Kong & Solace unite control plane for AI connectivity

Kong has added Solace to its Premium Technology Partner Program, linking Solace's event streaming and real-time data tools with Kong's API and AI connectivity products.

The relationship centres on a shared control plane for managing data movement across APIs, event streams and AI-related service calls. It focuses on governance and monitoring as organisations expand their use of AI systems that depend on current operational data.

Growing overlap

Many companies run API management and event streaming on separate platforms. That separation can create oversight gaps and add complexity when teams need consistent security and compliance policies across different types of traffic.

Agentic AI systems add pressure for speed and context. They often draw on multiple internal services and data sources, with calls spanning APIs, asynchronous events and AI model interactions.

The partnership combines Solace's real-time data movement and event governance with Kong's API management, security enforcement and observability tools. It also covers AI-related connectivity, including large language models and MCP servers.

Under the arrangement, teams can apply lifecycle management, policies, authentication and access controls across the path that connects events, APIs and AI services. Kong's stack includes Kong Event Gateway and Kong API Gateway, which provide protocol gateways and a REST-style interface for API traffic.

The goal is a single view of interactions that might otherwise be managed across multiple systems, with consistent control and visibility across real-time event streams, API calls and AI agent activity.

Partner programme

Kong's Premium Technology Partner Program covers integrations and plugins that connect to its commercial products, including Kong Konnect and Kong Gateway Enterprise. Premium partners go through a validation process against current commercial releases.

The programme also provides engineering support for integration work and optimisation. Kong describes it as a curated set of third-party technologies for customers that want pre-validated connections into its ecosystem.

For partners, the programme is positioned around joint commercial opportunities and closer product alignment, along with earlier access to product features and roadmap information.

Solace's inclusion in the premium tier signals Kong's view that event-driven architectures are central to its broader strategy for AI connectivity and traffic management. Many enterprises already treat event streaming as foundational to modern integration patterns, particularly when real-time operational data needs to reach multiple systems at once.

"Event-driven and API-driven architectures are no longer separate concerns," said Ken Kim, Senior Vice President, Business Development, Kong. "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."

Solace is positioning the combined approach around real-time data delivery and orchestration for AI agents, alongside governance for event flows. That includes managing how events are produced and consumed across systems, and how teams control and audit those interactions.

"Real‐time data is the lifeblood of modern, agentic AI," said Shawn McAllister, CPO and CTO, 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."

The integration work will sit within Kong's partner ecosystem, with validation aligned to Kong's commercial releases and joint engineering engagement as the relationship develops.