14 October 2024 - Composable.com - MACH Alliance Strengthens Position as a Technology Leader, Responding to Growing Market Needs From Business Community

MACH Alliance Strengthens Position as a Technology Leader, Responding to Growing Market Needs From Business Community

Composable.com - October 2024

Authors: David Uccelli, Worldwide Principal Solution Architect, Digital Commerce, AWS and Cody Shive, Global Partner Solutions Architect, AWSThere’s a lot of buzz around composable transformation today. In this blog Amazon Web Services (AWS) will explain some important concepts that will help you navigate the waters of Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless components—known as MACH.But, where do we start with MACH, and why should we care? If you’re new to it, MACH endeavours to help you to build a solution specific to your business needs by selecting best-of-breed components and combining or 'composing' them into a custom platform. Many have likened it to building something out of Lego bricks or building a car by picking components such as the engine, steering rack, and body. However, this car makes it easier to swap or upgrade components and even try components before you buy or rent them.The MACH Alliance has a list of<a href="https://machalliance.org/members"> 80+ members </a>who have been <a href="https://machalliance.org/insights/mach-certification-a-seal-of-confidence">certified</a> to all follow the same values. There are three types of members in the alliance. Most are Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) who provide large components such as the engine and wheels in our car analogy. Then there are the System Integrators (SIs) who provide the blueprint and expertise to put the car together. Finally, there are the <a href="https://machalliance.org/insights/why-we-added-an-enabler-membership-category">Enablers</a>, which are defined as “supporting functional areas of a MACH architecture, including monitoring, data storage, container management, tracing and orchestration.” In our analogy, an Enabler would provide components such as the nuts and bolts, speedometer, brake handle and windscreen as well as the metal sheeting or plastic you need to make your own components.As you embrace the MACH philosophy, we have some “tips” that will hopefully help. To get started, let’s compare and contrast a monolith with a microservice:<ul><li>A monolith is a tightly coupled single tiered application in which the user interface and data are combined into a single program. It is self-contained, and independent from other applications. It can have modules, but they have to all be deployed at once.</li><li>A microservice is a tightly scoped, strongly encapsulated, loosely coupled, and independently deployed application service. Several microservices usually work together to form a platform. The most important feature is that components can be independently deployed. In other words, you can make a change to the microservice, or deploy a new version of it into the production environment without having to change any other parts of the system.</li></ul><h3>Common reasons for decomposing monoliths into microservices</h3>There are many benefits offered by moving from a monolithic application to microservices. Below are the most commonly quoted benefits:<ul><li>Faster time to market Teams can implement changes independently, resulting in new capabilities being rolled out much faster.</li></ul><ul><li>Truly omnichannel Microservices encapsulate business rules; and as such, user interfaces are independently developed, accessing the microservices via APIs. This concept is also known as headless.</li></ul><ul><li>Reduced software complexity and specialized knowledge The scope and functionality of a single microservice is limited, resulting in easier maintenance and updates. Testing and deployment are incremental, rather than with a monolith which is often drawn out and subject to heavy regression testing, especially if it has been heavily customized.</li></ul><h3>Tip #1: We’ve been there, we know</h3>About twenty years ago, <a href="http://amazon.com/">Amazon.com</a> made the decision to move away from monolithic applications, simply because they wouldn’t scale. At that time, Amazon had one monolithic application and one Oracle database. It took 11 hours to update. They recognized if they continued in that vein, they would not achieve the agility necessary for the burgeoning ecommerce market. So, in a bold move, Amazon.com embraced what was new for the time, the concept of “service-oriented architecture” to achieve its first generation microservices. As a result, DevOps was born at Amazon.com with the mantra, “You build it, you run it” ringing through the halls. In a nutshell, here’s how it was done:Amazon.com enforced an API-only communication mentalityAmazon.com further enforced MACH principles through what it now calls the API Mandate. The only way that teams were allowed to communicate with each other was through the use of APIs – no exceptions. This mandate came in 2002 from Jeff Bezos, and it remains true to this day. Among other tenets, Bezos spelled out that you shouldn’t share databases as this would bypass the business logic in the microservice and restrict working independently. If you have shared a database what happens if you want to delete a column? Do you have to check if another service is using that column?Amazon.com re-imagined the concept of the release cycleOne of the key impacts of adopting DevOps and independently deployable microservices is a dramatic change in the release cycle. Instead of 11 hours of down time to launch, at Amazon.com they now have over 60 million deployments a year. This enables huge improvements from an innovation, experimentation and from a time-to-market perspective.Amazon.com started with the end in mind<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFdpBqmDpzM">The Amazon working backwards method</a> is a product development approach that starts with the team imagining the product is ready to ship. Knowing what success looks like (from the customer’s point-of-view) gave Amazon.com a north star to aim for. Knowing that a migration from monolith to MACH can be broken into manageable phases, they started breaking down the code into discrete operational components. And, they didn’t expect to migrate everything at once; instead, Amazon.com took a phased approach to make an orderly transition employing a <a href="https://machalliance.org/insights/transition-from-a-legacy-suite-style-monolith-to-microservices">Strangler</a> pattern. In a future blog, we will look more closely at patterns you can use.<h3>Tip #2: Make Sure Microservices are Right for You</h3>Monolith does not equate to legacyMany people think there is only one type of monolith, and we often think legacy equates to monolith. In reality there is a continuum of monoliths, and they can be highly modular and even have multiple databases, enabling several of the advantages of microservices such as independent teams working on modules.In a recent article called<a href="https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2023/05/monoliths-are-not-dinosaurs.html"> Monoliths are not dinosaurs,</a> Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO emphasizes “there is no one-size-fits-all” and you should design your architecture to fit your situation and objectives.Do you need to customize?If you have a pretty standard use case then a tried and tested monolithic platform may be the best choice. Monoliths often come with “starter stores” that have been developed and refined over many years to accelerate the deployment of popular use cases.However, many companies want unique features that can only be built through customization. With more and more customization, problems start adding up for a monolith as the single block of code becomes more difficult to deploy. This results in larger scoped deployments and the need for release coordination, which can greatly slow innovation. It can even result in being stuck on an old version of the monolith that is no longer supported.How important is a business-friendly management UI and experience orchestration to you?As a result of being tightly coupled, most monoliths have extremely useful management user interfaces (UI) that are designed to be used by the business. Monoliths can also do things that are currently quite difficult for microservices-based platforms or require larger development teams. For example, in WebSphere Commerce, Oracle Commerce and others, you can easily preview a consumer experience in next summer’s sales, including any personalization, loyalty, catalogue changes and offers. Recreating that type of experience orchestration and management UI in a microservices world is not impossible, but it is pretty difficult as it involves orchestrating many different vendors’ microservices using a single UI. For some retailers it is worth developing themselves using services like Amazon <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/">EventBridge</a> and <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/step-functions/">AWS Step Functions </a>for their particular use cases. There are also services offered by<a href="https://partner-resources.awscloud.com/retail/great-mach-runs-on-aws2"> AWS Partners </a>for “experience orchestration” with pre-built connectors for many common MACH components.<h3>Tip #3: Help is Out There</h3>Getting started with the process of refactoring a monolithic application into microservices can be daunting. What should you address first? How do you convince management of the benefits? What’s everybody else doing?Leverage a Systems Integrator as your partnerIn the past it was common for a company to pick a monolithic vendor using a long RFP process, then ask the vendor which Systems Integrator (SI) would be suitable. Picking an SI was an afterthought.An important tip, that everyone who has started the MACH journey knows, is that the SI should now be your most important decision and can help pick vendors with you. After all, one of the reasons you are moving to MACH is the ease with which you can upgrade or swap out a vendor if it does not work out. It is a lot more difficult to swap out your SI.Many SIs are <a href="https://machalliance.org/members">MACH Alliance members</a>, and you can find much larger lists on similarly curated marketplaces such as <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/solutions/retail">AWS’s Marketplace.</a> In a future blog we will explain how to safely widen your net beyond the 80+ MACH members.Once you have narrowed down your list of candidates, an alternative approach to a long RFP process is to pick one or more simple proof of concepts and develop them with one or more potential SI partners. See how they work with your team and how they help you identify the capabilities you need first. How good are they at either suggesting the best Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) services on the market to evaluate or helping you build your own services?Pick a partner that has experience with similarly-sized companies, and look for an SI that does not use one template to fit all customers. Ask yourself “do you trust them to handover a fully optimized solution that has been thoroughly documented, so any future partners or in-house teams can take over the solution?”Ensure You Have a ChampionIt’s important to have a champion who can provide the mandate for completing the migration. Seek out an executive sponsor, and help them understand the benefits of MACH. As mentioned earlier, at AWS we use the working backwards mechanism to help us provide a clear understanding and purpose for an initiative. A key artefact of working backwards is a document called a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFdpBqmDpzM">Press Release/Frequently Asked Questions, or PR/FAQ </a>for short. That mechanism, or one like it, is an excellent way to explain to executive management your purpose and method for migrating a monolithic application to microservices. It also can be used to help that sponsor understand the relative costs and benefits of the migration.Understand your goals, your capabilities, and your weaknessesTogether with your chosen SI, clearly define your goals for the project, and identify the capabilities necessary to launch and maintain the future state. Remember that every company has different priorities. For example, your company may be known for an amazing online experience but rated poorly for customer support. Make sure everyone is aware of your priorities, and the capabilities you want to improve.A good method to quickly separate the wheat from the chaff is to prioritize what is necessary to achieve a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). For example, you will probably need a search capability for the launch of your new digital commerce site, but will you need it to be personalized at the start or will some other feature have a higher return on investment?Involve the business at every stageSet up product teams to implement, refine and manage each service. Make sure the business stakeholders who will actually use the product are fully involved from design to testing and training others on the solution. Getting buy-in by involving business users in every step of the implementation and ongoing maintenance and enhancement of the solution sounds simple, but it will bring incredible rewards in the future.<h3>Tip #4: Keep Innovating Through Experimentation</h3>When asked about the objectives of a MACH transformation, the likely answer is going to revolve around innovation and keeping up with changes in the market. What many companies forget is innovation and product market fit is achieved through experimentation.One of the most popular quotes from Bezos is:“To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it's going to work, it's not an experiment”A less well known, but equally important quote is:“What you really want to do company wide is maximize the number of experiments you can do per given unit of time. Since the outcomes of all these things are uncertain, if you can figure out how to conduct an experiment, you can make more bets. So, the key, really, is reducing the cost of the experiments.”Amazon has a dedicated group that allows teams to constantly experiment with the user interface on the website and mobile app. Amazon has put a lot of energy into trying to figure out how to be very low cost with experiments so they can run a much larger number of them.However, a lot of companies don’t make full use of the fact MACH architectures can handle a vast number of changes needed for experimentation. <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/how-skillshare-increased-their-click-through-rate-by-63-with-amazon-personalize/">Skillshare</a> experimented with their in-house recommendation system vs. <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/pm/personalize/">Amazon Personalize</a> in 2020 after a boom in customers due to the pandemic. It found that using Amazon Personalize resulted in a 63% increase in click through compared with the in-house developed solution.The secret is to set up a team that purely enables cheap experimentation. Keep an eye on the market and keep listening to your customers by running experiments.<h3>Ready For MACH?</h3>While these tips may seem simple to achieve to those who have not started a monolith to MACH transformation, they are all very powerful and have been recounted by retailers, brands, vendors, SIs and technology enablers who have been through the process.In a future blog we will be revealing more tips, including different migration patterns and using MACH Enabler services with MACH Vendors to create a unified experience for customers. As part of this we will touch on serverless and event driven architecture. We will also look at how to widen your net beyond the 80+ MACH members, while making sure you follow MACH principles.Authors:<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/blt87786d10339323a5/64b79c3f070fc02d32a4070f/David_Uccelli-_card.png"/>David Uccelli is the Worldwide Principal Solutions Architect for Digital Commerce at AWS and works in the CPG and Retail team. David started in eCommerce over 20 years ago, working with IBM customers to build online solutions. Since then, he has worked with a huge number of large retailers and CPGs, including working directly for Walmart, Sainsbury’s, John Lewis, Heineken, Canon and PVH. David has also worked for several large consultancies and was a founder of a startup that was sold to Sainsbury’s. Having worked on large monolithic platforms in the past he now specialises in composable architectures for all channels and works closely with many MACH Alliance members.<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/blt138ef6a7fb365162/64b79c4eef5ef06b4c66dc13/Cody_Shive-_card.png"/>Cody Shive is the Global Partner Solutions Architect for Grocery, Drug, and Convenience at AWS, where he works with both cloud and physical store retail partners. Cody has over 20 years in Retail as an independent consultant, a technical lead for IBM/Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions, and as a Retail Transformation architect for NCR. Cody specializes in deep data analytics and keeps himself involved in self-service solutions such as Self-Checkout and Dash Cart technologies. He is passionate about grocery, stemming from his very first job at Albertsons in Jacksonville, Florida. Cody is a graduate from the University of North Florida with a degree in Computer and Information Sciences and minor in Business Management.

