WSO2 stands for “Web Services Oxygenated” with the number “2” referencing the chemical symbol O2 for Oxygen, which harkens back to Weerawarana’s Web Services days, but a better, lighter, open-source version of it. The company competes in the fast-growing global market for integration platform as a service offerings, which was valued at $3.4 billion in 2021, and is projected to reach $37.9 billion by 2031, according to Allied Market Research.
Neither raising funds in the beginning or growing and managing WSO2 has been a straight line journey toward success for Weerawarana. He left IBM to create his own company with little to no financing. They brainstormed ideas, but with two conditions: it had to have a semantic meaning and the domain name had to be available. Finally, they came up with WSO2. “The name came from web service oxygen. That is why in the in the logo, the 2 is dropped like the oxygen symbol. And inside the O, there's a heartbeat sign. And that heartbeat sign represents support, which is our business model, because we were giving all our software away for free, then sell support,” says Weerawarana.
Yet the company hadn’t yet fulfilled its potential. Its products and technology were well received, but the company was suffering from a lack of market presence and sales. Weerawarana decided to step aside as CEO and the board brought in a CEO with sales and marketing experience. The new CEO didn’t work out as planned and the board decided to look for a new CEO. Then Covid hit in 2020 and the recruitment process came to a halt.