The Power of Architectural Rigor and Pragmatic Delivery
AHEAD has earned the Technical Excellence Award in the 2025 Kong Partner Awards, recognizing our deep architectural leadership and hands-on collaboration in helping enterprises modernize at scale with Kong’s platform. The award was presented at Kong’s Partner Summit in New York City, celebrating organizations delivering measurable innovation and customer impact in API and AI connectivity.
“Winning Kong’s Technical Excellence Award affirms the strength of our modern API and platform engineering approach,” said Nick Colyer, Vice President of Digital Engineering at AHEAD. “Our teams pair enterprise architecture rigor with pragmatic delivery so organizations can adopt Kong quickly, safely, and at scale in order to achieve their business objectives.”
AHEAD’s Technical Excellence distinction highlights our architectural vision and collaborative approach, enabling enterprises to modernize at scale with Kong technologies.
Empowering API-First Development for AHEAD Clients
This award underscores AHEAD’s ability to translate strategy into resilient, secure, and repeatable delivery patterns across Kong’s unified platform for API management, AI gateways, service mesh, and ingress controller. Together with AHEAD’s consultative expertise, the Kong platform accelerates time-to-value for clients while establishing robust operating models for long-term success.
“AHEAD represents exactly how Kong envisions partnership in this new era of API and AI connectivity,” said Ken Kim, Senior Vice President of Business Development at Kong Inc. “Their technical leadership, collaboration, and deep architectural expertise have helped enterprises modernize faster and operate smarter on the Konnect API platform. Together, we are showing what is possible when organizations build on modern infrastructure to unlock speed, resilience, and long-term success.”
AHEAD’s Work with Kong: From Strategy to Day-2 Operations
Across large-scale engagements, AHEAD teams partner with customers and Kong engineering to stand up the program foundations and delivery accelerators needed to operate Kong at enterprise scale. Representative work includes:
- Designing robust API management programs with governance and operational playbooks for seamless Day-2 operations.
- Deploying scalable architectures for Kong Konnect and Kong Mesh across diverse environments with security and readiness gates.
- Automating at scale via CI/CD pipelines, Platform Engineering with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and integrated ServiceNow intake/portal workflows.
- Coordinating with Kong Professional Services to achieve critical delivery milestones, including architecture approvals, environments, and UAT/PRD go-lives.
Learn more about AHEAD’s platform engineering capabilities.
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