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Four tips from AWS for succeeding with MACH

My two favorite topics these days are Generative AI and MACH, two topics that don’t on the surface seem very related. But actually, we can apply the lessons learned from a MACH approach to the implementation of Generative AI and reap some of the same benefits. Agility, flexibility, and vendor-lock avoidance are bonus outcomes achieved if we leverage a MACH strategy.Before going much further, let’s back up to frame the discussion. MACH is an approach at modularization and decoupling that facilitates assembling best-of-breed components into solutions. <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/industries/aws-joins-mach-alliance/">Amazon Web Service (AWS) joined the MACH Alliance </a>a while back, and my colleagues have written about how <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/industries/great-mach-runs-on-aws/">Great MACH Runs on AWS</a>. Using this approach, retailers are able to construct a solution from different vendors, picking and choosing what works best for them now, with the flexibility to swap components later as necessary. For example. The Very Group in the UK, is <a href="https://commercetools.com/blog/mach-architecture-from-commercetools-cloud-nativity-from-aws-the-very-group-commerce-modernization">assembling their new ecommerce platform</a> from MACH members such as commercetools, Constructor, and Amplience, all running on AWS.Switching gears to Generative AI, it’s important to first understand that Generative AI is powered by foundation models (FMs), which are very time-consuming and expensive to train. Training requires months of processing on specialized hardware, like that supplied by <a href="https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/aws-and-nvidia-collaborate-on-next-generation-infrastructure-for-training-large-machine-learning-models-and-building-generative-ai-applications">Nvidia running in the AWS cloud</a>, or <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/trainium/">AWS Trainium</a>. But once trained, they can form the basis for many derivative solutions by fine-tuning. For example, the large language model (LLM) <a href="https://www.anthropic.com/index/introducing-claude">Claude from Anthropic</a> is a foundation model capable of general conversations. A retailer could fine-tune it to handle typical ecommerce interactions and <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/live-call-analytics-and-agent-assist-for-your-contact-center-with-amazon-language-ai-services/">deploy to their contact center</a>, thus enabling retail-specific prompts for the operator during calls. This could just as easily be used for a chatbot on the retailer’s website as well. I’ve also written about <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/industries/the-positive-impact-generative-ai-could-have-for-retail/">the positive impact Generative AI could have for retail,</a> including a list of other use cases.Here's where the two ideas come together. Retailers would be wise not to lock themselves in to a particular FM. The fact is, there are many FMs available today, each with its own benefits and costs, and there are more emerging every week. Although AWS offers <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/titan/">Amazon Titan</a>, its own FM, we also provide easy access to FMs from other providers since that choice depends on the end-goal. So, we created <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/">Amazon Bedrock,</a> a fully managed service that makes FMs from leading AI startups and Amazon available through an API, so you can choose from a wide range of FMs to find the model that's best suited for your use case. <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/announcing-new-tools-for-building-with-generative-ai-on-aws/">AWS provides the tools and environment</a> where you can choose to build new FMs, or fine-tune existing ones. We offer access to various FMs and even different training and inferencing hardware. This is a different approach than pushing one particular FM.A great example of this was given at the recent<a href="https://youtu.be/XrN7lhr9E_I"> AWS London Summit [video 23:18-26:16]</a>. Imagine a retailer wants to promote a new product. The product description is generated by Anthropic’s Claude AI assistant, StableDiffusion creates the product image, social media copy comes from AI21’s Jurassic-1 LLM, and Amazon Titan provides the SEO-optimized terms, all accessed through Amazon Bedrock. This gives the ultimate freedom to the retailer to select the cost-effective FMs that work best for their situation then harmonizes the outputs. Of course, for simplicity’s sake, you might not want multiple FMs, and you’re free to follow that path as well.Adopting what appears to be the best FM of the day might get to market first, but taking a more MACH-inspired approach to enabling business agility with freedom of choice has more long-term benefits.Author: David Dorf, Global Head of Retail Industry Solutions, AWS

