Forward Deployed Engineer

Kong and Solace Partner to deliver unified data governance for the agentic AI era. Kong Inc., a recognized leader in API and AI connectivity solutions, has announced that Solace, the real-time data and agentic AI company, has officially joined Kong's Premium Technology Partner Program. Through this strategic collaboration, both companies aim to provide enterprises with a unified, governed, and fully observable data fabric built specifically for the fast-growing agentic AI era. As a result, teams will be able to manage APIs, events, and AI services seamlessly through a single control plane. Today's organizations are under increasing pressure to innovate quickly while still maintaining strict security, governance, and compliance standards. At the same time, agentic AI systems require real-time, contextual data to flow smoothly across business operations. However, many enterprises still manage APIs and event streams in separate silos. Consequently, these disconnected systems create governance blind spots, slow down deployment cycles, and raise operational risks. To address these challenges, Kong and Solace are combining their strengths to simplify and strengthen enterprise connectivity. By integrating Solace's real-time data movement technology with Kong's API and AI connectivity platform, organizations can now govern APIs, event streams, Large Language Models (LLMs), and MCP servers from one centralized control plane. In addition, businesses can apply consistent authentication, lifecycle management, access controls, and policies across the entire data path. Solace brings high-performance real-time data movement, event governance, and event-driven orchestration that supports agentic AI workflows. Meanwhile, Kong delivers centralized API management, robust security enforcement, advanced observability, and AI gateway capabilities. This is achieved through Kong Event Gateway's native protocol support alongside the REST-like interface provided by Kong API Gateway. Ultimately, enterprises gain one consolidated platform where all data interactions from streaming events to API calls to AI service requests remain fully visible and easy to manage. "Event-driven and API-driven architectures are no longer separate concerns," said Ken Kim, Senior Vice President, Business Development at Kong Inc. "By bringing Kong and Solace together under a unified control plane, customers gain centralized governance, consistent security policies, and end-to-end observability across every data interaction from REST APIs to streaming events to AI agent calls. This is essential for organizations scaling in the agentic era." This partnership highlights how organizations are increasingly looking for unified approaches to data governance as AI adoption accelerates. "Real-time data is the lifeblood of modern, agentic AI," said Shawn McAllister, CPO and CTO at Solace. "Together with Kong, Solace is removing the silos between events, APIs, and AI services that slow down modern organizations, helping to accelerate innovation and empower teams to confidently scale their real-time, AI-ready platforms." In addition to the partnership announcement, Kong also emphasized the importance of its Premium Technology Partner Program. The program is designed to provide enterprises with trusted, validated integrations and plugins that enhance Kong's commercial offerings, including Kong Konnect and Kong Gateway Enterprise. Premium partners receive engineering support, validation against the latest Kong releases, and opportunities for deeper collaboration. For customers, this program expands access to a curated ecosystem of cutting-edge integrations backed by Kong's quality standards. For partners like Solace, it creates new revenue opportunities, early product insights, and closer engagement with Kong's engineering roadmap. With this alliance, Kong and Solace are positioning enterprises to confidently scale real-time, AI-ready platforms while ensuring governance, security, and observability remain at the core of the agentic future.

Kong has launched Context Mesh, a product that automatically discovers enterprise APIs, transforms them into agent-consumable tooling, and deploys them with runtime governance. The offering addresses the integration gap threatening agentic AI initiatives by enabling AI agents to access enterprise data through existing API infrastructure. Context Mesh uses knowledge from Kong's Konnect platform to automate agent integration, including automatic API discovery, curated toolkits, instant Model Context Protocol generation, and gateway deployment with inherited access controls. Generated tooling is registered in Kong's MCP Registry for enterprise-wide discovery. The launch follows Gartner research warning that 40% of agentic AI initiatives risk cancellation by 2027 without proper integration solutions. Context Mesh is available in tech preview for Konnect deployments.

Kong has introduced MCP Registry within Kong Konnect Catalog, creating an enterprise directory for registering, discovering and governing Model Context Protocol servers and AI-native tools for agentic applications. The registry integrates with the MCP ecosystem whilst remaining compliant with the AI Alliance Interoperability Framework standard. Operating as an extension of Kong's existing API Catalog, MCP Registry enables organisations to govern MCP servers alongside their underlying API dependencies, ownership and policies. This provides enterprises with visibility and control over AI agent tools with the same rigour applied to mission-critical infrastructure. The announcement addresses challenges enterprises face in scaling AI initiatives, with S&P Global reporting 42% of companies abandon AI projects before production. MCP Registry will be available in technical preview this month, with additional capabilities expected to follow.