Case Studies > Digicel Transforms Telecommunications with Kong

Digicel Transforms Telecommunications with Kong

Company Size

1,000+

Region

America

Country

Jamaica

Product

Kong Enterprise

Tech Stack

API Gateway
Microservices
Docker
Kubernetes

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Digital Expertise
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Services

Software Design & Engineering Services

About The Customer

Digicel is a telecommunications and home entertainment provider founded in Jamaica in 2001. The company's mission is to deliver the best network, services, and value to customers. Digicel has grown to provide services in over 30 markets across the Caribbean, Latin America, and Oceania regions. Within two years of launching in 2001, Digicel became a mobile subscriber market leader. Today, its mobile phone network serves over 13 million wireless customers. Digicel has invested over $5 billion in its business worldwide, building critical infrastructure and connectivity to the communities it serves.

The Challenge

Digicel, a telecommunications and home entertainment provider, embarked on an effort to launch a fully digital mobile network for its French West Indies region. The company's existing technology stack relied on a VPN network and ESB to expose services and faced issues with connectivity and functionality in microservices use cases. The company needed to adopt a microservices architecture to support this transformation and remain competitive. They were looking for an API gateway that would support their domain-driven design approach and work well with their architecture.

The Solution

Digicel adopted Kong Enterprise as their API gateway. Kong offered a simpler architecture and lightweight deployment for achieving the team’s vision of transitioning their monolithic architecture to microservices. Kong also worked well with the team’s plan to introduce their API gateway as an on-premise solution initially. With Kong, Digicel's team supported the launch by decoupling the Digicel French West Indies group’s business domain with one microservice. This incremental adoption of a microservice allowed a successful launch on an ambitious timeline for the project. Kong acted as the API gateway between wireless customers and Digicel French West Indies’ digital services. Digicel made use of Kong’s plug-in architecture to meet their business requirements, including security, logging, metrics, and integration to existing systems.

Operational Impact

Digicel French West Indies successfully launched a fully digital mobile service, using Kong as an API gateway.
This initial launch’s success gave the team the confidence to subsequently put Kong at the center of broader digital transformation efforts.
Several other web services were launched with Kong acting as API gateway.
Digicel is also in progress migrating from a CRM and ESB approach to a microservices architecture with Kong acting as an API gateway.

Quantitative Benefit