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Applying MACH Principles to Generative AI

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It’s undeniable that retail has changed exponentially over the past year. Lockdowns. Permanent store closures. An influx of online customers. It’s been a journey to say the least. Some have been pushed to the brink and others have really taken on the challenge and grown.How retail business models progress going forward will be something to watch. Have we seen the complete demise of the traditional department store? Will marketplaces continue to rule? And how will the high street react when things get back to some kind of “normality”?One thing we know for sure is customer behaviour has changed. Their expectations have changed. And they aren’t going to change back. So, with online growth only expected to continue, customer expectations expected to remain high, retailers will need to adapt and look to new strategies more than ever before.To take advantage of all these changes, and to really deliver for customers, retailers can look to a MACH-based approach for their technology. It can bring with it a wealth of benefits, but retailers can’t look to implement MACH for MACH sake. There needs to be a clear strategy behind it, a thorough understanding of why they are implementing it and how it can help them achieve what’s on their roadmap.Understanding the why: Key reasons retailers could leverage MACHOf course, retailers’ goals will be individual but to help understand where a MACH-based approach can help, we thought it might be worth going over a few scenarios. These are the types of “whys” those looking to MACH can justify.The why: Keeping up with all the changeOne thing we hear from retailers all over is that the pace of change is intense, and keeping up is proving difficult. Old legacy systems are holding retailers hostage to lengthy development cycles, and they simply aren’t afforded the agility they need.A MACH-based approach can bring a continuous development process to the fore, where retailers can look to constantly iterate and change, allowing them to go to market with new products, content and experiences quicker than before. This is imperative when constantly reacting to the needs of their customers and to the market.The why: Connecting the offline with the onlineRetailers can no longer rely on their in-store experience to be the single or main experience for their customers. With more and more online traffic, customers not only want an amazing experience online but they want a connected one. The offline and online experiences must be harmonious but also seamless when navigating between them.A true omnichannel approach can be achieved with MACH-based technology because it allows retailers to manage and add multiple frontends and storefronts a lot more efficiently, anything from in-store kiosks and native apps to the more traditional desktop site. Content can then be easily pushed across all channels and all devices making content production and delivery more streamlined internally. Overall, it enables customers to get a true, consistent brand experience however they decide to interact with a retailer.The why: Integration with better market solutionsThere’s no denying the proliferation of technology in the marketplace, especially when it comes to eCommerce, point of sale, payments etc. Being able to leverage all these new tools and solutions and work with them to create a better customer experience (and backend experience for technical users) however is another story. Unfortunately, many retailers are locked into large monolithic platforms that dictate what integrations they can take advantage of and when. This leaves retailers languishing behind more agile competitors, with many forced to simply make do or build a number of workarounds.Utilising a best-of-breed, composable approach, MACH gives retailers the freedom and the choice to well, choose who they want to work with – everything from shipping and fulfilment to personalisation and search. They can pick which solutions will enhance their offering and they have the scope to add, remove or switch out any in the future just as easily. Vendors aren’t locked in and there is no intense replatforming to consider.The why: Ramp up content and personalisation effortsContent is everywhere, but good content really drives relationships with customers. Good content and brand storytelling can convert and drive loyalty. Producing and delivering good content on a large scale however is time consuming and hard to achieve.The same principle applies for personalising different channels. It can be simple enough to give a few product recommendations on a site, but truly capturing the right data and making it properly work to deliver unique personalisation efforts across different channels that really connects with customers at the right time in their buying journey is a much harder task.This is where MACH comes into its own, especially when retailers can leverage unique third-party solutions that are purposely built for these very things. Headless content management systems for example can take the bottlenecks out of the content production workflows, eliminate developer input with less coding and allow marketers to quickly push content anywhere they like. Personalisation tools can capture data and use AI and machine learning to deliver bespoke content that adapts to the customer’s behaviours, preferences and drivers in real time.The why: DifferentiationWith so much competition in the retail marketplace, both locally and globally, standing out from the crowd can be hard. Retailers need to look at how they can differentiate themselves, which can come in many forms. However, a big part of this is the user experience, design, and that first impression that a shopper gets of a brand, be it on social media, their website, anywhere.Legacy technology is forcing many retailers to conform to certain, pre-defined templates and guidelines that leave them all looking the same digitally. They simply don’t have the ability to break free and implement the look and feel they really want, nor offer those surprise and delight moments. A MACH-approach however, lets retailers build and design how they see fit. Their experiences are their own - no shackles and no constraints, just creativity and imagination

Retail and MACH: Understanding your “why” when implementing

As businesses navigate the complexities of digital transformation and keep innovating to meet the evolving needs of modern consumers, the adoption of robust and scalable IT systems emerges as a strategic imperative. At the heart of the commerce stack lies the Order Management System (OMS), serving as the control tower that seamlessly integrates and orchestrates operations across various sales channels. As the bridge between commerce and supply operations, the OMS ensures efficient order processing, inventory management, and fulfillment, regardless of the channels through which the consumers decide to buy and to be delivered.In this article, we will delve deeper into the multifaceted role of MACH-Certified OMS and the compelling reasons why businesses across diverse industries are embracing this innovative solution.<hr/><h3>Let’s start from the basics: Why MACH?</h3>Traditional commerce architectures, characterized by monolithic structures and limited flexibility, are ill-suited to meet the demands of today's digital marketplace. At the opposite, a modern stack built on MACH-Certified modules and embodying a headless approach, leverages modular, best-of-breed solutions seamlessly integrated into a customizable framework. This decoupled model empowers businesses to orchestrate front-facing capabilities while ensuring agility and scalability in the backend, across all channels.<hr/><h3>And why OMS? </h3>The role of Order Management Systems (OMS) is pivotal in today's commerce (both BtoB and BtoC), especially for those businesses managing multiple sales channels and multiple stock points. From online marketplaces to brick-and-mortar stores and everything in between, OMS serves as the backbone of efficient order processing and fulfillment across diverse touchpoints. OMS benefits are multiple but on average they can help businesses to increase of 30% online sales, lower by 20% the fewer out-of-stock items, move more of your in-store inventory, reduce your delivery costs and shipping times, above all when shipping internationally, increases customer satisfaction and loyalty…let’s understand how: the main OMS role is to synchronize and optimize order management processes. By providing real-time visibility into inventory levels and order statuses, organizations can optimize stock flows, reduce overstocking or stockouts, minimize costs, and enhance operational efficiency.In addition to efficiency and operations optimization, an OMS can help deliver seamless and personalized shopping experiences. It can do so by ensuring that products are readily available for order processing and by ensuring customers are getting a best-in-class shopping experience, whether it's online storefronts, mobile apps, social media platforms, or physical stores, in terms of availability of the items and in terms of delivery (and returns) options, delivery speed and delivery promise.<hr/><h3>Why a MACH-Certified OMS? </h3>In essence, as explained in the previous paragraph, an OMS is the cornerstone of the commerce stack, connecting sales channels with supply operations and facilitating seamless customer experiences. Given its central position in the commerce ecosystem, it's imperative that the OMS is equipped to connect with many different tools and systems seamlessly. This is where MACH certification becomes indispensable. MACH principles ensure that OMS solutions adhere to standards that prioritize modularity, interoperability, and agility.MACH-Certified OMS solutions stand out for their robust integration capabilities, facilitating seamless connections with various software applications, including e-commerce platforms, POS systems, ERPs…. An OMS, natively conceived following the MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless) principles, will bring the following benefits to the users: <ul><li>Headless Architecture: With a headless OMS, retailers have the insurance that they will be able to leverage modular components and APIs to customize experiences for each channel, ensuring consistency and relevance.</li><li>Cloud-Native Infrastructure: Cloud-native OMS solutions offer unmatched scalability, reliability, and agility compared to on-premises alternatives. By leveraging cloud services, retailers can focus on innovation while offloading infrastructure management tasks. Cloud-native architectures facilitate seamless integration with other cloud-based services and APIs, enabling retailers to scale resources dynamically and drive innovation.</li><li>API-First Approach: APIs are central to modern commerce architectures, enabling seamless communication and integration between systems. This approach allows retailers to expose OMS capabilities as reusable and interoperable services, empowering developers to build integrations and if needed, custom applications that may extend functionalities and adapt to evolving needs.</li><li>Microservices Architecture: By decomposing the OMS into smaller components, retailers can iterate and innovate rapidly, delivering new features and functionalities to market more efficiently.</li></ul><hr/><h3>Conclusions</h3>In conclusion, the adoption of Order Management Systems (OMS) represents a strategic imperative for businesses seeking to optimize their operations, drive cost savings, and deliver unparalleled customer experiences. MACH-Certified OMS solutions offer scalability, seamlessly adapting to changing demands without disrupting day-to-day operations. By investing in a scalable MACH-Certified OMS, organizations can future-proof their operations and sustain long-term growth initiatives effectively.<hr/><h3>Author:</h3><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorenzostranges/"><img alt="Lorenzo_Stranges_-_card.png" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/blt9da117ed2c48671c/66029dd32fff92bc9d47f97d/Lorenzo_Stranges_-_card.png" width="608" height="327" style="max-width: 608px;width: 608px;height: 327px;"/></a>

