Kanchana Wickremasinghe, Vice President and General Manager of Choreo, WSO2, explains how the company creates awesome digital experiences quickly, easily and securely for startups enabling them to shrink their deployment time.
Can you discuss WSO2’s journey so far with our readers?
Founded in 2005, WSO2 enables thousands of enterprises, including hundreds of the world’s largest corporations, top universities, and governments, to drive their digital transformation
journeys—executing more than 60 trillion transactions and managing over 1 billion identities annually.
Using WSO2 for application development, API management, integration, and customer identity and access management (CIAM), these organisations are harnessing the full power of their APIs to securely deliver their digital services and applications. Our open-source, API-first approach to software that runs on-premises and in the cloud helps developers and architects to be more productive and rapidly compose digital products to meet demand while remaining free from vendor lock-in.
WSO2 has over 900 employees worldwide with offices in Australia, Brazil, Germany, India, Sri Lanka, the UAE, the UK, and the US.
What does the WSO2 for Startups offer?
The WSO2 for Startups offer is aimed at early-stage startups looking to build cloud native mobile or web applications in any industry.
With WSO2 for Startups, you can:
● Go-to-market faster: Reuse B2C and B2B sample app code specifically created for startups, which has all the functionality needed in a cloud native application.
● Get expert advice: Connect with experienced solutions architects who will help startups identify requirements and work on a proof of concept (PoC).
● Reduce total cost of ownership: Get free Choreo and Asgardeo credits and reduce the number of tools you need to build your solutions.
In this offer, we provide startups with the following benefits:
● $18,000 Choreo credits that can be used to create components like APIs, integrations, and microservices, or on pass-through infrastructure costs. This will be applied to the Pay-as-you-go tier.
● $15,000 Asgardeo credits that can be used on the monthly active user limit, which can be on any use case (B2B, B2C, or B2E). This will be applied to the Professional tier.
● 1:1 time with our solutions architecture team who will help you build a 1-month PoC.
● Access to our customer success team who will provide basic support worth $2,100 for 3 months.
What are some of WSO2’s best technologies that startups can use?
Startups face IT challenges that are unique to businesses of their size. They typically have limited technical resources and development budgets. In order to generate revenue, they need to get innovations off the ground as soon as possible.
This is where WSO2 technologies offer tremendous value. Our solutions enable even small organizations to shrink development and deployment windows for digital innovations to mere days instead of weeks and months. Key solutions in our portfolio for start-ups include:
- Choreo is a SaaS internal developer platform designed to accelerate the creation of digital experiences.
- Asgardeo is our SaaS customer identity and access management solution that secures access for consumers, business partners, employees, or APIs.
- Ballerina is an open-source programming language for the cloud that makes it easier to use, combine, and create network services.
How will these products add value to the business?
In most startups, developers need to quickly build their products and PoCs to test out their hypotheses in order to gain backing and funding. They have very little time and money to spend on their research and development. This is where Choreo and Asgardeo can help.
You can use Choreo to quickly build applications without worrying about underlying infrastructure technology like DevOps, CI/CD, API management, and integration. Choreo simplifies the complexity of cloud native app development, allowing startup developers to focus on the business logic and creating great digital experiences.
Asgardeo helps you set up simple, intuitive, and secure login experiences for any type of application including those built for end consumers, other businesses, or internal employees. With Asgardeo’s wizard-like flows, setting up identity management becomes very easy.
When is the right time startups should consider investing in these digital solutions?
To accelerate their time to market, startups should ideally invest in these digital platforms right from the ideation stage. This will enable them to rapidly build and test various features and functionalities, thereby enabling them to fine-tune the concept and potentially uncover additional areas for innovation as they progress.
What are some sectors that can use these products?
Today, digital technologies are pervasive in verticals. Therefore, both Choreo and Asgardeo can be used by startups to build any digital products irrespective of the industry.
However, additionally, we have some industry specializations such as healthcare accelerators for HealthTech companies to get going without having to build everything themselves, saving them even more time and money. We also have expertise in the finance industry that can help FinTech companies.
With the advent of AI-based attacks increasing, what are the new enhanced challenges startups are facing?
Security is not an afterthought in Choreo and Asgardeo, these products will help startups to build secure, scalable, and reliable applications much faster than other platforms.
Asgardeo also has several features built-in that help organisations secure their applications from threats that include account takeovers, to bot attacks and more. If additional third-party solutions need to be integrated into your applications, Asgardeo and Choreo can be leveraged to do this as well.
