The first thing you notice is the light—soft and golden, spilling through the conference hall windows in Colombo. It’s early, but not everyone’s face appears rested. The founder of WSO2, however, is smiling as he jokes about being the only one in the room who isn’t sleep-deprived. The laughter cuts through the haze of jet lag. This isn’t a typical corporate summit.
It’s a milestone gathering: 20 years since a small Sri Lankan software startup set out to rewrite how enterprises think about technology.
Today, WSO2 powers multiple industries across public sector, fintech, healthcare, retail, telcodigital infrastructure across 90 countries. And yet, even now, it’s the Founder and CEO. CEO, Sanjiva Weerawarana, stands in his trademark WSO2-branded T-shirt and jeans, telling a packed room: “We’ve never believed in locking you in. If you choose another partner one day, you should be free to do so. We hope we’ve earned your trust enough to stay.”
Across Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the UAE, digital transformation has become a national priority. At WSO2’s anniversary summit, regional partners and global architects debated how AI can accelerate change – if technology is open, adaptable and built on trust.
This is not Silicon Valley bombast. There are no promises of unicorns or moonshots here. Instead, there’s a quiet confidence in something that feels rare in tech: openness – not just as a licensing model, but as a philosophy.
Building tech that doesn’t chain you
The draw, according to one Middle Eastern partner, isn’t just the code. It’s transparency in an age where black-box software feels like a geopolitical risk.
“Trust is earned, not sold,” said a customer of WSO2 during a panel interaction. “You don’t just pick a tech vendor based on features. You pick the one you can call at 3 a.m. and know they’ll show up.”
He leans forward, recalling a recent client crisis: “WSO2’s support team? They answered an E3 ticket in under 30 minutes. That’s not SLA language – that’s trust, in action.”
The conversation meandered from technology to relationships and back again. In markets like the Gulf, where regulation, compliance and national security often intertwine, a vendor’s code matters—but its character matters more.
Modernisation: The messy, human journey behind the buzzword
Later in the day, another speaker posed a question that hung in the air: “What’s the difference between a 10-year-old enterprise app and an ‘80s sports car?”
Pause. A few chuckles. Someone in the back muttered, “Both break if you push them too hard.”
Exactly. Application modernisation, the summit’s unsexy, beating heart, isn’t a shiny cloud migration slide. It’s the reality of trying to make old, mission-critical systems bend to the demands of a digital-first economy. Black Friday traffic surges that crash checkout portals. Banking apps that can’t talk to new payment rails. Healthcare records are stuck in silos.
“Modernisation isn’t a switch you flip,” said one of WSO2’s solution architects. “It’s a journey. And most of it is fixing invisible plumbing, so businesses can finally build what matters.”
What matters, of course, isn’t APIs or integrations in themselves. It’s what sits on top of them: new banking experiences in Oman’s Vision 2040, cross-border trade platforms, digitised citizen services. Every success story here came wrapped in human stakes—patients accessing care faster, governments simplifying bureaucracy, startups scaling overnight without collapsing under their tech debt.
AI without the hype
There was an AI talk, naturally – there always is these days. But it wasn’t pitched as magic. Instead, it was treated as a tool, often invisible, making the grunt work less painful. One demo showed a healthcare system mapping patient records from one standard to another in seconds, powered by machine learning. “It used to take weeks,” the presenter said. “Now it takes a prompt.”
The underlying message: AI isn’t going to build the future for you. It won’t design your banking platform, reimagine your citizen services, or invent your business model. But it can clear the rubble, eliminate manual drudgery and let humans get back to solving real problems.
20 years later, still a startup at heart
WSO2 isn’t young anymore – 20 years is a lifetime in software. And yet, the energy in Colombo didn’t feel corporate. It felt like a room full of builders, still restless, still asking why things are done the way they are, still unwilling to accept “that’s how it’s always been.”
“We’re structured enough to deliver, but unstructured enough to evolve,” Sanjiva said, reflecting on the company’s philosophy. “If we were the same company we were ten years ago, we’d already be dead.”
The summit closed not with a product pitch, but a reminder that technology, especially open technology, isn’t about control, but about longevity and freedom. And that modernisation, AI and digital transformation are only meaningful if they make life tangibly better – for businesses, for governments and for people trying to get things done.
There were no illusions of a perfect future. But there was a sense that the future could at least be built honestly, openly and together.