Why your next MACH-Certified Order Management Systems (OMS) should become the backbone of your modern Commerce Stack

The first global <a href="https://machalliance.org/MACHathon">MACHathon</a> showcased creative ways to help people get virtually unstuck. Seventeen teams from around the world had one week to invent a solution, with many focusing on issues that are prevalent due to Covid-19, and turn their idea into reality using MACH technologies and composable architectures.Taking into account the <a href="https://machathon.devpost.com/project-gallery">many inventive projects</a> that were brought to life in just a few days, it was a close race on who would win the five category awards and who would take home the overall MACHnificent Award. After careful deliberation, a jury of digital leaders across industries selected the top solution in each category.<img src="data:image/png;base64,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"/><h1>The Maturity Award</h1>Sponsored by <a href="https://commercetools.com/">commercetools</a>, the Maturity award looks for the submission that offers the most complete end-to-end solution.The winner was <a href="https://devpost.com/software/simple-shopping-experience-with-curbside-pickup">i-Electra</a>, a simple shopping experience with curbside pickup created by a team from <a href="https://www.infosys.com/">Infosys</a>. The solution helps small retailers get online quickly and safely deliver their products by bringing together curbside pickup, live chat, personalized content, and customer perks in a fully responsive experience across desktop and mobile.“We were able to build a fully functional solution with 5 different products from the MACH Alliance” the team states on their <a href="https://devpost.com/software/simple-shopping-experience-with-curbside-pickup">project story page</a>. “We were able to do this within a week despite having little or no exposure to most of these products.”“We really liked the composition of technologies they were using,” said judge, Roberto Carrera of EPAM, when presenting the award, “how it made sure businesses can have interaction with their customers, and how using technologies and automation like the chatbot was really able to bring it to completion.”<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CtLvUJm50K8?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0"></iframe><h1>The Usability Award</h1>Sponsored by <a href="https://amplience.com/">Amplience</a>, the Usability award was given to the team that designed the most innovative UI/UX.<a href="https://devpost.com/software/social-local">SociaLocal</a> took home top honors in this category, a platform designed by a team from <a href="https://www.valtech.com/">Valtech </a>that fosters involvement of people and small businesses in their local neighbourhood through four key principles: Discover, Connect, Help Out, and Meet Up.The judges agreed that the SociaLocal solution was a great example of a simple and intuitive UI that was bringing together local people and businesses, and really solving the problem of “getting unstuck” that was set for all the entries.For most of the team, this was their first hackathon experience, and collaboration happened across multiple time zones. On their <a href="https://devpost.com/software/social-local">project story page</a>, the team says that the MACH philosophy allowed them to decouple the different work streams and successfully work in distributed environments.<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/505852084?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0"></iframe><h1>The Relevance Award</h1>Sponsored by <a href="https://www.valtech.com/">Valtech</a>, the Relevance award looks for the solution with the highest perceived value for the end users.The winner was the <a href="https://devpost.com/software/shopping-helper-bot">Shopping Helper Bot</a> designed to make online shopping easier, safer, and less stressful for seniors and their families. Created by a team from <a href="https://www.epam.com/">EPAM</a>, the solution uses a Telegram bot that allows seniors to use simple text search to fill a communal shopping cart, and have the most digitally fluent member of the group handle the eCommerce aspects.“It’s very in-the-moment, and we’ve all experienced needing to shop for necessities lately,” said judge, Mihaela Mazzenga of The Sharper Image, when presenting the award. “It’s a great example of use of technology for a real world problem, and it also eases an experience for multi-generational families.”<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N4b3qFuPcEI?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0"></iframe><h1>The Viability Award</h1>Sponsored by <a href="https://www.epam.com/">EPAM</a>, the Viability award goes to the solution with the highest perceived business value.The solution for at home learning, <a href="https://devpost.com/software/techernator">TeacherNator</a>, took home the award. Designed by a team from <a href="https://www.valtech.com/">Valtech</a>, the solution brings together technologies to create an interactive learning environment that goes beyond a textbook and Zoom.“The solution provides business value in combining a very cost effective combination of good platforms to deliver a very effective interactive teaching platform,” said judge, Peter Burggraaff of Boston Consulting Group, when presenting the award. “It presents a very clear solution for real channels of at home schooling.”The team is planning on the next iteration of the project to include a video-conferencing solution and engagement analytics to further help teachers support their students, according to their <a href="https://devpost.com/software/techernator">project story page</a>.<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/505809801?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0"></iframe><h1>MACHnificent Award</h1>The MACHnificent award is the grand prize for the overall winner of the first annual MACH Alliance MACHathon. The winning team was the one that scored the most points across all criteria of the judging framework.The 2021 MACHnificent Award goes to the <a href="https://devpost.com/software/foodbank-connectors">Food Bank Connector</a>, designed by a team from <a href="https://lab.co.uk/">LAB Group</a>. The solution brings together the food bank network to highlight demand, send out alerts, and connect the dots between services like logistics and surplus distribution. Leveraging a stack of technology to revolutionize the way food banks operate.“This is a really great example of how you can use different MACH technologies to solve a real world problem.” said judge, Pascal Lagarde of Valtech, when presenting the award. “It looks great, it really helps unstick multiple groups of stakeholders, and we thought it was the best overall solution to the assignment that was given only a week ago.”“This was our first experience with MACH tech and surprised with how quickly we were able to build our tool and upskill.” the team says on their <a href="https://devpost.com/software/foodbank-connectors">project story page</a>.“The scalable nature of MACH tech means that we can roll it out to other areas that need help too.” says team member and art director, Rebecca Kidston.“We’ll definitely be continuing with the project after the MACHathon is over,” says team member and lead technical solutions architect, Deon Smith, “as we really feel it can make a difference.”<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/505794665?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0"></iframe><h1>The Integration Award</h1>Sponsored by <a href="https://www.contentstack.com/">Contentstack</a>, the Integration award is for the most innovative combination of solutions stacked together.The award goes to <a href="https://devpost.com/software/project-atmanirbhar">AtmaNirbhar</a>, a platform developed by a team from <a href="https://www.accenture.com/">Accenture</a> that uses audio and visual tools to make it easier for marginalized members of society to join the digital world. Using voice search and augmented reality, the solution is especially designed to help people around the world without literacy skills access the benefits of digital to sell their services and products, as well as stay up to date with what their local government has to offer.“What we really liked about this one is it helps illiterate folks use audiovisual to make it easier to connect and run a ‘phygital’ business, a combination of physical and digital, and we thought that was an amazing project.” said judge, Jasmin Guthmann of Valtech, when presenting the award.On their <a href="https://devpost.com/software/project-atmanirbhar">project story page</a>, the team says they would like to continue developing the AR functionality of the platform to make it easier for users to review products and learn skills.<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/glSFrWpDIGU?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0"></iframe><h1>People’s Choice Award</h1>Sponsored by <a href="https://mcfadyen.com/">McFadyen Digital</a>, the People’s Choice Award was voted on by the public.<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/508886379?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0"></iframe>Each of the seventeen teams received a share of the votes, with a network of over 1050 people selecting their favorite project. With over 200 votes, <a href="https://devpost.com/software/project-atmanirbhar">AtmaNirbhar</a> was the overall winner. Developed by a team from <a href="https://www.accenture.com/nl-en">Accenture</a>, this audiovisual platform was also the winner of the Integration Award, as seen above.

