Kong API Summit '25 | Ben van Leliveld, Delta Fiber

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Ben van Leliveld

Program Manager IT

Delta Fiber

play_circle_outline Meet Paul Nashawaty and Ben van Leliveld: Spotlight on DELTA Fiber's Fastest Internet at Kong API Summit 2025

play_circle_outline Kong selected for digital transformation due to better fit and successful proof of concept.

play_circle_outline Future plans to implement Kong API gateway across all services by 2026.

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Ben van Leliveld, Delta Fiber

Ben van Leliveld

Program Manager IT Delta Fiber

In this Kong API Summit ‘25 segment, theCUBE Research’s Paul Nashawaty sits down with Ben van Leliveld, program manager of IT at DELTA Fiber, to unpack how the Netherlands-based service provider is building a future-proof architecture on Kong’s API gateway. Van Leliveld explains why DELTA Fiber standardized on a single gateway to reduce complexity, accelerate time to market and strengthen security across fast-growing B2C, B2B and wholesale lines of business. He details the company’s investment in a 10-gig fiber network and the imperative for IT systems – cust... Read more

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Ben van Leliveld, Delta Fiber

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Paul Nashawaty

>> Hello, and welcome to Kong API Summit 2025. My name is Paul Nashawaty. I'm the practice lead and principal analyst at theCUBE Research. I cover app dev and all things related to application development. I'm coming to you live from the show floor in the event. I'm joined today by Ben. Ben, how are you doing?

Ben van Leliveld

>> Hi. Fine, Paul.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Great to have you on. Great to have you. Why don't you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and about DELTA Fiber?

Ben van Leliveld

>> Yeah. First of all, thanks for having me here.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Of course.

Ben van Leliveld

>> I'm Ben van Leliveld. I'm program manager IT at DELTA Fiber, Telco Company, and it's a service provider in the Netherlands. And I'm proud to say that we have the fastest internet of the Netherlands, but even the world.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, that's great. I mean, it's a bold statement. I mean, there's a lot of-

Ben van Leliveld

>> That's a bold statement.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. There's a lot competitors out there, right?

Ben van Leliveld

>> Yeah, yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So this is great. Well, I mean, I'm really excited to have you here. This event is really exciting. There's a lot that came out the keynote this morning, a lot of announcements that were interesting around APIs and making things easy to use and frictionless. But let's start with just understanding a little bit about DELTA Fiber and your role in the company and what you're doing.

Ben van Leliveld

>> Yeah. Well, actually, for DELTA Fiber, we have a lot of challenges. We invested a lot of money in the fiber network, which delivered up to 10 gigabit speed to the home address, so and that's really a lot. So it's a lot of money, and of course we want to have a return on investment, all our investments.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Sure.

Ben van Leliveld

>> That's something we have to do. And you can deliver the fastest internet and also a very secure stable internet, but it means nothing when your IT supporting your customer is slow or not performing or not secure enough.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Right.

Ben van Leliveld

>> So a year ago we decided that we have to have a future-proof architecture on that, improve our speed and our security and our time to market, and that was basically driving it. And then they ask me, because I'm used to running special programs, to implement that future-proof architecture, and then we selected Kong.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Very cool. I mean, I think it's important to understand, the days of putting a help desk ticket in and waiting three days for something to resolve are long since gone. Right?

Ben van Leliveld

>> Yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Those days are gone. It's about instant gratification, instant response, faster time to value, and what you're saying is that's what DELTA Fiber is really kind of doing with it.

Ben van Leliveld

>> Yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> With this. But let's talk a little bit about some changes that happened in the company recently. Right? We talked about there's the introduction of using Kong and using the product sets, and but what inspired DELTA Fiber to kind of take on these digital transformation initiatives?

Ben van Leliveld

>> Yeah. Yeah. The inspiration comes from that we want to become a lean customer, but internally, so but very high quality to our customers, so delivering fast to our customers. And the complexity for us was that basically three years ago, we only had retail customers, so consumers. And due to the high speed internet we deliver, the big businesses, B2B, but also wholesale, are now our customers also. And the difference is that consumers have, let's say, the best availability, but you are not legally obliged to do it. But for B2B and for wholesale customers, it's something else. Very strong SLA, service level agreements, and that kind of stuff, and so you have to manage that. You must be reliable and fast together.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Do you see a convergence between the B2B side and the B2C side when it comes to SLAs and when it comes to that kind of adaptability?

