The week before last I attended two very different conferences: the Open Source Summit in Minneapolis and WSO2con back here in Austin. A study in contrast: t-shirts and developer-heavy crowds at the first, button-downs and CTO/CIO types at the second. What they did have in common however was Open source (and not surprisingly a focus on AI).
Who is WSO2
If you’re not familiar, WSO2 is an open-source software company founded in 2005 that builds middleware and integration products: API management, identity and access management, and enterprise integration. Their current focus is what all of this means in an agentic world, as evidenced by the conference theme: “Building the Agentic Enterprise.”
Laying out the landscape
WSO2 did a good job mapping the trends in this new agentic world, with a light touch on their own products. It reminded me of the early days of cloud, when context-setting and education had to come first before the majority of enterprises could move. The overall message delivered was, the old way won’t work – agents demand a new mindset, new infrastructure, and a new digital platform. A few key callouts:
- We’re moving from an app-centric to an agent-centric architecture, and agents need an agent-enabled digital platform.
- This world requires infrastructure that hasn’t existed before. Not because the existing stock is broken, but because it was built for a very different kind of software.
- The software development lifecycle needs to be reimagined as an agent development lifecycle (ADLC).
OpenChoreo and a SUSE partnership
On the open source front, the big news was a partnership between OpenChoreo, a CNCF sandbox project out of WSO2, and SUSE. SUSE is combining OpenChoreo with the Rancher stack to deliver an open-source path from infrastructure to platform, with commercial support available. I’ll have a separate post on this shortly, including my interview with the OpenChoreo maintainers, Lakmal Warusawithana and Sameera Jayasoma. (And a fuller look at OpenChoreo itself to follow.)
What about culture?
The conference did a strong job laying out the technical and architectural changes, and the shift in mindset that enterprises need to make for agentic computing to take hold and actually be productive. What was missing was the cultural change required for any of it to stick.
As I’ve written before, I see five barriers to enterprise AI adoption. WSO2 covered three: security, data, and integration. The two that went unaddressed are organizational structure and culture. I talked with WSO2 leadership about this. They acknowledged the importance of both, but pointed to field-deployed engineers as the way they’re addressing it. That helps on the technical side, but does little for the broader enterprise.
WSO2 doesn’t have to own that part, but they do need to recognize how much it matters and find a partner who does. Without it, agentic computing stays stuck in pilot. And WSO2 is far from alone here. For agentic AI to move forward, organizational structure and culture have to be addressed by the broader industry, right alongside security, data, and integration.
Pau for now…
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