MACHathon 2021 Winners ﻿Solutions for “Getting Unstuck”

A Deep Dive Into the MACH Themes and Topics Being Discussed at This Year’s MACH TWOBuilding on the success of last year’s MACH ONE conference, we’re coming back for an even bigger, better <a href="https://the.machalliance.org/machtwo/">MACH TWO</a> in Amsterdam June 13-14.Our annual conference has quickly become known as THE event of the MACH calendar. If you're considering replatforming to a composable stack, already on your journey, or would like to know more about the next big technological shift, this is not to be missed.This year's theme? How composable architecture and MACH design principles are changing how we do business.<h2></h2>The speed, agility and scalability composable architecture and MACH design principles offer are transformative for enterprises – future-proofing digital ecosystems whilst dramatically improving customers' experiences.But this infinite opportunity and reward require a new way of thinking – one where leadership must consider how best to orchestrate data of all types across every system in the business. For some, these journeys are painful. There are stories about old ERP systems presenting roadblocks to the API-build, examples where the business is truly resistant, and projects which struggle because the legacy cannot be worked around. Equally, you will hear many more stories that have really transformed large enterprise tech within their business. MACH TWO will cover them all.<h2></h2>Let’s take a look at some of our incredible speakers and dive into the topics they will cover.<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/blt9dd9fef95424867f/645a0cb1d93f9cef08bae15f/speaker_Dylan_Valade.png"/><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylan-valade/">Dylan Valade,</a> Head of Global E-Commerce Technology, PUMA Group, is joining our speaker roster. He will present his experience transitioning the company to MACH and the resulting benefits delivering new front end customer experiences faster.“What’s important is that as soon as somebody has an idea they can have it live, either in production or in a production-like environment, within a day or two’.” says Dylan, “There should be no reason to have a good idea, that everyone is supportive of, and not be able to preview or prototype it the same week.”When he joined PUMA in 2016, Dylan found that the legacy technology wasn’t enabling this kind of speed. Some of the monolithic platforms being used did make sense for their area of business, and many still exist in the company’s stack, but the lack of flexible APIs was holding the team back when it came to customer experience. “What happens with the monolith structure is that you struggle to keep pace with the change of new frontend experiences that become available.” says Dylan, “When your backend and frontend are one in the same, it makes it difficult to safely release as much code as you’re ready to put into production because you can’t tell where a button change on the frontend might affect a price upload on the backend.” “We couldn’t get good ideas live because we were so focused on solving these problems. The MACH approach allows for easy, incremental change without huge investment or big decision making or a major change in the way people do their work.” says Dylan.<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/blt0049bf318256f671/645a3c2335e4ba6d706bba9d/speaker_Anca_Iordanescu.png"/><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/anca-iordanescu-phd-computer-science-3756971/">Anca lordanescu</a>, VP of Engineering at IKEA will present their story of internal transformation and taking back control. Moving from decades of outsourced IT where there was little internal ownership, to one where IKEA has control of its own technology destiny is no easy feat. IKEA has moved from 10 developers internally to more than 1,000 - deploying an API-based architecture that allows tools to be plugged in where needed.<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/blt00f0a064e43fb772/645a12cfd93f9c34e3bae17c/speaker_Paul_Hornby.png"/><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulhornby/">Paul Hornby</a>, Digital Customer Experience Director at the Very Group, will talk about building an optimized culture and how they built support for change internally, while demonstrating tangible business value at each step of the process.In 2022, Very began migrating each stage of the customer journey from its existing digital commerce platform to MACH. Each migration phase introduces more of Very’s new in-house headless presentation layer, which gives customers a more contemporary, consistent and accessible design, built using the retailer’s new design system.The team can make more simultaneous changes to different parts of its customer journey than ever before. The possibilities that this opens up from both a customer and a business perspective are greater than anything they’ve experienced, and they are planning further investments to give their customers their best ever experience on Very, and to help the business to attract and retain more of the best tech talent.<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/blt32d68f7aa109201b/645a402923f9164c08cb097d/Group_2920.png"/><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-sims3/">Paul Sims</a>, Chief Architect, and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/louisa-hanover-businessarchitecttogaf/">Louisa Hanover,</a> Business Architect at Primark will focus on one of the added benefits of embracing composable architecture (and MACH) and the cultural shift this necessitates. For Primark, this has been a key enabler for becoming a 24/7 international retailer, forcing a change in approach away from traditional patterns such as batch and offline modes. This is the cancel culture Primark are embracing - a recognition that techniques that took the business to where it is today won't take them to where they need to be tomorrow.<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/blt866d73980e21e422/645a178335e4ba6c4a6bba15/speaker_Andreas_Westendörpf.png"/><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/westendoerpf/">Andreas Westendörpf,</a> CTO at Emma - The Sleep Company, will share his experience. The company has been transitioning from monolith to MACH since 2020. They didn’t want to be constrained by a monolithic, highly integrated approach so they looked to find a best-fit solution for each business domain. Their approach for every domain was best-purpose-fit to enable the business development and origin to make AND rent technology on a case-by-case basis.The old technology stack couldn’t handle the order volumes they needed but the real reason for transformation was that changes took a long time to implement, weeks or months, so business development was blocked.However, Andreas cautions that adopting MACH isn’t a free hit, and a strong software engineering culture must support and inform plans, but when done right it can act as a dynamo for business growth.<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/bltb4c1d27fc92387e1/645a3cf1f6d4ab4694def079/speaker_Mindy_Montgomery.png"/><a href="Mindy Montgomery">Mindy Montgomery</a>, Associate Director of Product Management at ASICS Digital, will share their story about starting their MACH journey in response to an internal challenge to significantly improve touchpoints across not only owned channels, but through 3rd parties of every type, from sponsored athletes through to wholesale retail partners. Mindy is a proven disruptor within large organizations and is taking up the challenge to speed up RFP's, creating an ecosystem platform that brings the ASICS story to life.<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/blte61f4e03efe155d8/645a12cf2887da8405858389/speaker_Sven_Rosemann.png"/><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sven-rosemann/">Sven Rosemann</a>, CTO at flaconi will talk about the company’s journey from being held hostage by IT to a liberated stack. flaconi is one of Germany’s leading online retailers for self-care products founded in 2011 and has seen unprecedented business growth. Its legacy architecture was in-house developed and required a lot of customization.It was clear they had to change and while they considered three options including maintaining their systems in-house and an all-in-one suite approach, it was clear only a combination of best of breed composable solutions would align with their needs and the way they wanted to operate and scale in the future.You can see their before and after architecture in our whitepaper - <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZZtfbkj21RkzjaRwYbUkJzH488K-imfV/view">Making the case for MACH. </a>The new architecture has enabled them to reduce in house development by 60%, allowing them to focus on developing features for customers and not maintenance.Let’s meet at MACH TWOHosted by MACH Ambassadors<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/nialledwards/"> Niall Edwards</a> of LEGO Group and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielle-diliberti-73801140/">Danielle Diliberti</a> of Sommsation, in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), commercetools, Contentstack and Valtech, the event will be brought to you live from the iconic DeLaMar Theatre in Amsterdam. Over two days, attendees will hear from digital leaders who are using MACH to create new futures including AmerCareRoyal, ASICS, IKEA, Mars, Interflora, Primark, Dr Oetker, Easyjet Holidays, Vodafone and more.Are you ready to join the conversation and shape the future of enterprise tech? Don’t miss out on the opportunity to learn from thought leaders and connect with like-minded professionals at MACH TWO. It’s free to attend for delegates. So, what are you waiting for?We've published a <a href="https://23221942.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/23221942/MACH%20TWO/MACH%20TWO%20Delegates%20Success%20Guide.pdf">must-read guide to MACH TWO</a>: How to maximize your time and create opportunities.<a href="https://the.machalliance.org/machtwo/">Register here</a>

