For decades, Ingka Group has been redefining how people around the world experience home living. The company is the largest IKEA retailer and represents 88% of IKEA retail sales, with nearly 400 stores and operations in 31 markets. Behind the furniture, flat-packs, and iconic blue-and-yellow storefronts lies a complex digital infrastructure connecting thousands of suppliers, logistics providers, and digital partners.

In today’s retail environment, partnerships are everything. Each product sourced, delivered, or stocked involves real-time coordination between multiple systems, powered by APIs.

But with hundreds of engineering teams building APIs independently across domains such as payments, fulfillment, and customer management, the team at Ingka Group needed a way to orchestrate this ecosystem.

At API Summit 2025, Soumitra Bhattacharya, Principal Software Engineer at Ingka Group, detailed how the company built the Ingka Partner Portal, a new platform powered by Kong Gateway and Solace to unify REST and event-driven APIs, enabling secure, consistent, and seamless collaboration with partners worldwide.

If your organization is trying to balance openness with control, Ingka’s journey demonstrates how strong governance can actually accelerate innovation.

As one of the largest global retailers, Ingka’s digital footprint spans thousands of services, APIs, and partner systems. Over time, this turned into a fragmented ecosystem where each team followed its own documentation, authentication, and publication process.

“We have hundreds of teams building APIs for their own business areas,” Bhattacharya said. “We can’t just create a simple API catalog — we needed something more, an integration ecosystem that brings everything together.”

While the company operated a centrally managed Kong API gateway, some business units maintained self-hosted gateways for legacy or regional reasons. This caused inconsistent partner experiences and governance gaps across the landscape.

“Even though we have a centrally managed gateway, we also have fragmented gateways due to different needs,” Bhattacharya said. “We wanted partners to always experience the same authentication and subscription process, no matter where the API is hosted.”

The rise of event-driven architecture added another layer of complexity. Ingka used Solace’s event mesh to connect systems across on-prem and cloud environments, but securely extending that mesh to external partners required abstraction and governance.

To simplify connectivity, Ingka needed a unified partner platform that brought REST and event APIs under one roof while maintaining strong security, observability, and compliance standards.

Ingka Group’s answer was the Partner Portal, a single integration layer that connects partners to internal systems through a standardized, governed, and discoverable API ecosystem.

At the heart of the platform:

• Kong Gateway provides the secure, scalable entry point for all APIs, enforcing policies for authentication, authorization, rate limiting, and observability.

• Solace Event Mesh powers asynchronous communication across on-prem and cloud systems, serving as the backbone of Ingka’s event-driven architecture.

• The Solace Upstream Plugin for Kong bridges REST and event APIs, allowing partners to send or receive events securely through REST endpoints without direct broker access.

“When a partner logs into the portal, they see API products, logical groupings of APIs that represent business capabilities like fulfillment or payments,” Bhattacharya said. “Each has documentation, examples, and changelogs. Once they subscribe, they’re onboarded through a secure, automated approval process.”

The governance workflow ensures compliance and security at every step. Each subscription request passes through a cross-functional review team, including security engineers who assess data exposure and partner eligibility before access is granted.

“We created standard documentation templates and API standards,” Bhattacharya said. “Before publishing, teams must validate that their APIs comply. That’s how we maintain quality and consistency across hundreds of teams.”

REST meets Events

The most transformative step came from combining REST APIs and event APIs under a unified developer experience.

Through the Kong Solace Upstream Plugin, a partner can now publish events by simply making a POST request to a REST endpoint. Kong translates the payload into Solace’s native format, applies authentication, and routes it securely into the event mesh.

This innovation ensures protocol abstraction, stronger governance, and end-to-end observability, all while maintaining a simple, RESTful interface for partners.

With Kong and Solace, Ingka Group has built a partner platform that combines governance, simplicity, and scale while fostering a culture of collaboration across its engineering teams.

The impact spans both technology and business outcomes.

• Unified partner experience for REST and event APIs

• Consistent authentication and subscription workflows across environments

• End-to-end observability from Kong Gateway to Solace brokers

• Persistent connections, improving scalability and cost efficiency

• Standardized documentation and compliance across all API teams

“Bringing REST and event APIs together under one umbrella has made partner integration faster and safer,” Bhattacharya said. “For our developers, it’s standardization with flexibility. For our partners, it’s simplicity with trust.”

Beyond the metrics, the transformation reflects Ingka’s digital philosophy: building platforms that enable secure collaboration while empowering innovation.

“Our goal was to simplify the partner experience without compromising governance,” Bhattacharya said. “Now every API — whether REST or event — goes through the same security and review process.”

The result is a future-forward architecture where internal systems, partners, and external ecosystems can connect and innovate all under a unified, secure API framework.

“When we bring REST and event APIs together in one unified experience, that’s when real partnership happens," Bhattacharya said.

With Kong, Ingka Group has built a modern API ecosystem that moves at retail speed; one that is capable of powering millions of secure transactions, connecting partners seamlessly, and scaling responsibly across a global network.