Sanjiva Weerawarana

Sanjiva Weerawarana is a CEO, software developer and open-source software evangelist. He is known for his work on Web Services standards including WSDL, BPEL, and WS-Addressing. He is the founder, chairman and CEO of WSO2, an open-source middleware company, and creator of the Ballerina programming language. His involvement with the Apache Software Foundation includes project work on SOAP, Apache Axis and Apache Axis2.

He has been instrumental in positioning Sri Lanka as a global technology center: In addition to founding WSO2, he started the Lanka Software Foundation to provide a platform for Sri Lankan software engineers to contribute to global open source initiatives. A staunch supporter of education and transparency, he is the founder of the Avinya Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to assisting underprivileged students.