MACH TWO: The Art and Science Powering the Future of Business

Meet Your MACH Alliance Ambassador: Adam Sturrock, Tech Consultant and Co-Founder of Moltin

<h3 style="text-align: center;">A Message from the President: New Leadership, New Momentum </h3>I’m excited to share some key updates following our latest <a href="https://machalliance.org/board" target="_blank">Executive Board</a> kick-off. It was a full day of discussions focused on advancing MACH education, easing adoption, and continuing our industry expansion. These conversations reinforced our commitment to delivering value to our members and supporting the broader transition to composable architectures. <h4>Strengthening Our Leadership </h4>I'm proud to announce industry-veteran&nbsp;Bob Howland&nbsp;as our new Chairperson, bringing vital end-user and brand needs directly into our board setting and thereby our strategic focus. Congratulations to&nbsp;Malte Ubl,&nbsp;Kimberly Matenchuk, and&nbsp;Dom Selvon&nbsp;for their successful elections and a warm welcome to&nbsp;Amer Ali&nbsp;as our new Treasurer. Each of these leaders brings a unique perspective, and their vision will be critical in shaping the future of MACH.In addition,&nbsp;Krithika Ganesamoorthi,&nbsp;Dom Selvon, and&nbsp;Jasmin Guthmann&nbsp;have been appointed as Vice Presidents. Their know-how in triggering industry change and enabling education will amplify our impact, and support end-users and members alike, in navigating the shift toward composable architectures rooted in the MACH principles.As I step into my re-appointed role as President, I want to thank&nbsp;Chris Bach&nbsp;and&nbsp;Jon Panella&nbsp;for their incredible support. Their contributions have been instrumental in shaping our journey, and I’m grateful for their continued involvement. <h4>Focus Areas for the Year Ahead</h4>As we look ahead, our focus is clear:<ul><li>Expand Education: We will continue to provide world-class educational experiences that equip businesses and practitioners with the knowledge required to fully realize all the business potential made possible by the MACH principles.</li><li>Ease of Entry and Adoption: Simplifying the adoption of MACH will remain a priority, as we aim to make future-fit composable architectures more accessible to companies regardless of sector, maturity, and size.</li><li>Grow the Community: We want to scale our strong community, which already helps practitioners and end-users embrace a composable, open tech stack based on MACH principles. Our focus is on formalizing this further, to enable a supportive environment where everyone can learn and share ideas. Through online discussions, in-person meetings, and workshops, we encourage connections that foster innovation.</li></ul><h4> The Broader Impact</h4>This evolving leadership team reflects the strength and diversity of our organization. Together, we’re defining the future of enterprise technology, and thereby give brands the tools to outgrow their digital strategies through composable architectures. Our collective efforts continue to solidify the path to a more innovative and scalable future for businesses, from industry disruptors to established brands.<hr/>

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<h3>Thank You for Your Support</h3>I want to express my gratitude to every member of the MACH Alliance for your ongoing commitment. Your engagement and dedication fuel our momentum, and I’m confident that with this new leadership team, we’ll reach even greater heights.Stay tuned for more exciting updates and opportunities to get involved. Together, we’re shaping the future of the digital landscape.

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A Message from the President

<h3>Views and Facts</h3>Picture yourself as the CIO or CTO of a major retailer whose physical stores were all closed due to COVID-19. How would you adapt? Adopting contactless curbside pickup is the clear answer, but given the limitations of your customer engagement and commerce platforms, how quickly could you roll that feature out? There was a clear delineation in the retail world, where companies like Best Buy, Target, and Walmart were able to quickly add contactless curbside pickup and other retailers that will remain unnamed took months to roll that feature out or have yet to roll it out. The difference between retailers that have come out of this pandemic successfully and those who have suffered largely comes down to being able to quickly adapt to changes in business through the use of technology.Many retailers are still using big, all-in-one customer engagement and commerce platforms that make it extremely time-consuming and expensive to release new functionality. These retailers are lucky to release new functionality once a month to production under the best of circumstances. With many features taking a few releases to perfect, retailers using this style of technology and practices could have to wait months, quarters or years to get that functionality right and start generating revenue. As we’ve all realized in the past few months, the world changes very quickly!Successful retailers that were able to quickly adopt contactless curbside pickup all had one thing in common – they used MACH technologies and practices: Microservices, APIs, Cloud and Headless. Let’s discuss each.The AcronymThe “M” in MACH is for “Microservices,” which are small applications that each do one thing and do it well. Rather than one enormous application that contains logic for product, pricing, inventory, cart, checkout, etc you have small cross-functional teams of roughly seven members who own a business domain, like pricing. The members of the pricing team then own the entire domain of pricing and have full control over their application and can release whenever they want.The “A” in MACH is for “APIs”. An API is simply a published interface that can be used to exchange data (products, orders, customers, etc) or execute functionality (add to cart, calculate price, reserve inventory, etc). APIs are critical because they allow the various frontends (web, mobile, IoT, etc) to access all of the same data and functionality. When the web was the only frontend available, the line between frontend and backend wasn’t so clear but in the age of multichannel retail, it’s absolutely necessary to give each frontend access to the same data and functionality.Next is “C” for “Cloud,” which means using real multi-tenant SaaS. Rather than having to download, install, run and manage software, multi-tenant SaaS vendors just give you an API key and you can start using their software immediately! Along with multi-tenant SaaS is cloud-native architecture which is much more resilient than the legacy architectures of the past.Finally the “H” standards for “Headless” which is your frontends being completely decoupled from your backend. With headless, you can change your frontends each as often as you’d like with a dedicated separate team. Your backend (fronted by APIs, backed by microservices) can then evolve separately on its own timeline.With MACH technologies, retailers can quickly change to meet an ever-changing business climate. MACH is the present and future of commerce. We at the MACH Alliance, founded in June of 2020, are committed to promoting the adoption of MACH because there is an enormous need for speed.Author: Kelly Goetsch

