Mastering Intelligent Digital Experiences with Platformless Modernization

In today’s fast-evolving technological landscape, modernization isn’t just about upgrading systems—it’s about rethinking how organizations create value by delivering exceptional digital experiences. Platformless Modernization takes a revolutionary approach, focusing on outcomes rather than infrastructure, enabling businesses to remain agile, scalable, and competitive.

Tailored for IT leaders who are driving strategy, this slide deck explores how Platformless Modernization leverages cloud-native and AI-driven practices to simplify complexity, enhance adaptability, and accelerate value delivery. Through a blend of technical insights and strategic frameworks, you’ll gain actionable tools and methods to align modernization efforts with your organization’s business goals.

Key Takeaways:

Strategic Approaches: Understand how Platformless Modernization aligns IT strategy with business outcomes, ensuring every initiative drives measurable value.
Simplified Complexity: Learn how platformless approaches eliminate the overhead of managing infrastructure while enabling rapid solution delivery.
Cloud-Native and AI Practices: Explore patterns and tools that leverage cloud-native architectures and AI-driven intelligence to enhance scalability and adaptability.
Future-Proofing IT Investments: Discover how to build architectures designed to evolve with changing market dynamics and technology trends.
Agile Innovation: Gain insights into creating a culture and processes that foster continuous improvement and innovation in IT delivery.

1. Mastering Intelligent Digital Experiences
with Platformless Modernization
Asanka Abeysinghe
CTO, WSO2
Feb, 2025
 © 2025 WSO2 LLC.Commercial in Confidence / Confidential / Not for Redistribution

2. Modernization
2
Platforms to platformless
How to modernize with a platformless platform
(Choreo by WSO2)
1
2
3

3. 3
Modernization is an
ongoing journey—not
just about migrating from
legacy systems, but
about continuously
evolving, adapting, and
pushing the boundaries
of what’s possible.

Photo by NEOM on Unsplash

4. 4
Customers’ digital experience journey
Customers do
everything
physically

None Contact

Use email or a
web form to
contact business
One or more
websites for
self-service
information
gathering

Information
Unified website
and/or app to
interact with the
entire business
with one identity

Experience
Transact

One or more
websites to
order, pay, etc.
for products &
services, often
with many several
identities
???

5. Agents that
perform tasks in
the business in
collaboration
with human
employees

Agents
5
Business’ digital maturity journey
Employees
do work
physically

None
Email

From one address for
the business to an
email per employee in
the business domain
Going beyond email
to collaboration with
email, calendar,
chat, docs and more

Collaboration
With 10s to 100s of
business apps in
use, integrations
make it easier to
operate the
business

Integrations
Business
Applications

Finance, CRM, HR,
Sales and more
apps used by
employees to
digitize various
parts of the
business
Custom Apps
and APIs

Custom apps & APIs
to execute business
workflows that cross
multiple business
apps
???

6. 6
Business
Systems
Contact
Information
Transact
Experience
EmailCollaborationBusiness
Applications
Custom
Apps & APIs
Agents
Customer
Capability
Integrations
To deliver improved digital capabilities
to customers & employees, the
business needs to develop integrations
across business applications and
develop custom workflows / APIs / web
apps, mobile apps / agents

Becoming a software company

7. Becoming a software company: architecture journey
7
No Architecture

With the business using tens to
hundreds of business applications,
employees need to connect these
systems to get work done. Starting
with manual re-entry, integration
graduates to RPA or direct integrations
using the applications’ native
integration capabilities.
Point-to-Point
Integration

8. Becoming a software company: architecture journey
8
S
S C C
S S
ESB
Enterprise Service Bus

As integrations become more
complex, mission critical and security
challenging, an integration center of
excellence takes over to build & run
integrations as automations or APIs to
support business needs.
Point-to-Point
Integration
Centralized
Integration

9. Becoming a software company: architecture journey
9
C
S
INGRESS
API MANAGEMENT
C C
S
S S
EGRESS
API MANAGEMENT
S S
API Management

With the need for more real-time
automations and experiences, APIs
become the new foundation of the
business’ composability architecture.
Managing APIs (including integrations
as APIs) that the business offers and
consumes provides IT with a central
governance model along with better,
unified identity management for both
employees and customers.
Point-to-Point
Integration
Centralized
Integration
Centralized
Governance

10. Becoming a software company: architecture journey
10
Cell Based Architecture

With different business domains
needing to operate at their own rate &
pace of innovation, centralized
governance transforms to a structured
decentralized model built on cells. This
allows different parts of the business
to operate with the autonomy they
need but without incurring technology,
architecture or security liability for the
organization.
S
S
I
Point-to-Point
Integration
Centralized
Integration
Centralized
Governance
Decentralized
Governance

11. Becoming a software company: cloud journey
11
On-premises Hybrid Cloud Repatriation Hybrid
Privately managed
infrastructure hosted
in dedicated data
centers
Integration of
on-prem and cloud
resources for
workload flexibility
On-demand,
scalable computing
services managed by
providers
Moving workloads
from cloud back to
on-prem
Bursting to cloud and
selectively moving
workloads as
needed

12. Becoming a software company: platform journey
12
SERVERS VIRTUAL MACHINES
CONTAINERS &
KUBERNETES
IDP
PLATFORMS
Reduce hardware
dependency and improve
resource utilization by
running multiple OS
instances on shared physical
infrastructure
Shift to modular,
portable workloads
with container
orchestration, enabling
scalability, resilience,
and immutability
Abstract complexity and
enable developer
self-service by automating
infrastructure, standardizing
operations, and embedding
best practices

13. 13 Photo by Sergio Teixeira on Unsplash
A platform is a support structure that
increases the e?ectiveness of a community.”
- Dave Grey
“

