Sri Lankan company expanding to Bloomington

After experiencing a 220-percent year-over-year increase in new customer bookings in 2012, Sri Lanka-based WSO2 is opening a new office in Bloomington.

WS02 is a software company that builds enterprise middleware, which are tools used to help people build software for themselves.

Outside Sri Lanka, the company has offices in California and the United Kingdom. Opened Oct. 25, its new office in Bloomington is where residents gathered to watch the traditional Sri Lankan oil lamp lighting ceremony for good luck to celebrate the opening.
“We are a global company, and a lot of our work is done in Sri Lanka, but a lot of our customers are here,” CEO Jonathan Marsh said.

Marsh said one of the advantages as a company in Sri Lanka is they have relationships with universities there.

“We have tons of internships, we have lots of research projects that go on and just an incredible recruiting pipeline for the top talent coming out of those universities into our company,” Marsh said.

Marsh said as the company expands to the United States, they hope to do the same thing in Bloomington.

“We will do well here if we can successfully recruit great talent to help us deal with our customers, to help support, consulting, solutions, architecture,” Marsh said.
Marsh said helping customers architect solutions, helping them with consulting and helping customers solve their issues is hard to do from Sri Lanka because of the different time zones.

“The main thing that we can do here easily is a little bit more customer facing,” Marsh said.

Marsh said Bloomington is attracting more tech companies, and many graduates who come to school at IU are having to go elsewhere to find work.

“I think we’re excited to find candidates that are interested in staying in Bloomington for a while,” Marsh said.

IU School of Informatics and Computing Dean Bobby Schnabel said this is the next step of what has been a great relationship.

“We have one of the world’s largest computing and information schools here in Bloomington, and one of our goals has been to grow a technical community in town that interacts with that school,” Schnabel said. “Very technical communities almost always have schools that they interact with, and conversely, great schools in the computing world almost always have broadening technical communities.”

Schnabel said there haven’t been that many technical jobs in Bloomington, so building up the supply of these jobs is beneficial.

Marsh said they want to start interviewing now for people who might graduate in December and also start interviewing now for people who might graduate in May in order to have 12 employees by next summer.

Sanjiva Weerawarana, founder, chairman and CEO of WS02, said he has had a long relationship with the computer science department at IU, as well as Indiana as a whole because he attended Purdue University to obtain his Ph.D. in Computer Science.
“It’s a place that I feel there’s a relationship with the University and the community,” Weerawarana said on why he moved here.

Another reason Weerawarana said he moved to Bloomington is because of the quality of life and the way people live in Bloomington.

“It’s a much better environment than California,” Weerawarana said.

Follow reporter Alli Friedman on Twitter @afreedz.