The Need for Speed

REWE Scales the Online Grocery Marketplace with a Flexible MACH ArchitectureAccording to a <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/how-european-shoppers-will-buy-groceries-in-the-next-normal">McKinsey &amp; Company survey of European consumers</a>, about 15% of people tried out a new website for grocery shopping during the pandemic and, of that group, over half intend to keep using their newfound site for some part of their grocery needs.The rapid demand of online ordering and convenient, safe delivery options has exposed the weak links in many retailers’ eCommerce systems that resulted in late deliveries, mixed up orders, and upset customers. Meanwhile, grocery retailers already on the path to modern commerce were able to quickly pivot to meet the demands of shoppers stuck at home.<a href="https://www.rewe.de/">REWE</a>, a leading German supermarket chain, is invested in the <a href="https://www.rewe-digital.com/">digital future of retail</a> and is a pioneer of applying MACH (microservice, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless) architectures to the food sector. In 2020, REWE was able to build on their MACH foundation to double the amount of “click-and-collect” services in just a few weeks, launch a <a href="https://fulfillmenttools.com/en/">cross-industry fulfillment platform</a>, and ultimately provide convenient access to food across Germany at a very critical time.“We now reach around 90% of the population with our delivery and pick-up services, and the package service additionally covers the entire country.”Dr. Robert Zores, CTO at REWE digital<h1>Complex Fulfillment</h1>While nearly every industry had to quickly ramp up digital in 2020, few sectors are more complex to scale than grocery. Fresh strawberries, frozen pizza, and pasteurized milk all have different packaging processes and cold chain regulations that are combined with high consumer demands around delivery time, quality, and substitutions.“Offering groceries online, commissioning them, delivering them or making them available for pick-up – all of course within the time frames requested by customers and with the highest level of service – that is a fine art,” says Björn Dröschel, Managing Director Product &amp; Technology <a href="https://fulfillmenttools.com/en/">fulfillmenttools</a>.Having an API-first architecture allows your different systems to communicate by sharing data in a standard format. This lets you easily pull data from your existing IT systems, quickly integrate new proprietary tools, or build your own in-house capabilities for unique needs. Through use of microservices, teams can add individual capabilities as they are needed and evolve their fulfillment process at the pace that matches their customers’ demands.Going into 2020, REWE had a modular microservices architecture in place with MACH-certified <a href="https://commercetools.com/food">commercetools</a> as their foundational commerce platform. As the number of shoppers purchasing groceries online quickly ramped up, REW digital developed <a href="https://fulfillmenttools.com/en/">fulfillmenttools</a>, a cloud-based platform designed with an API-first approach that streamlines fulfillment from the moment the order is placed until it reaches the customer.<h1>Marketplace Orchestration</h1>Key to REWE’s business is a growing marketplace of food, kitchen, and homeware partners with productsavailable for REWE customers to order online, have delivered, or pick-up from a collection point“Our biggest challenge is the technical onboarding. Smaller retailers are often not technically capable of transmitting their product data in a well-structured format,” says Bassel Soukar, Head of Marketplace at REWE digital, about the complexities of quickly growing a marketplace. “It is not only the quality of the partners that matters, but also their technical competence in handling modern tools. To overcome this challenge, we provide support through our own technical onboarding team.”The API-first approach of MACH can help standardize the data of multiple partners, bringing products smoothly into the system. Additionally, native Cloud software offers multi-client capability which allows each marketplace partner to be activated individually, making data management easier.“Operating a ‘real’ marketplace is extremely complex. It starts with the connection of the marketplace participants (different product data and structures, different qualities, consolidation of the same items, automation, process management, etc.) and ends with the handling of mixed shopping baskets from different suppliers. These multi-layered processes have to function smoothly for the customer without any loss of quality or service.”Dirk Hoerig, Founder and CEO at commercetoolsA MACH approach to marketplace architecture not only helps scale the amount of products offered, it also creates a foundation for more personalized shopping. For instance, a customer might only want to see items available in their local shop, to prioritize organic products, or to avoid ingredients they are allergic to. Structuring marketplace data as neutral APIs from the start will allow retailers to quickly scale up different experience capabilities in the future.<h1>Scale Quickly</h1>50% and 53% of <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/retail/our%20insights/the%20path%20forward%20for%20european%20grocery%20retailers/disruption-and-uncertainty-the-state-of-grocery-retail-2021-europe-final.pdf">European</a> and <a href="https://www.grocerydive.com/news/e-commerce-profitability-is-a-top-priority-for-grocery-ceos-survey-finds/602288/">American</a> Grocery store CEOs, respectively, say that scaling their online grocery business is a top 3 priority over the next year. For many in the food sector, the past year showed that legacy tools - and outdated ways of working - can’t give them the speed they need.&nbsp;“Yesterday’s digital strategies, such as multiyear targets and corresponding road maps, no longer suffice given the fast rate of change in grocery retail. Pure online players and innovative incumbents are constantly on the move; by the time they complete their two year road map, the world looks different again.”McKinsey &amp; Company, The State of Grocery Retail 2021, EuropeA MACH approach allows teams to spin up new capabilities or integration in lightweight proof-of-concept projects without risking current functionality, using microservices that are developed and scaled independently.“When someone has an idea for a new feature, we implement it quickly so that we can test the new feature using measurable data (KPIs or key performance indicators). Only when the KPIs show positive results, for example when the newly implemented feature generates more revenue, will it then be scaled up,” explains David Yasli, CPO at REWE digital.Using this flexible approach, REWE was able to quickly scale fulfillment when Germany entered lockdown in the spring of 2020.“Within a few weeks, we were able to almost double the number of REWE stores with a pick-up service to over 1,000. Where others had to struggle with a lot of manpower and additional infrastructure to set up Click &amp; Collect, we were able to scale our services, add markets organizationally and integrate them into the web and in the app,” says Dr. Robert Zores. “It was certainly a feat of strength for the pick-up service team, which wouldn’t have been possible without our technological background.”<h1></h1><h1>REWE’s Flexible Retail Solutions Go Beyond Grocery</h1>REWE has long been a leader in digital retail. They were an early investor in <a href="https://commercetools.com/">commercetools</a>, the headless commerce platform now used by global enterprises to drive everything from high-fashion social selling to in-car commerce.“The ‘online groceries’ area, with its complex requirements when it comes to product catalogs, data volume, scaling, order volume, and cross-channel and omnichannel models, etc. covers almost all possible challenges – true to the motto: If you can do food, you can too (almost) everything else,” says commercetools’ founder and CEO, Dirk Hoerig.The REWE digital team believes that fulfillment is another area where retailers of all industries can benefit from the lessons learned tackling the complexities of the food sector. In September 2020, they launched their in-house development platform, <a href="https://fulfillmenttools.com/en/">fulfillmenttools</a>, to help retailers of all industries on their way to digitalization.“Both the platform itself and our team bring a lot of retail and tech expertise to the table, which also provides other industries, such as fashion, consumer electronics or leisure with a valuable competitive advantage,” says fulfillmenttools’ Managing Director Product &amp; Technology, Björn Dröschel. “We have built our solution so flexibly that it can be applied to all types of pick-up and delivery models. This makes it possible to equip even the most complex omnichannel offers from retailers with the right processes, so that they can offer their customers modern services, such as Click &amp; Collect, based on their existing IT infrastructure.”<h1>How MACH Helps Grocery Retailers</h1>Modern MACH architectures give teams the power to make unique, innovative digital commerce experiences and bring new ideas to market in hours or days, rather than weeks or months.MicroservicesModular, independent services can be adapted to specific customer needs and implemented step-by-step.API-firstAll functionality is exposed through APIs for rapid integration of existing and future IT systems.Cloud-native SaaSEnsure scalability for unplanned fluctuations and use multi-client capability to manage marketplace partners.HeadlessCombine powerful backend tools into a seamless frontend experience for shoppers across every channel.. Starting with 5 partners in 2018, the supermarket’s website now offers over 150,000 products from more than 65 partners.

REWE Scales the Online Grocery Marketplace with a Flexible MACH Architecture

Author: Casper Rasmussen, President of the MACH Alliance 

Among organizations well along in their MACH journey, 77% report using AI, compared to only 36% of those new to MACH. While this is correlation, not causation, it highlights a clear pattern: companies investing in MACH are also the ones advancing in AI.
AI is pushing companies to move faster, adapt quicker, and rethink their entire business. And this is exactly why MACH is more important than ever.
Being AI-ready is no longer a future concern—it’s a present necessity. The businesses that thrive will be the ones with an architecture and mindset that enables AI to integrate, evolve, and deliver real impact. It won't come as a surprise that we recommend a MACH approach.
Allow me to elaborate on why that is—and back it up with some solid proof for this well-founded opinion.
 
<h4>Composable AI: The Way to Stay in Control</h4>
AI thrives on access—to data, to services, to business logic. It works best in environments that are open, connected, and built for change. The MACH approach, by design, enable this. MACH architecture is API-first, modular, and vendor-independent, ensuring AI tools can integrate, evolve, and scale without businesses being locked into a single system or provider.
<a href="https://diginomica.com/mach-survey-composable-pays-fear-hampers-adoption" target="_blank">Phil Wainewright, with Diginomica</a>, has pointed out that AI is not just another tool—it’s reshaping enterprise technology at its core. But to make AI work, businesses need an architecture that’s just as agile as AI itself. Without it, organizations risk being locked into rigid systems that can’t keep up with the speed of AI-driven innovation. (link) 
<h4>Why MACH is the Fabric for AI Adoption</h4>
AI cannot be an afterthought—plugged into existing systems or wrapped around it, forced to conform to rigid infrastructure. It needs a foundation that is open, adaptable, and built for change. That’s exactly what MACH provides.
AI-powered workflows demand real-time data, seamless interoperability, and the ability to evolve at the same pace as the models themselves. A MACH approach ensures AI is not just an add-on, but a fully integrated, scalable part of business operations.
Here’s what MACH brings to the AI era:
<ul>
 <li>Seamless AI Integration – API-first design ensures AI models can interact with enterprise data and services natively, eliminating costly workarounds.</li>
 <li>Scalability – AI workloads are compute-intensive. MACH’s cloud-native, microservices-based infrastructure dynamically scales AI operations without disruption.</li>
 <li>Data Agility – AI models rely on structured, real-time data. MACH unifies data across PIMs, CDPs, DAMs, and beyond, ensuring AI always operates with the most relevant inputs.</li>
 <li>Freedom to Experiment – AI evolves fast. MACH’s modular approach lets businesses quickly adopt and switch between AI models as new capabilities emerge.</li>
</ul>
 
<h4>The Risk of AI Without MACH</h4>
Without MACH, AI initiatives risk failing, as businesses aim to scale the impact of their experiments . Monolithic systems are rigid, and traditional enterprise suites confine AI’s potential by keeping data and services locked within static architectures. Vendor lock-in adds another layer of limitation, forcing businesses to stick with a single AI model even as better options emerge.
When MACH launched in 2020, the primary driver was enabling businesses to create unique, best-in-class, and flexible user experiences. Today, that driver is evolving—the ability to deploy AI seamlessly across the enterprise is taking center stage.

