Previously, connecting a new partner service through an API required a significant amount of integration work for Miles & More, commonly requiring several engineers from different parties to ensure the systems were communicating effectively. A single integration would typically take four weeks to complete, making it a costly process that took engineers away from other tasks.

“Apigee is one of the most efficient tools I’ve seen. When you want to connect a new service, it’s a really streamlined process, taking less than an hour to do, meaning we can free up team members to focus on other tasks,” says Sommer. 

The Miles & More team needs minimal support from the Google Cloud team to use Apigee to connect and manage APIs, thanks to its automated controls and developer-friendly functionality. 

“The way Apigee is designed is really transparent and we can customize and configure it to our needs,” says Sommer. “It’s also got a killer feature, the Trace tool, which lets us see exactly what’s happening in real time. That means we don’t need to look up logs or call someone to investigate an issue, we can just see how it’s been configured, spot the mistake, and fix it straight away.”

The speed at which Miles & More is now able to integrate with systems of new partners means it can take new experiences to market more quickly than before. For example, the company recently launched a gamified experience to allow members to offset the carbon emissions of their flights. Miles & More was able to connect this partner service to the Miles & More app in less than an hour, enabling its app developers to build its own app more quickly, significantly reducing the time it took for Miles & More to release the experience to its members. 

“Benchmarking Apigee against architectures where Apigee isn’t used, it is clear how much time is saved trying to get the systems to talk to each other,” explains Sommer. “Without Apigee they go through iteration after iteration until the systems connect. However with Apigee, we have the potential to spot the issue immediately and fix it in less than a minute. Being able to connect these tools so quickly is what enables us to have a faster time to market.”

As Miles & More continues to expand its partner ecosystem, it plans to train its product teams to use Apigee to onboard new services using APIs. Currently, the product teams are dependent on the API management team to do this, which can result in wait times of a few days before the new services are connected. Training the product teams to use Apigee independently will remove these wait times, and allow Miles & More to scale up its API operations without scaling up the API management team. As a result, Miles & More will be able to connect more partner services, and offer more partner experiences to customers, faster.

For Sommer, the future of Miles & More is closely tied to its continued use of Apigee and its close relationship with the Google Cloud team. “Apigee has been a game changer for Miles & More, enabling us to connect backends and partners more quickly and expand our ecosystem,” he says. “From a business perspective, the Google Cloud team has always been interested in what we are doing and how they can support us in realizing our mission.”