Winter
January 2025: A costly license renewal looms. Wavelo takes a leap of faith and commits to OpenBao.
Initial Partnership: Wavelo partners with open source specialist Adfinis to bridge OpenBao's gaps.
Open source runs through Wavelo's data centers, infrastructure, core services, and customer collaboration. As a cloud-native, event-driven software suite, Wavelo leads in enabling cloud service and telecom providers to take back operational control and scale Agentic AI safely.
As part of Tucows – a public internet pioneer with hundreds of millions in annual revenue – Wavelo combines enterprise-grade stability with open source flexibility, offering customers a low-risk path to replace rigid, proprietary 'consultantware'.
Facing a strict ten-month deadline and rising proprietary license costs, Wavelo partnered with Adfinis to migrate its proprietary secrets management platform to OpenBao™. Adfinis co-developed the missing enterprise features, including multi-tenancy and horizontal scalability, by contributing them directly to the OpenBao open source project. The migration eliminated vendor lock-in, halved maintenance overhead, and cut licensing costs by 60%.
Wavelo had long run a proprietary secrets management platform for its secrets and identities, mainly for compliance reasons. A move back to open source had been in the works for some time. Rising license fees and tedious vendor negotiations made the decision easier and, as the team put it, "once again moved us toward the open source tools we wanted anyway". Wavelo selected OpenBao as its target, then set out to address five things:
Culture, trust, and deep technical authority made Adfinis the clear choice. We clicked immediately on mindset, but what really set them apart was their open, collaborative style – and their unmatched expertise as leaders in OpenBao. They’re effortless to work with, completely open to any discussion, and ready to solve complex challenges alongside us without friction.
Hanno Liem | Chief Technology Officer at Wavelo
Wavelo engaged Adfinis in 2025 to co-create its envisioned OpenBao platform. The team needed a partner who could close OpenBao's enterprise gaps, not only deploy the platform. Adfinis fit. As a co-maintainer of OpenBao and member of its Technical Steering Committee, Adfinis contributes features directly to the OpenBao project. A brief first exchange was enough to start.
Adfinis collaborated with the OpenBao community to deliver the missing pieces:
Together, Adfinis and Wavelo deployed the new platform on its infrastructure and fully decommissioned the legacy system. The migration delivered:
With 10+ years operating mission-critical secrets management platforms, Adfinis is an OpenBao co-maintainer and Technical Steering Committee (TSC) chair, providing expert and hands-on guidance, 24/7 enterprise support, and software assurance to adopt open, simple, and reliable secrets management. Wavelo gains a partner that shapes OpenBao itself, which secures long-term innovation and support.
1. Open Source First
Open source is a core principle for both Wavelo and Adfinis. It frees Wavelo from vendor lock-in and gives the team full control over its stack. OpenBao sits under the Linux Foundation, with no single vendor steering its direction.
2. Architectural Sovereignty
Wavelo wanted its architecture decided by its own needs, not by a license or contract. The adoption of OpenBao put those decisions back in Wavelo's hands.
OpenBao™ is a modern and community-driven open source secrets and encryption management system that centralizes key management, credential generation, and encryption. Adfinis is an OpenBao co-maintainer and Technical Steering Committee (TSC) member providing expert guidance and enterprise support to adopt open, simple, and reliable secrets management.
Adfinis operates, monitors, and maintains your OpenBao platform 24/7, including upgrades and security patching. This frees your team for its own work, while you keep full control of your stack.
Adfinis integrated missing enterprise features directly into OpenBao as a co-maintainer: multi-tenancy, horizontal scalability, CLI tooling, Consul plugin, and more, all contributed upstream to the community.
A step-by-step breakdown of how Wavelo and Adfinis closed critical enterprise feature gaps, executed the platform migration, and established 24/7 managed operations within a strict 10-month deadline.
January 2025: A costly license renewal looms. Wavelo takes a leap of faith and commits to OpenBao.
Initial Partnership: Wavelo partners with open source specialist Adfinis to bridge OpenBao's gaps.
May 2025: First builds of OpenBao 2.3 include namespaces support (multi-tenancy) are available.
Deployment Preparation: Wavelo begins internal deployment preparation while Adfinis adds more features.
August 2025: Adfinis develops the Consul plugin and integrates namespaces into the UI.
Additional Capabilities: Wavelo funds Adfinis to co-develop horizontal read scalability and kick-off UI 2.0.
October 2025: First builds of OpenBao 2.5 including horizontal read scalability are being tested.
The Migration: Wavelo successfully migrates to OpenBao within its strict 10-month deadline.
February 2026: OpenBao 2.5 launches with full horizontal read scalability support, closing all gaps.
Long-term Partnership: Wavelo deepens partnership with Adfinis including 24/7 OpenBao enterprise support.