Tough Competition Brings Out The Best

India vs Pakistan is big when it comes to anything. Cricket is no different to that and India vs Pakistan is one of the most hard fought contest you could ever find. India and Pakistan clashed in a crucial Asia Cup 2008 match yesterday. What a clinical chase it was by Pakistan who hunted down the mammoth 308 scored by India. Pakistan was under pressure as they had already lost to Sri Lanka and they needed a victory to keep there hopes alive of getting into the finals. Sri Lanka had already booked their place in the final.

On a placid batsman friendly wicket India posted 308. Chasing down anything over 300 is not easy and to do it under so much pressure takes a lot of courage. Whats more Pakistan were without their regular captain Shoaib Malik and it was Misbah-ul-Haq who had to fill his shoes. Misbah is new to the scene having played just 39 matches and he showed tremendous maturity in yesterday's Match.

What I want to highlight here is that Tough Competition Brings Out The Best. It can bring out the best of a person, company or even a Product. Thats exactly what happened in yesterday's match. Pakistan was under so much pressure and that brought the best out of Misbah-ul-Haq and Younis Khan.

The same can be said about software. Lets take the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) for example. We did some performance testing on comparing the WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) with some other Open Source and proprietary ESBs. If you take a look at Round 1 and Round 2 you would see that the WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) was the fastest. Now take a look at the latest (Round 3) results too. The proprietary ESB which was slower in the previous rounds showed better performance. Competition brought the best out of it. I'm pretty sure that this result will encourage our ESB team to perform better next time. Tough competition is always good and it helps us improve our selves.

The same can be said about the WSO2 Registry. This has stiff competition from Mule Galaxy another open source registry. You can see a comparison of the WSO2 Registry and Mule Galaxy here which was done by Deepal.