The open source tool KumuluzEE, developed by the Slovenian startup company Sunesis, is the first tool in the world to allow developers to develop microservice on a cloud on the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) platform. The main developer of the tool, Tilen Faganel, and his mentor, prof. dr. Matjaž B. Jurič from UL FRI, received the most prestigious award for Java innovations, Java Duke's Choice Award yesterday, at the JavaOne 2015 conference in San Francisco. This is an award considered to be to the Java ecosystem what an Oscar is to the film industry. Annually, this year for the thirteenth time, it is given by a community of esteemed Java experts who develop the most popular programming language in the world. In the past, the award was given to solutions such as Hadoop, Apache TomEE and Jenkis, today known and used by practically every developer. This time for the first time, it went into the hands of a Slovenian company that is from now on considered to be an elite member of the global Java ecosystem. The Slovenian startup community also confirmed the incredible developmental and market potential of startup Sunesis, member of the Venture Factory university incubator. Last year, the company placed amongst the finalists of the competition Start:up Slovenia as well as received Slovene Enterprise Fund's startup grant P2. 

Global recognition and confirmation 

The main value of the Java Duke's Choice Award for the young startup company Sunesis is undoubtedly its quick transition from relative anonymity to priceless global recognition. And of course it's the best possible confirmation of the high innovativeness of the product that sets new trends in cloud solution development. At the same time, it's also a confirmation of the hard work and persistence of the main developer, Tilen Faganel, and his mentor, prof. dr. Matjaž B. Jurič from the Ljubljana Faculty of Computer and Information Science.
 

Catapulted amongst the elite members of the Java ecosystem 

Recipients of the Java Duke's Choice Award are considered to be elite members of the Java ecosystem. A lot of solutions that received this award in the past, such as for example Hadoop, Apache TomEE and Jenkis, are global hits today. This award will help Sunesis conquer markets abroad, especially in the US, because it doesn’t only bring priceless recognition to the Kumuluz brand but also offers additional confirmation of the technical excellence of the KumuluzEE tool.
 

Promising future 

“For us, the award doesn't only mean international confirmation of the innovativeness of the KumuluzEE tool. I prefer to take is as a prediction that Sunesis will also walk the path of the previous award recipients and massively establish itself amongst developers who will use our solution to develop better apps and services on the computer cloud,” said Tilen Faganel when he received the award.

The award is well-deserved! 

Statements given by numerous esteemed experts from the Java community are also riveting. We list a few of those that will definitely help the Sunesis team the most when conquering the American market:

• Reza Rahman, Java EE evangelist from Oracle Corporation: “KumuluzEE is a great community effort to power Java EE API based microservices, especially on the cloud”
• Arun Gupta, vicepresident of Couchbase: “KumuluzEE truly brings microservice architecture to Java EE. Maven-ready, Fat JAR, modularized dependencies, Docker-ready, and pluggable web container makes it ready to be deployable in any cloud environment. If you are building apps using Java EE, start your microservice journey with KumuluzEE!”
• Martijn Verburg, CEO of jClarity and Java Champion said: “Although Java EE specifications and application servers have come down in size, it still wasn't a first technology choice for today's micro services developer when compared to say NodeJS or Spring Boot. That's now changed as KumuluzEE brings a light-weight, application server free way of creating micro services with the full power of Java, the JVM and JavaEE behind it! This innovative stack is truly a worthy Duke Awards winner in 2015”.

Quickly and safely through the process of digital transformation 

Products developed and marketed by Sunesis under the umbrella brand Kumuluz cover an entire spectre of development and integration solutions for the cloud. Besides the awarded tool for the development of microservice KumuluzEE, they also include the integration platform Kumuluz and the tool for user interface development, KumuluzUI. Their use significantly simplifies and even more than halves the development time for companies transitioning into the digital economy. At the same time, it gradually, reliably and safely leads them through the process of digital transformation.

On the way to becoming a leading cloud company 

All three products are most interesting for the general public because with them, the Slovenian company is paving its way to becoming a leading cloud provider on the global level, efficiently solving the problems of development and app integration for working on computer clouds. At the same time, they offer a comprehensive platform that exploits all cloud advantages and enables integration with mobile devices, web, social media, IoT devices and Big Data analytics. For a more expert public, here are their key use and competitive advantages:

• Kumuluz, an open-source free tool for the development of microservices is the first to offer the development of microservices for the cloud by using the JavaEE platform. Besides being adapted to the cloud, microservices have a multitude of other advantages – they improve architecture flexibility, each microservice can be developed independently, they also make upgrading versions and technologies easier. Solutions developed with the use of microservices are adapted to clouds and exploit all advantages of cloud platforms.
• Kumuluz integration platform addresses the integration challenges between SaaS applications and/or on premise applications as well as supports API management. Unlike the classic approach, where all apps are connected to each other, it integrates apps according to the hub principle, which means that each app only needs one connection.
• KumuluzUI user interface development tool significantly simplifies and accelerates the development of responsive user interfaces for business apps, adjusted to mobile devices and tablets as well as personal computers. 

A highly trained team in the right place at the right time 

Sunesis team believes that the esteemed award they received yesterday in San Francisco at the JavaOne 2015 conference will importantly influence the number and reach of their projects next year. That the young excellent experts are in the right place at the right time is also proven by the fact that companies have lately been massively moving their apps to the cloud. With this, the needs for developing SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) apps on the cloud are increasing, while their integration is also becoming more important.
 

The company is persistently developing and expanding

Company Sunesis, member of Venture Factory, the business incubator of the University of Maribor, is also persistently developing and expanding. From last spring, when it was a finalist of the national competition Start:up Slovenia and received Slovene Enterprise Fund's startup grant P2, to this autumn, it expanded the team as well as its product and service portfolio. It's successfully collaborating with several Slovenian companies and some companies abroad, and it was this year that it successfully conquered the Austrian market.
 
The official message of the Oracle corporation about the award recipients will be published in the afternoon on: https://www.oracle.com/search/press

Stanislava Vabšek

Communications and PR Start:up Slovenija

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