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Use Case | Pepkor's Migration from WSO2 to Apigee X

Pepkor, a leading South African retail powerhouse, has been on a mission to modernize its digital infrastructure to enhance customer experiences and operational efficiency. With a vast portfolio of brands—including PEP, Ackermans, and Tekkie Town—Pepkor operates across diverse sectors such as clothing, footwear, and homeware. Its extensive store network and customer-centric approach make it a key player in the region’s retail landscape.

To support its continued growth, Pepkor sought to enhance its API management capabilities. In collaboration with AppyThings, the company successfully transitioned to Apigee X, unlocking new levels of scalability, security, and performance in its digital ecosystem. Moving from a self-managed API manager to the Google managed Apigee X helped to free up Pepkor resources to innovate instead of spending most of their time keeping the platform stable. Pepkor with guidance from AppyThings was able to create an API governance framework that enabled them to democratize API development to all internal teams creating more opportunities for innovation and growth in the company.

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1/ Project Introduction

Pepkor successfully migrated from a self-managed on-premises WSO2 API stack to Apigee X, Google’s managed API SaaS solution. This migration empowered Pepkor with a scalable, secure, and developer-friendly environment, ensuring innovation, efficiency, and future-proofing their API strategy. By adopting Apigee X, Pepkor can now seamlessly integrate its APIs with modern cloud-native applications, enhancing agility and operational performance.

2/ AppyThings & Pepkor

While Pepkor had experience in on-premises API management, migrating to a cloud-based API solution required specialized expertise. AppyThings, with its deep knowledge of cloud API solutions, played a critical advisory role, guiding Pepkor in API governance, best practices, and cloud migration strategies.

By working together, the two companies built a robust Apigee X-based API management framework, enabling Pepkor to seamlessly transition its on-premises WSO2 APIs to Google Cloud. The partnership ensured that the migration was smooth, efficient, and strategically aligned with Pepkor’s long-term digital transformation goals.

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3/ Challenge(s)

As Pepkor expanded rapidly, its existing WSO2 API management platform struggled to keep up with increasing demands. The primary challenges included:

• Scalability Issues: The on-premises solution lacked the flexibility to scale with Pepkor’s growth.

• Integration Limitations: WSO2 posed difficulties in integrating with modern cloud-native applications and services.

• Operational Bottlenecks: Frequent performance issues impacted customer experience and operational efficiency.

• Resource Constraints: IT teams spent more time maintaining the on-premises WSO2 platform than driving innovation.

• Limited Visibility: Pepkor lacked real-time insights into API traffic and had to reactively address incidents rather than proactively optimizing performance.

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4/ Solution(s)

By partnering with AppyThings, Pepkor executed a comprehensive migration to Apigee X, achieving:

• Scalability & Resilience: A cloud-native Apigee X architecture tailored to Pepkor’s needs.

• Security: Implementation of OAuth 2.0 for robust data protection and access control.

• Developer Enablement: A user-friendly developer portal featuring API documentation, usage examples, and support resources.

• Automation & Governance: CI/CD automation for seamless API deployment, along with best practices in API design and lifecycle management.

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5/ Services provided

• API Environment Evaluation: Assessed the existing API landscape and recommended an optimal migration strategy.

• Best Practices Implementation: Provided API design blueprints and governance documentation.

• CI/CD Automation: Configured pipelines for automated API deployments.

• API Analytics & Monitoring: Established reporting mechanisms for real-time insights and alerting.

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6/ The Results

Enhanced performance of API platform. Apigee X is designed with enterprise-grade reliability to ensure secure and seamless API operations at scale. The platform guarantees a 99.99% SLA uptime for its API management services. Ease of development and deployment ensured the groundwork for an agile API development environment that delivers to the needs of Pepkor’s customers. Real-time observability of API performance metrics, reporting and alerting that is provided out of the box from Apigee X.

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7/ Call to Action

Is your organization ready to modernize its API strategy? AppyThings specializes in seamless API migrations and cloud-native API management. Contact us today to explore how we can transform your digital infrastructure and drive innovation.

Contact Tom Hendrix at tom@appythings.com or call +32-474-365-980 for more information.

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