My Next Big Thing

Skating to where the puck is going to be

Some of you have noticed my professional interest has shifted. This week I joined WSO2 to help them achieve their next stage of growth.

I am thrilled about this move because the ever-increasing popularity of cloud services and cloud sprawl is triggering the need to integrate those exploding quantity of endpoints – APIs services, events, and data streams.  This is an important technology market, helping companies harness the power of the cloud to generate real business value. It's where the industry is headed.

For me, the opportunity to develop and shape new technology categories for integration, API management, identity and services analytics was too exciting to pass-up.  And WSO2 has a number of unique advantages that I found compelling – ranging from their suite of technologies to their open-source model (and culture) to.... well, stay tuned for a big announcement in the near future.

To be sure, there are already a number of industry players in the API and Integration markets. Most are either pursuing relatively straightforward SaaS integrations around a “hub” (think: SalesForce, WorkDay, Netsuite, Oracle) or building simplified “Citizen Integrator” templated approaches to Integration (think: iPaaS).

And if you somehow haven’t been reading about Containers, Serverless Architectures, IPaaS and others, you should know that the exponential trend toward more, smaller, cloud services is already upon us. Leveraging these technology resources will enable (if not accelerate) the trend away from large monolithic apps (and SaaS apps) toward more granular – and more flexible – services and APIs. And businesses that move in this direction will find themselves with a more agile IT that can respond/adapt to needs more quickly.

Continue to watch this space for tips and observations on WSO2, as well as about the API Integration space overall.