WSO2 has announced the promotion of Asanka Abeysinghe to the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) role. The announcement comes a week after Eric Newcomer stepped away from the role. Abeysinghe has worked for WSO2 for fourteen years.
The last eight years have been in increasingly senior leadership positions. He started in 2008 as an architect, only three years after the company was founded. For the last three years, he was Chief Technology Evangelist. Before that, he was Deputy CTO and VP of architecture. He, therefore, has a deep understanding of the technology that underpins the WSO2 platform
As its evangelist Abeysinghe has worked with many of the thousands of WSO2 customers. It includes the world’s largest corporations, top universities, and governments. Those customers have used WSO2 software to execute 60 trillion transactions and manage over 1 billion identities annually.
The WSO2 platform has enabled application development, API management, integration, and identity and access management (IAM) to harness the full power of their APIs to securely deliver their digital transformation initiatives.
Dr Sanjiva Weerawarana, WSO2 founder and CEO, commented, “Asanka has played a pivotal role in advancing our platforms, educating the market, and serving as a trusted advisor for enterprises navigating their digital transformations. As a thought leader on architectures for today’s digital demands with deep connections to our customers, Asanka is strongly positioned to spearhead the evolution and adoption of our next-generation solutions. It’s a genuine honour to have him serve as CTO.”
Before WSO2, he was Chief Software Architect at Ridgecrest Asia (Pvt) Ltd and worked at Affno, Teamwork and MobileMedia, beginning his career as a developer. Abeysinghe has a BSc in MIS from the National University of Ireland.
Looking forward
As CTO, Abeysinghe will focus on driving WSO2’s external architecture strategy. He will continue to advise clients on digital transformation and how to optimise WSO2’s open-source and SaaS platforms.
As a thought leader in the industry, he will also champion the cell-based architecture approach applied to the Choreo SaaS application development suite and the digital double concept informing WSO2’s Asgardeo SaaS for customer IAM (CIAM).
In a recent LinkedIn post, indicative of his position, he stated, “#cellbasedarchitecture is not only designed to be modular and scalable but also to support the principles of #reactivearchitecture.
“Reactive systems are responsive, resilient, elastic, and message-driven. By adopting a cell-based architecture approach, services are designed to be autonomous and message-driven, which aligns with the reactive manifesto’s focus on message-passing and event-driven architectures.”
Abeysinghe will also champion the company’s vision and WSO2’s corporate reference methodology for development, customer success, and implementation.
Abeysinghe commented, “At WSO2, we’re on a mission to simplify the creation of digital experiences for our customers as we expand our new generation of SaaS offerings and open-source software to help software development teams innovate faster.
“Just as we advise enterprises on delivering customer-centric digital applications, as CTO, my foremost priorities will include educating the market, channelling user feedback to product engineering, and delivering strategic advisory services to empower our customers with the essential foundation for success.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
Sometimes organisations overlook the obvious candidates for senior positions such as CTO. WSO2 has promoted a proven leader who deeply understands the technology underpinning the WSO2 platform. Moving forward, this will be an advantage and means the transition is smooth.
With over twenty years in the industry, Abeysinghe is also an accomplished speaker. He will continue to advocate WSO2 and its technology in his new role. WSO2 has widely promoted Abeysinghe to a role he seemed destined for. One question is whether he might have been poached had they employed another external CTO, which would have been a huge loss to the company.