14. Platform as the foundation,
every enterprise is building or buying one

14
Platform
Digital Experiences

15. 15


Platform in action


Business Platform
Technology Platform
Digital Experiences
This layer should
disappear from focus
and deliver a
platformless
experience
This is what
differentiates you from
your competitors and
where your focus
should be.
Product
Owners
Chief
Architect
Platform Engineering
Team

16. 16


Platform must be purpose-driven


Business Service Platform
Internal Developer Platform
Digital Experiences
This layer should
disappear from focus
and deliver a
platformless
experience
This is what
differentiates you from
your competitors and
where your focus
should be.
Product
Owners
Chief
Architect
Platform Engineering
Team

17. Building platforms distracts digital experience builders!
17
Digital experience builders
Product Owner Developer

18. How do you make the platform
disappear from focus?

19. 19
PLATFORMLESS
We call this “Platformless”. That doesn’t mean the platform vanishes completely. Rather, by
building the right boundary we can hide it from our consciousness and therefore remove the
complexity it brings.
Photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash https://wso2.com/what-is-platformless/

20. Platformless
20
Delivered by platform engineering
An Experience:
Consumed by digital experience builders
●Shifts focus of digital experience builders from platform concerns to application development.
●Reduces cognitive load on developers by providing an end-to-end, frictionless, self-service experience.

21. Explore our platformless manifesto
21
Weerawarana, S., Fremantle, P. & Abeysinghe, A.
(2023, November 6). Platformless. WSO2 GitHub.
https://github.com/wso2/reference-architectur
e/blob/master/platformless.md
Openly available under CC BY 4.0 - contributions
and enhancements welcome via pull request!

22. ●Setup
○Add DNS records (fully automated for
most registrars)
○Add your users
●Operate system
●Use
○Discuss etiquette
○Discuss sharing
○Discuss knowledge management
Enterprise collaboration is now platformless
22
●Setup
○Select and deploy email (SMTP server,
spam tools, antivirus, …), chat server,
calendar, file shares
○Set up shared authentication with LDAP
and integrate
○Install multiple clients
●Operate system
○Software maintenance
○Spam & antivirus maintenance
○Backup and restore
●Use (with difficulty)
Before
With or

23. ●Setup
○Add DNS records (fully automated for
most registrars)
○Add your users
●Operate system
●Use
○Discuss etiquette
○Discuss sharing
○Discuss knowledge management
●Setup
○Select and deploy email (SMTP server,
spam tools, antivirus, …), chat server,
calendar, file shares
○Set up shared authentication with LDAP
and integrate
○Install multiple clients
●Operate system
○Software maintenance
○Spam & antivirus maintenance
○Backup and restore
●Use (with difficulty)
With or
Enterprise collaboration is now platformless
23
Just Collaborate!
Before

24. 24https://wso2.com/choreo/
Choreo allows you to
focus just on creating and
delivering awesome
digital experiences.
Choreo is an AI-Native Internal Developer Platform
as a Service that facilitates enterprise software
engineering and software delivery & operations.

25. Traditional Software Manufacturing Process
Delivering digital applications from coding and development to production
and delivery


Abstracts and consolidates the capabilities of multiple tools into a single
platform to
get applications and services up and running quickly


Built by productizing 15 years of experience helping customers
create their own internal platforms
JUST ADD
DEVELOPERS
…And out comes
results
Coding &
Development
Production
& Delivery


Develop



Deploy



Manage



Reuse



Design



Observe



Govern

Choreo: Solving cloud native software challenges
Choreo consolidates the capabilities of multiple tools that customers stitch together to build these platforms
25

26. Digital Experiences
26
Your digital business, with Choreo
Internal Developer Platform
Enterprise Software Engineering
Software Delivery & Operations

27. Refine modern software delivery &
operations
●Developer self-service
●Containerization & Kubernetes
●CI/CD & GitOps
●Resource optimization
●Multi-cloud, multi-environment
●Observability & alerting
●Config & secret management
●Resiliency, scalability & HA
●Operational & business insights
Establish your enterprise software
engineering practice
●API-first development
●Domain driven design
●Microservice architecture
●Test driven development
●Automated DevOps
●Secure by default
●Version management
●Iterative architecture
●AI augmented engineering
What does Choreo deliver?
27

28. What does Choreo deliver?
28
Marketplace
APIs | Events | Data
Domain A
S
S
S
Domain B
S
S
S
S
Engineering Operations
API design
API discovery
Application Developers
Zero trust
Resilience,
scalability & HA
API Gateway
Auth/Autz
Observability
CI/CD
S
S
S
S
S
S
A
V1
V2
S
Mesh
Cell A
Cell B
API-first
development
Version
management
Domain driven design

29. What is Choreo?
29

30. Make AI an integral part of your enterprise
architecture and software fabric
You
Your
customers
AI for Code Code for AI
We embed AI into our products, enable
natural language interfaces to streamline
development—automating repetitive
tasks, generating code, improving
debugging—and enable robust
governance to ensure best practices.
We empower you to deliver intelligent
digital experiences for your customers,
leveraging advanced logic, an AI
gateway for AI consumption, agent
security, and an Agent Builder for
LLM-based orchestration—moving
towards an ‘agentic economy.’
30

31. Choreo evolves with new capabilities, H1 2025
31

32. 32https://wso2.com/choreo/
●Improves developer productivity by simplifying developer workflow.
●Helps platform engineering to operate at scale without the complexity.
●Delivers modern AI & cloud native apps/services without the cognitive load.
●Provides a platformless experience.
How Choreo transforms your organization
JUST ADD DEVELOPERS.

33. 33
Platforms enable
modernization, platformless
simplifies it, and intelligence
accelerates it
Platformless
Modernization

34. 34
It’s time to go
platformless!