case studies of successful WSO2 implementations, presented by the customers themselves. The morning, lunch and afternoon breaks also contributed to creating a networking environment between partners and customers.
Moreover, an “Oxygen Bar” was available, where experts from all technological areas from WSO2 were constantly available for any additional information on the products or their use.
Day 1 – Digital Transformation
The first morning was filled with various keynotes, the first being presented by the CEO of WSO2, Tyler Jewell. In this keynote, the strategic vision of WSO2 for the next few years was presented, reinforcing the trend towards integration and the reasons that increasingly justify an “API first” approach by organizations. This same vision was supported by Massimo Pezzini, Vice-President of Gartner, with view of HIP (Hybrid Integration Platform) as a digital facilitator for organizations. In the afternoon, there were parallel streams with three different contexts: the red room had Integration and Architecture, the yellow room had Stream Processing and Identity Management, and the green room had Open Banking and success stories.
Day 2 – Agility in Integration
The second day had Agility as its main theme, and it started with two very interesting keynotes from Aria van Bannekum, founder of the Agile Manifesto, and Paul Fremantle, CTO and Co-Founder of WSO2. In the afternoon, there were again three parallel sessions: the red room was focused on API Management, the green room on success stories centred on the API ecosystem, and the yellow room on complete WSO2 product demonstrations.
Day 3 – Ballerina
The last day of the conference was integrated with the event Ballerina Day 2018.
Although it was complemented by exclusive sessions for debates on subjects related to the new partnership programme, this day was totally focused on Ballerina, an open-source and cloud-native programming language that WSO2 has been developing for the last three years. This programming language aims to address flaws created by “non-agile” middleware products and by current programming languages, which are too complex to deal with in integration scenarios. Ballerina promises to simplify this level of complexity and promote agility, providing middleware abilities with the minimal possible amount of code.
It is also oriented towards cloud and DevOps environments; therefore, it allows for integration with Decker and Kubernetes.
Content and Digital Coordinator