Case Study: UK-based £17bn retail chain achieves secure, scalable API Shared Services and faster app development with Akana's SaaS API Gateway

Multinational Retailer - Customer Case Study

The client is a £17 billion UK‑based retail chain with more than 1,000 stores across Asia and Europe, undertaking a multi‑year IT transformation including an SAP rollout and a push to build mobile and web capabilities and a single view of product and supply chain data. To enable group‑wide integration they defined a Group API Framework based on Shared Services, but faced the challenge of securely managing access, preventing overload or failure of shared assets, and keeping API and development workflows efficient as they moved to DevOps and microservices.

To address this, they chose the Akana SaaS API Gateway to centrally manage, secure and monitor APIs. The Gateway enforces authentication/authorization and threat protection, supports policy hierarchy and protocol transformation (e.g., SOAP to REST), and provides real‑time dashboards and analytics—enabling faster DevOps-driven app development, standardized API portals, scalable Shared Services and reliable performance; rollout started in the UK and Ireland with wider deployment planned.