Chief Guest

Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarna, Chairman and Chief Architect of WSO2 (https://wso2.com/about/team/sanjiva-weerawarana/) will be the Chief Guest and will deliver a guest talk at the opening ceremony of the SKIMA conference.

Sanjiva is the Founder, Chairman and Chief Architect of WSO2. WSO2 was founded by Sanjiva in 2005 with a vision to reinvent the way enterprise middleware is developed, sold, delivered and supported through an open source
model.

Prior to starting WSO2, Sanjiva worked for nearly eight years in IBM Research, where he focused on innovations in middleware and emerging industry standards. At IBM, he was one of the founders of the Web services platform, and he co-authored many Web services specifications, including WSDL, BPEL4WS, WS-Addressing, WS-RF and WS-Eventing. In recognition for his company-wide technical leadership, Sanjiva was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology in 2003.

Sanjiva also has been committed to open source development for many years. An elected member of the Apache Software Foundation, Sanjiva was the original creator of Apache SOAP, and he has contributed to Apache Axis, Apache Axis2 and most Apache Web services projects.

In 2003. Sanjiva founded the Lanka Software Foundation, a non-profit organization formed with the objective of promoting open source development, not usage, by SriLankan developers. He is currently its chief scientist and a director. LSF’s success stories include many Apache Web services projects and Sahana, the predominant disaster management system in the world. In recognition of his role in promoting
open source participation fr om developing countries, Sanjiva was elected to the board of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) in April 2005, where he served for two years.

Sanjiva also teaches and guides student projects part-time in the Computer Science & Engineering department of the University of Moratuwa, and he is a member of the university’s Faculty of Engineering Industry consultative board.

Prior to joining IBM, Sanjiva spent three years at Purdue University as visiting faculty, where he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1994.