Sanjiva Weerawarana. CEO, WSO2

Sanjiva Weerawarana received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University in 1994. After 3 years at Purdue as visiting faculty, he joined IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, NY, USA in 1997 where he was until April of 2005 (working the last 4 years remotely from Sri Lanka). Sanjiva was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology in 2003. He is currently Chairman & CEO of WSO2, the open source SOA company he founded in 2005.

Sanjiva is a founder of the Web services platform and has authored many key specifications including WSDL, BPEL4WS, WS-Addressing, and WS-Eventing. He has contributed to implementations of many of these, including Apache SOAP, Apache Axis, Apache WSIF, the IBM Web Services Gateway and IBM BPWS4J. In March 2004, he and several other of IBM's Web services leaders jointly published a book on the overall architecture of the Web services platform. Sanjiva has published more than 50 refereed articles.

Sanjiva is very active in the open source world where he is a Member of the Apache Software Foundation and an Emeritus Board Member of the Open Source Initiative. He is also the Founder & Director of the Lanka Software Foundation, a non-profit foundation formed in Sri Lanka to promote open source participation from Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is now leading contributor to open source in Asia.

In his copious free time he also teaches in the Computer Science and Engineering at University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka and guides student R&D projects in distributed systems, programming languages and Web services.