Yes, that’s where I’m landing.  I’ve known and admired Sanjiva since early in the XSL Working Group, and his year-old startup WSO2 is sure to be a rewarding place to work.  WSO2 is developing products around the Axis2 open-source Web Service Stack, and while Axis2 itself is open source, WSO2 plans to provide support and service to corporations making Axis2 a critical part of their infrastructure.  It’s a model that has worked well for MySQL and Red Hat.

My title is Director of Architecture, Mashup Technologies, and I’ll be working on ways to make the consumption of Web Services as trivial as possible, and the deployment of Web Services just as simple.  This is a perfect overlap for me - I’ve been working on Web Services, especially the Enterprise-level, back-office, strongly-typed variety for a long time, but my background and affinities are with the script-friendly, quick-and-easy, dynamically-typed web hackers.  If I’m successful, Web Services will become a more important part of the grass-roots Web toolbox.

Working at WSO2 will in some ways be completely different than working at Microsoft:

• Open Source Software versus Commercial Software (I know commercial isn’t quite right, as there is commerce in Open Source, but calling it Closed Source or Proprietary Software has a negative connotation that I don’t think is justified.  Neither model is inherently bad, they are just different.  In any case I’m looking forward to understanding the Open Source business and development models better.)
• Diplomacy versus Design (While I’ll continue to work on standards, the majority of my time will be devoted to designing new ways to make Web Services accessible to the grass-roots of Web developers.)
• Unstructured versus Bureaucratic (An organization the size of Microsoft requires a level of rigor, process, fixed roles, and yes even bureaucracy that I won’t miss all that much.  You can often get more done faster flying by the seat of your pants.  And you can have more fun doing it.)
• Time zones (I’ll continue to work at home in Auburn, but I’ll no longer be in the same time zone as the main office.  In fact, I’ll be 11 1/2 hours off.  That’s the only part of the new job that scares me!)

And in other ways it’ll be just the same:

• Web Services (I’ll be building on my recent experience rather than taking up something completely new like lion taming.)
• WS Description Working Group (I’ll continue to co-chair the WG, and in fact hope to be even more involved in proving implementation experience to move the specs out of Candidate Recommendation stage.)
• International travel (While I hope to reduce my travel somewhat, I still look forward to meeting my colleagues in exotic locations.  Now Sri Lanka will be on my repeat destination list!)

I’m very excited about this move, and it feels like it’s happening at just the right time for me.  Well, a few weeks later than I’d hoped, but now at last I’ve cleared the road and am ready to hit the gas.  Starting on Monday when I leave for the Apache conference in Austin.  If you’re in the area, let’s do tea!