Case Study: Multinational Retailer achieves secure, scalable shared services with Akana API Gateway

Multinational Retailer - Customer Case Study

A £17 billion UK-based retail group operating more than 1,000 stores across Asia and Europe is undertaking a multi-year IT transformation to standardize SAP, mobile and web capabilities and achieve a single view of product and supply chain data. To enable group-wide integration, the IT team created a “Group API Framework” based on Shared Services, but faced challenges around securing and managing hundreds of API-enabled assets, preventing overload or abuse, and supporting faster app development with DevOps and microservices.

They selected the Akana SaaS API Gateway to provide centralized API management, real-time monitoring, policy hierarchy, and advanced threat protection. The Gateway enabled secure, scalable shared services and standardized API delivery, accelerating app development (CI/CD/DevOps), simplifying multi-unit API portals, and allowing protocol transformation from legacy SOAP to REST — with phased deployment starting in the UK and Ireland and rolling out to other countries.