Ben van Leliveld

>> Yeah. Actually, mostly the residential customers are satisfied. It's okay. And we are ranking better in our, let us say, customer satisfactory score. So that's going in a good direction. So but for the B2B customers, something else. You have to deliver.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Oh, yeah.

Ben van Leliveld

>> 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We also deliver our internet services to hospitals, for instance, and that kind of stuff.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. I mean, it's one thing to have your consumer market having ... If your game is down or you're not able to watch a show, that's one thing, but when a business obviously is down, then it's money. Right?

Ben van Leliveld

>> Yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> You're losing money, you're losing product, and then they're going to look for alternative solutions have.

Ben van Leliveld

>> Yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So.

Ben van Leliveld

>> And what we also wanted to do is bring down the development costs, so deliver more IT, better IT functionality for remarkably lower costs, and of course, much faster also.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, let's talk about that. Let's talk about some of the challenges. I know that from a developer's cost perspective, from a like when I look at my world and the world that I cover, and within app dev, there's definitely a need to increase productivity. There's definitely a need to increase innovation and make it more frictionless and allow for more people to be engaged. So what were some of the challenges that you mean that really kind of DELTA Fiber encountered with taking on these initiatives?

Ben van Leliveld

>> Let's stay to the API and API gateways. Actually, within the company we have around three or four running, and then some peer-to-peer solutions also for APIs. That's something you don't want. So you want to put in standardization, a way of working that is standardized. And of course, not for API gateways, there's only one.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Right. Right.

Ben van Leliveld

>> Because there you can share knowledge and there you can speed up. You have an economy of skill.

Paul Nashawaty

>> See, but I find that to be interesting and a challenge in itself. Right? Because you have organizations that I think that you're talking about standardization, which I agree with by the way. You want to simplify and get rid of the complexity, but you also have to bridge the gap between what people are currently using and what they're following today.

Ben van Leliveld

>> Exactly.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Right? So how do you overcome some of those challenges?

Ben van Leliveld

>> Well, actually when you look at the, let's say, critical success factors of such a program, it is on number one, the people, number two, the people, and then comes Kong. And so now, it's a lot of resistance, and that is normal in my career set a lot. And so it's my specialty to get the noses in the same direction, get everybody motivated to do the change, to make the change. And I think that the IT stuff is not easy, but also the business stuff, because we've chosen to, let's say, start with our MyEnvironments of the customer, so the portal, the self-service portal, the self-service app, oh, then the focus is on you. What are you doing in my business? Are you going to affect my business? And when there are problems, because it's the first time we do all that kind of things, and that's all the part I have to manage, and I really think it's a fun job. You do-

Paul Nashawaty

>> Oh, yeah. No, I can see that.

Ben van Leliveld

>> And to guide it in the good direction. So make sensible decision, but get all the noses in the right direction. Good training, enough budget for training. And then, yeah, the rule is, no business impact in the negative side.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. Yeah. No, and I can see that. I think that when you're looking at standardization, you need to look at the path of least resistance, but also the fastest time to value. So that leads me to ask the question, when we look at DELTA Fiber, looking at this solution.

Ben van Leliveld

>> Yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Why did they chose Kong as the foundational kind of a direction for this?

Ben van Leliveld

>> Yeah, that's a very good question, because we had an RFP process and an RFQ process, and at the end, two competitors, Kong and the other competitor.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Sure.

Ben van Leliveld

>> And basically, Kong hits the 100% fit target. So and also did a proof of concept during the final stage, in the RFQ stage, which was very successful. But the main question was, do we have to work with a system integrator or can we do the job in the Netherlands with Kong itself? And then Kong took up the, let's say, the challenge to say, "Well, we have a deployment team in the Netherlands, very experienced consultants, and yeah, we can do that. So we can support the deployment, train your people, and we go away when it is a success, and then the job is done." And I think that working with a system integrator can work very well, but in this case, it managed that, that we had the platform operational and the website and the new app within three months.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Wow, very quickly.

Ben van Leliveld

>> And we would never have done that with a system integrator, to be honest.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. Yeah. So you used your in-house staff.

Ben van Leliveld

>> Yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Team to deploy. You were able to overcome any skill gap issues because the vendor, in this case Kong, took on-

Ben van Leliveld

>> Classic....

