Kong Inc. Unveils Winners of the API Innovator Awards and Partner Awards

Winning companies are a sample of the groundbreaking work happening across Kong's global ecosystem

SAN FRANCISCO, September 29, 2022 — Today at the Kong Summit 2022 conference, Kong Inc., the cloud native API company, announced the winners of its second annual API Innovator Awards and inaugural Partner Awards.

The API Innovator Awards recognize teams and individuals who are navigating new and complex business challenges with the help of Kong solutions such as Kong Konnect, Kong Enterprise, Kong Gateway, Kuma and Insomnia. For the very first time, the Partner Awards spotlight companies in Kong's partner network that are supporting joint customer success across various regions.

The winners of these awards symbolize the strength and diversity of Kong's developer, customer and partner ecosystem, says Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder of Kong Inc. Its inspiring to see how these teams are leveraging Kong technology to tackle some of today's most pressing business problems and to drive customer success even in uncertain times.

It is a great pleasure for the TBC team to be acknowledged and recognized by Kong, says Bidzina Matsaberidze, CIO of TBC Bank. TBC chose to be the leading technology-driven company in our region and Kong's API gateway helped us to decentralize development work and remove the need for a centralized integration layer, which has not only streamlined innovation processes at the bank but also reduced costs by one-third. The award is great motivation for our team to pursue our main mission - simplify the life of our customers."

The API Innovator Award honorees include:

• Top Overall Innovator - Commercial:Alef Edge is building the first Private Mobile Network as a Service for enterprises, with the goal of simplifying the complexity of mobile networking and its standards. In the initial stage of development, Alef Edge used homegrown and managed tools, and manual deployments. This led to limited scalability and security, issues with versioning, and inconsistent policies for API access. With Kong, Alef Edge was able to achieve shorter time to market, improved visibility in API usage, and an enhanced self-service developer experience.
• Top Overall Innovator - Enterprise:The LEGO Group is looking at a future where large parts of its revenue could go through its gateway, and where kids around the world will rely on connectivity to their platform for their experiences. As the company grew and its digital footprint expanded, the team realized its central bespoke integration platform had become a bottleneck. The platform created complexities in data ownership, debugging, and all aspects of maintaining the platform. With Kong, the LEGO Group migrated to standardized APIs as integration points, built and maintained by the product teams themselves. Now, the company is equipped to build with resilience.
• Top Finance Innovator: Over time, TBC Banks IT infrastructure and processes had become increasingly complex and inefficient. With thousands of pieces of software and processes across the bank, bottlenecks had a direct impact on the business, as product launches and service offerings would be delayed. This led TBC on a digital transformation journey and it chose Kong to improve the banks API ecosystem, ultimately simplifying the daily lives of users. After implementing Kong Enterprise, TBC reduced time to market by 40%. Its operational lending API platform, which offers more power to control the movement of funds and loans, caters to 700,000 customers.
• Top Open Source Innovator: The backend infrastructure at CRED has more than 350 microservices that power different functionalities for various lines of businesses for CRED. Non-linear spikes in traffic within a short period were slowing down certain services and creating cascading failures on the CRED app, degrading the user experience. Kong enabled CRED to provide Quality of Service by disabling non-critical flows, saving the team 500 hours of manual monitoring and intervention.
• Top Public Sector Innovator: DWP Digital deliver the digital services for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Traditionally they were delivered in policy based silos, with many processes that relied on in-person contact and manual intervention. There was no single place to find what data or services existed, who owned them or how to access them. Working with Kong to provide a common API platform and tooling for connecting systems, DWP Digital are now processing over half a billion API calls each month. This has resulted in a more connected experience for citizens and millions saved on administration costs associated with manual checking processes.
• Innovator of the Year: Few people at Raiffeisen Bank International believed the Realtime Integration Center of Excellence (RICE) would be successful, but with Thomas Joham's unique drive and laser focus on customer needs, RICE was piloted during the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe. Thomas's team delivered 20 standard APIs to 12 network banks per country, based on real business demand, within the first year.

The Partner Award honorees include:

• Overall Partner of the Year: Amazon Web Services (AWS) has supported Kong throughout a number of achievements, such as key product support, as well as the development of Kong's framework for the AWS Cloud Development Kit. AWS sellers have been instrumental in Kong's success through its availability in AWS Marketplace, a digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors that make it easy to find, test, buy, and deploy software.
• Global System Integrator (GSI) of the Year: Over the past year, Wipro Limited has significantly focused globally on Kong and became Kong's most impactful GSI partner. With a result-oriented focus, Wipro Limited has mobilized people and resources to grow their Kong business, including building a practice with over 150 trained consultants and helping develop a three-way relationship with Wipro Limited, Kong and AWS.
• Regional Partner of the Year - Americas: SHI generated more resale deal flow than any other partner in North America, supporting Kong's growth across regions, industries and solution areas.
• Regional Partner of the Year - EMEA:Reply and their network of companies throughout EMEA is one of Kong's longest-standing partners in that region. Having sourced multiple deals for Kong with contract values of over half a million dollars, Reply has built an experienced team to implement end-to-end Kong projects.
• Regional Partner of the Year - APJ:MFEC Public Company Limited has relentlessly focused on customer success by continuously building a strong go-to-market team that helps customers re-imagine their businesses and reinvent their services driving significant success and keeping the APJ economy moving forward.
• Technology Partner of the Year:Red Hat has invested heavily in Kong and seen massive success across product integration, marketing and go-to-market programs. The company added Kong to its ISV Elite Partner tier and has been instrumental in Kong achieving product certifications for Ansible, Red Hat OpenShift Operator and Red Hat OpenShift on AWS (ROSA).

To learn more about Kongs Partner Program, please visit https://konghq.com/partners.

About Kong Inc.

Kong is the cloud native API platform with the fastest, most adopted API gateway in the world. Loved by developers and trusted with enterprises' most critical traffic volumes, Kong helps startups and Fortune 500 companies build with confidence — allowing them to bring solutions to market faster with API and service connectivity that scales easily and securely. Leaders like Nasdaq, PayPal, GE, Samsung, Expedia, GlaxoSmithKline, Rite Aid, Moderna, Wayfair, and Verifone trust Kong to help them modernize their tech stacks, adopt new technologies and meet customer demand quickly through APIs. For more information about Kong, please visit konghq.com or follow @thekonginc on Twitter.