With Tungsten, WSO2 is offering a different twist on application servers, an analyst concurred.

"What WSO2 is doing with their non-J2EE app server is new, in that it's built from the ground up to support Web services implementations. J2EE comes with a lot of baggage from the pre-SOA days, since it's fundamentally based on the code portability value proposition of Java," which is write-once, run-anywhere, said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink, in an e-mail.

"SOA, however, is based on services, which are 'write once, access anywhere'," Blooomberg said.

WSO2, which has offices in Sri Lanka, Boston and the United Kingdom, plans to offer an open source middleware platform. The company plans to release an enterprise service bus named Titanium in the third quarter of this year and a server-side mashup and service composition platform called Tellerium in the second quarter of 2007.

Unlike other ESBs, Titanium will not be a rebranded JMS platform, Weerawarana said. It will mediate XML and MTOM (Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism) communications.