Paul Nashawaty

>> that complexity of themselves and they provided you an ease-of-use solution to deliver your initiatives that you're trying to drive. Is that, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but-

Ben van Leliveld

>> No, no, no. But exactly, that's a good summary of how we went and how we did it, and it was really ... The start was tough because when Kong came in, we had blueprint sessions, architectural blueprint sessions, but also in the organization, that kind of stuff. And some things we did not thought about, so we had to solve it almost immediately, and that was Kong very helpful in giving us the tools to do that, also to management. So that was very helpful. But then we could accelerate, where we had set the organization, put in our own Kong platform team with the right peers to the Kong consultants. It's went really fly. Yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, I like that. So you touched on it a little bit, but I would love to understand, do you have any success criteria where you showed gains by moving with Kong versus previously where you had previously?

Ben van Leliveld

>> Yeah, actually we had the benefit that we did some kind of project with a temporary gateway. We had to implement also in our MyEnvironment, let's say almost a year before exactly the same job with another tool. And well, the second time it was 300% faster.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Wow.

Ben van Leliveld

>> And 60% more costly, less costly, sorry. Less.

Paul Nashawaty

>> And what drove that? Was it because Kong actually took out the friction or what was the-

Ben van Leliveld

>> Yeah. It was of course the good, let's say consultancy by Kong, but it's also that you have a standard solution that really fits all open standards. And so we had to make choices there, but it was all standardization and all about configuration and not making tailor-made software or customizations in the software. It was not needed. And that, yeah, saves a lot of time, but also complexity.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. So I see in my research that 68% of respondents in our recent research indicate that they want to use and leverage companies, vendors that sponsor open-source initiatives, but they don't want to go at it alone. Right? They want to use open-source, they want to use the flexibility of open-source, but they want a vendor to back that open-source project.

Ben van Leliveld

>> Exactly. That's the same true for DELTA Fiber. Exactly.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Okay.

Ben van Leliveld

>> That's the case.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Interesting. Yeah. That to me is a very interesting perspective because now you have the open-source community to back your projects as well.

Ben van Leliveld

>> Yeah. Also, OpenAPI and all that kind of stuff, and OpenID, you name it, and it's there.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. So how important, I think when I think of some of the new regulations and governance that are going into place, especially in Europe, like what they think of the EU CRA that's coming in place, how important are these things? Were they as part of your discussion decision?

Ben van Leliveld

>> Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very important. We had to adhere to also regulatory items, which are very much safeguarded by the government, even by audits, especially the Telco providers and ISPs I must say. But I can suppose also the banking sector and that kind of companies. But we are, yeah, on the looking glass, so to say. Yeah. So we had to check that. And we also had of course our audits and penetration tests. A funny part there to tell perhaps that is that we were part of that penetration test by an external party. And then the auditor, or the, let's say the ethical hacker gave me a mail, "Mr. Ben, I cannot get to your APIs either." And I started laughing. I said, "Well, that's exactly what we want. Exactly the point." "Can you please give me some rights that I get to your APIs?" Of course, we did that to see whether there were some vulnerabilities there, but there were not. It's a funny part of the job then.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, it's very impressive. I mean, I think it's obviously when you're putting your pressure testing on and the pressure testers can't get to it, that's telling in itself, right?

Ben van Leliveld

>> Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> That's really good.

Ben van Leliveld

>> Yeah. It's all kind of bounty programs, so they only get paid when they find something.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Correct.

Ben van Leliveld

>> I thought it was funny.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, no, it's absolutely funny. But it's great. It's a good testimonial.

Ben van Leliveld

>> Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> But so what's next? What's next for DELTA? What's next for you as you continue to-

Ben van Leliveld

>> Well, the next is within the company that we going to implement to the Kong API gateway everywhere. So all the other gateways will be phased out. So that will be the migration in 2026. And the lovely part is that also the network part of our company is considering also to connect to the Kong API gateway for their APIs. Those are separated. Hey, you can say that we have a business layer and we have a network layer. And so it's really moving in the positive direction. For me, it means that a lot of complex work ahead. The migration work and without impact, but I think that the Kong team, our platform team with Kong and also with support from Kong, we will succeed.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, when we're sitting here in 2026 next year and we're out at this event next year, I'm looking forward to hearing some of the successes that you've done and things you've been going through. Ben, it's been really great having you on the show today. It's been awesome. And I want to thank the audience for watching. And I am Paul Nashawaty and I'm coming to you live from the show floor at Kong API Summit 2025 on theCUBE, your leading source for tech news.