Vodafone’s proposed merger with Unitymedia was approved by the European Commission in 2019, making the group the market leader in German fixed-line services. Vodafone Germany now provides services to over 18.5m households, exceeding Deutsche Telecom which serves 18m households, and increasing Vodafone’s network reach to over 70% of German homes.
Vodafone needed a seamless integration between the merged entities. In order to provide a consistent customer experience, and to meet regulatory conditions, a rapid and reliable API strategy for group-wide integration was vital. Security, speed of deployment, and flexibility were primary considerations, as well as the ability to transform data to meet partner needs.
Vodafone chose to deploy the MuleSoft Anypoint platform and appointed Zentive as integration partner. Since then, the Zentive team has helped to deploy 1000+ APIs, serving multiple areas of the business, as well as external partners. The platform evolved from an on-premises deployment to hybrid-cloud with AWS, making use of DevOps pipelines to automate processes, increase reliability, and reduce ongoing costs.
Customised experience layers were created to tailor services to individual client needs, while mock responses provided early visibility of API schemas. Services were proactively added to Anypoint exchange, encouraging re-use and providing a central repository for documentation.
The platform now plays a key role in the ongoing integration strategy, with demand for new integrations accelerating.
