Kong Inc. Unveils Cloud Connectivity Innovator Award Winners at Virtual Kong Summit 2021

Kong Inc., the cloud connectivity company, today announced the winners of its inaugural Cloud Connectivity Innovator Awards program at Kong Summit 2021. The awards recognize individuals and teams who have accelerated digital transformation during the past five years using Kong products, including Kong Konnect, Kong Enterprise, Kong Gateway, Kuma or Insomnia.

The Cloud Connectivity Innovator Award honorees include:

Australia Post (Top Overall Enterprise Innovator): Kong Konnect powers government agency's self-service API-first platform, offering developers autonomy and future-proof scalability

• Australia Post provides postal service to more than 25 million customers and has more than 4,300 locations. The organization needed an API gateway that could scale to meet future demands, provide automation capabilities for developers and support a multi-cloud environment.
• Using Kong Konnect, Australia Post has reduced its developer onboarding time from 5-10 days to just a few minutes. Because Kong is deployment-agnostic and can govern how APIs are used and secured through industry-standard authentication and authorization plugins, Australia Post has been able to effectively decentralize its applications across multiple clouds and enable teams to proactively resolve business challenges within their environment of choice.

Standard Chartered Bank (Top Financial Innovator): Kong Gateway deployed as-a-service accelerates global bank through its application transformation journey across 50 markets

• Standard Chartered Bank offers international banking and financial services in more than 50 markets. The bank needed an API gateway solution that could accelerate its application transformation journey and provide one-touch production deployments.
• Using Kong Gateway as-a-service provides a uniform way to publish, govern, secure and consume APIs across the bank's more than 400 applications. Kong's microservices-based approach has increased API adoption in the bank by 5x and reduced the time to publish and consume APIs from a few days to hours.

Koyeb (Top Open Source Innovator): Open source Kuma powers a startup's ?zero-config' serverless platform that gets users up and running instantaneously

• Koyeb delivers a serverless platform that helps developers deploy applications globally. The team needed to build a global, scalable, multi-tenant service mesh that could easily integrate with its existing technology stack.
• Koyeb turned to open source Kuma, the universal service mesh, to support multi-zone deployments out of the box and serverless workloads across clouds and continents. Kuma provides a ?zero-config' set up for Koyeb's end-users, saving them weeks of work and engineering resources. Without Kuma, Koyeb would have postponed the zero-config capability by a year.

Angelo Ovidi at Kore Labs (Innovator of the Year): Kong Gateway 'USB hub' deployment offers complete modularity and the ultimate in customer control

• Kore Labs, provider of digital tools for creating, managing and monitoring financial products in a controlled environment, has adopted a modular Kubernetes approach that is designed to be portable, deployable and reusable. Kore's solution was literally built around Kong Gateway, using an innovative ?USB hub' approach in which new functions can be added as microservices without impacting the rest of the platform.
• Kong's API platform supports multi-cloud and hybrid environments, providing complete modularity and the ability for customers to control where their data resides. Chief Architect and Head of Technology Angelo Ovidi was named the Cloud Connectivity Innovator of the Year for leading his team to establish an API-first, cloud-first, cloud-agnostic architecture. In the words of his team, "Angelo's proven ability to drive technology innovation has dramatically increased Kore's ability to satisfy customer requirements, pivot with agility, cut costs and accelerate growth."

Cloud Connectivity Innovator Award submissions were evaluated based on the strength of their use case, including the challenges faced, the uniqueness of their solution and other differentiators that showcase a commitment to creating superb end-to-end connectivity while navigating modern microservices architectures. More details on the 2021 winners and videos from the awards ceremony will be available on the Cloud Connectivity Innovators Awards site.

"Kong is delighted to celebrate our inaugural Cloud Connectivity Innovator Award winners, as they showcase best-in-class examples of how developer teams can overcome the challenges of navigating modern architectures," said Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder of Kong Inc. "We are excited to help countless more companies in their digital transformation journeys, and we cannot wait to see the innovation that comes next from Australia Post, Kore Labs, Koyeb and Standard Chartered Bank."

The winners were publicly recognized during an awards ceremony at virtual Kong Summit 2021 and received a trophy and a donation to a charity of their choice from Kong on their behalf.

About Kong Inc.

Kong creates software and managed services that connect APIs and microservices natively across and within clouds, Kubernetes, data centers and more using intelligent automation. Built on an open source core, Kong's cloud connectivity platform enables digital innovation by allowing organizations to reliably and securely manage the full lifecycle of APIs and services for modern architectures, including microservices, serverless and service mesh. By providing developer teams with unprecedented architectural freedom, Kong accelerates innovation cycles, increases productivity, and seamlessly bridges legacy and modern systems and applications. For more information about Kong, please visit https://konghq.com or follow @thekonginc on Twitter.