The goal of Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) is to simplify how companies connect their applications and data. The promise for the first wave of iPaaS platforms like Mulesoft and Boomi was straightforward: a central platform where APIs, systems, and workflows could be managed together without writing code. Integrations would move out of developers’ hands and into drag-and-drop tools for admins and analysts.

In practice, most of the legacy iPaaS platforms fell short of that vision. They introduced proprietary runtimes and languages, rigid architectures, and specialized skill requirements that limited flexibility and speed once teams moved beyond simple use cases. Additionally, many customers have found that their spend on iPaaS has outpaced the perceived value that they have received from these tools. Legacy iPaaS has created massive value for enterprises, but companies today are demanding something better — more flexibility, less lock-in, and pricing that doesn’t become a tax on growth.

The need for a better model is more visible than ever today. Modern enterprises run on complex, API-driven platforms and are increasingly introducing AI-enabled workflows into core business systems. This shift demands fine-grained control, observability, and scalability. Legacy iPaaS platforms were not designed with this level of control and ownership in mind.

The next generation of iPaaS, driven by Kong and PolyAPI, takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of forcing integration logic into proprietary languages and opaque runtimes, modern iPaaS enables teams to solve big business problems using native languages, powerful tools, and a structured catalog that captures institutional knowledge without creating long-term lock-in.

PolyAPI is a modern iPaaS platform designed to run natively alongside Kong. It provides a clean execution layer for integrations, orchestrations, and backend services.

PolyAPI supports a flexible engagement model. Customers can build on the platform themselves, have a systems integrator use it, or work with Poly as a full-service integration partner that designs, builds, and operates solutions end to end. In every case, integrations are composed from reusable functions that act as the building blocks of services and workflows. These functions can be shared and extended across use cases, rather than duplicated for each new integration.

All intellectual property developed on the platform is fully owned by the customer. This preserves long-term control, eliminates vendor lock-in, and ensures integrations can evolve without being tied to a specific delivery model or proprietary runtime.

At a technical level, Poly treats integrations as real software. Services are written in TypeScript, Python, or Java using standard development tools and deployed as cloud-native workloads, allowing teams to use familiar practices like version control, testing, and observability instead of working inside a closed iPaaS runtime. Poly provides a large catalog of pre-trained API functions for major enterprise systems to accelerate development, while still allowing teams to implement and customize business logic where needed. As integrations evolve, Poly automatically maintains a structured catalog of APIs, webhooks, and custom functions that serves as the system of record for the integration layer and is used to generate typed SDKs for internal teams and partners. PolyAPI includes native primitives for configuration and state, using variables and tables to handle credentials, mappings, and reference data that would traditionally be embedded in iPaaS flows or custom code.

The outcome is an integration platform that delivers more control, consistency, flexibility, and speed. Organizations migrating from legacy iPaaS platforms to Poly typically reduce total cost of ownership by 40–60%, driven by a more scalable architecture, lower runtime costs, and fewer specialized skills required to build and operate integrations.

Kong Gateway is a core component of the Kong Konnect API and AI management platform, known for its platform-agnostic design, high scalability, and performance. Built on a plugin-based architecture, it centralizes critical API capabilities including authentication and authorization, rate limiting, caching, and request and response transformations. This makes it well suited for managing both modern microservices and traditional API workloads, including APIs exposed by iPaaS platforms such as PolyAPI.

Kong AI/MCP Gateway extends Kong Gateway to support AI-native applications and agent-based architectures. It provides connectivity and governance across a wide range of generative AI models, infrastructures, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools and servers. Built-in capabilities such as prompt governance, semantic processing, token-based rate limiting, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and PII protection allow organizations to experiment with AI while maintaining consistent security, cost controls, and compliance across all AI traffic.

With Kong governing API and AI traffic and PolyAPI executing the services behind it, teams now have a complete foundation for delivering production-grade integrations and AI-enabled workflows. The sections below illustrate how this combined stack translates into practical, real-world value for enterprise teams.

Kong and PolyAPI together transform iPaaS from a black box into a powerful development layer that accelerates innovation.

Kong provides the modern API control plane — secure, cloud-native, and scalable — giving teams confidence that every request, policy, and service is managed with precision. PolyAPI builds on that foundation, giving organizations freedom to design and deploy powerful integrations, orchestrations, and microservices that run behind those APIs.

Because PolyAPI is built on Kubernetes-native infrastructure, your services scale automatically alongside your APIs. Organizations can choose to run Poly as a fully managed service or deploy it in a self-hosted environment, based on their operational requirements.

Common use cases unlocked by running PolyAPI on top of Kong Konnect include:

• - **Service Development** - Build composable services, orchestrations, and microservices. These services form a durable execution layer that can be consumed by applications, partners, and increasingly by AI agents, without relying on proprietary runtimes or fragile point-to-point integrations.
• - **Operational Applications **- Create internal tools and operational UIs that sit directly on top of your APIs and business systems. Teams can operate multiple systems from a single pane of glass, with the ability to safely introduce AI-driven workflows for well-defined, controlled tasks.
• - **Workflow Automation **- Workflows are built as explicit, step-by-step processes with well-defined inputs and outputs. If desired, AI can be used selectively for specific processes while the underlying execution remains deterministic and reliable.
• - **Partner Enablement **-  Expose APIs through Kong with consistent authentication, policies, and observability, while Poly provides a modeled catalog of functions, typed SDKs, and human-readable documentation for those APIs.
• - **Vendor Management **- Create an abstraction layer between your technology and vendor systems to reduce lock-in risk and allow underlying systems, including AI providers, to evolve without end-customer disruption or full rebuilds. 

The enterprise stack is evolving fast. APIs have become the front door to every digital service, and the integrations behind them define how businesses actually operate. Yet too many teams are still held back by legacy iPaaS tools that slow innovation.

Kong Konnect and PolyAPI offer a different path. Together, they give organizations the control, visibility, and creative freedom to build on a scalable, modern architecture. The companies that act now will move faster and turn their integration layer into a competitive advantage. Those that wait will keep fighting the same bottlenecks and costs that have plagued iPaaS for years.

The future of connectivity is already here. It’s open, composable, and built by developers who expect more from their tools. Now is the time to modernize your integration and API strategy with Kong and PolyAPI.

### Next Steps

If you are interested in seeing how Kong and PolyAPI can support your enterprise API and integration use cases, reach out to your Kong account manager or contact us at sales@konghq.com.