David Dorf with AWS, recently pointed out that businesses need to avoid AI vendor lock-in at all costs. Today’s best AI model may not be the best next year. With a MACH-based approach, companies stay flexible, ensuring they can continuously adopt and refine AI strategies without overhauling their tech stack. 
<h4></h4>
<h4>The MACH Alliance: Setting the Standard for AI and Composable Architectures</h4>
The MACH Alliance exists to help businesses build future-proof technology strategies. As AI reshapes the enterprise landscape, MACH provides the foundation needed to make AI work—efficiently, at scale, and on your terms. Now and in two or ten years.
MACH is not just an option for AI adoption. It’s the way to ensure AI remains an advantage, and does not turn into a liability as new developments arise.
The future of AI is composable. The basis of composability is MACH. Let’s go.

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<h3 style="text-align: center;">Explore MACH+AI at The Composable Conference!</h3>
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<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/casper-aagaard-rasmussen/" target="_blank"><img width="535" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/bltef98c3fd4f6551e3/67cc61502c963bbc1a1bf5f0/Casper_card.png" height="245" target="_blank"/></a>Keywords: composable, composability, AI, Artificial Intelligence

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MACH is the Backbone of an AI-Ready Business

The Business Benefit of a Modern Product Development ParadigmSoftware-as-a-Service (SaaS) has been around for a long time. Spearheaded by Salesforce in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) segment, the subscription-based licensing quickly took over the marketing technology world.In its simplest definition, Software as a Service means that rather than purchasing a product, a ‘box’, a buyer purchases the service - the right to use that piece of software without actually ‘holding a box in their hand’.Prior to a subscription model, enterprise software buyers would find themselves with large upfront investments for a software license, often accompanied by annual maintenance and support fees - traditionally ranging from 10 to 25% depending on the level of support chosen. The large sum of the initial purchase made software licenses part of the capital expenses which meant long decision making and procurement cycles.When marketing took over large parts of the technology budget, these long evaluation and procurement cycles became no longer acceptable and the shift to subscription and thus operating expenses rapidly rippled through the marketing facing part of the enterprise software industry. This had tremendous implications on vendor bookkeeping and reporting and I only too well remember the worry in the CFO’s eyes a good decade ago when working at a legacy software vendor. But most vendors eventually made that shift - the ones who did not are just not around anymore.Another force fueled the pivot to a subscription-based licensing model: The rise of ‘The Cloud’. As companies became increasingly comfortable with dropping their server farms in the basement and moving to a serverless model, Software-as-a-Service became a more and more attractive model. From a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) perspective, adopting cloud offerings meant enterprises could shift the cost of setting up and maintaining the infrastructure to their software vendors. And whilst that meant tremendous reduction in cost, more crucially it meant significant reduction in risk for maintaining the security side of the software and the risk for software breaking either because of badly maintained infrastructure or under the load of peak traffic.However, something sneaky happened right there when vendors moved to ‘The Cloud’. And from conversations with prospects and even digital agencies and system integrators in the past half-year, I am shocked how little awareness there is for the final crucial benefit of Software-as-a-Service: The death of software versions.Gartner Research predicts that through 2021, digital transformation will take enterprises twice as long and cost twice as much as anticipated, causing them to push things off until they’re out of date. There are many reasons for that, but from what I learned in conversations with digital leaders, upgrades are a major culprit.Cloud-native SaaS means no upgrades ever. The cost and effort involved in upgrading technology is huge and often underestimated in total cost of ownership conversations. The risk in upgrading, particularly in more complex environments is high, especially for organizations that customised part of the tooling to better accommodate their needs. And lastly, the resources that work for weeks - sometimes months - on an upgrade project, they don’t contribute to actually propelling the digital experience for customers forward. The opportunity cost for that is rarely taken into account.Seamless, rolling upgrades means that you always have the latest functionality at your disposal. When talking to organizations on legacy technology, one of the biggest frustrations of teams is that they are always behind, in some cases multiple versions. So whilst a vendor might have made improvements to a new version released, they cannot utilize the features to improve their digital customer experience because they have not yet upgraded to that next version. Often, because the upgrade is, when the actual business case is made, prohibitively expensive.These two benefits - no upgrades ever and always the latest tooling - when they come together, can provide significant competitive advantage because of the innovation capacity they open up.Tangent: One of my biggest pet peeves in this upgrade treadmill is when legacy vendors ask for additional license fees for major upgrades. One customer told me the other day that a ‘leading’ CMS vendor asked for a 6-digit figure for them to be allowed to leverage the latest version. Honestly, I thought this was a thing of the past. This organization had invested millions of dollars into said vendor over the course of the years. Dollars, that the vendor used to create this new version. How messed up is it to ask a customer to pay for something that they funded in the first place? This organization shared my views and took the opportunity to deliver themselves from this attitude and switched to a Cloud-native SaaS solution.The bottom line: Legacy vendors in marketing technology largely switched their finance models to subscription and moved their infrastructure to the cloud to appear more sassy. But in order to really BE SaaS, the Software Delivery Model has to follow too.That is the hardest part because the internal architecture is not set up for a microservices, cloud-native delivery. Because the way engineering is set up, is not set up for weekly releases. Because APIs are not thought about first as modern SaaS vendors do, but an afterthought. This isn’t just a matter of technology, this is also a question of changing 30-year-old mindsets. I spoke to an industry analyst recently who told me that to the best of his knowledge the only vendor who ever successfully managed to refactor from on-premise to cloud-native SaaS in the digital experience software space, is Vtex - who just a few days ago entered unicorn status.So when you look out for new marketing technology, ask these three questions to make sure you are buying into tools that will give your innovation house the agility and flexibility you need, and that you don’t accidentally buy into the upgrade treadmill:<ol><li>What effort is involved in upgrading to the latest version of your solution?The answer should be: No effort. And if in doubt, have this confirmed by a reference that matches your use case and complexity.</li><li>How often do you deploy new functionality releases (so not hotfixes and bug fixes)?The answer should be at least monthly. Check the product release documentation to verify.</li><li>What license premium do you ask for new versions? The answer should be: None. You may want to confirm that in your contract.</li></ol>Author: Sonja Kotrotsos<ol></ol>

Understanding SaaS: More Than a Subscription

<h3>Headless Commerce is getting more and more accessible</h3>In modern eCommerce, the user experience is crucial as a coherent, well-designed shopping path, which increasingly includes elements such as social media that significantly influence conversion rate. And yet, it is extremely tough to meet ever-changing customer expectations, especially while struggling with a legacy eCommerce system. That is why Headless Commerce is gaining momentum and slowly but surely paving its paths to the mainstream.Headless Commerce is - in essence - a new approach to building software architecture where all services - not only the frontend and backend - are separated and "talks" to each other via API.In practice, it means that headless platforms (backend) come without an external layer, a graphical interface, i.e., the head (frontend). The external bodiless frontend communicates with the headless platform via API. Also, it can be connected with any other 3rd party services such as Headless CMS, payment, search, loyalty programs, etc.The crucial element is the API, which connects the individual pieces to an entire ecosystem. The core advantage of this approach is that every piece can be replaced at any given moment without rebuilding the entire system.<h3>Headless Commerce is about to reshape the eCommerce industry</h3>Decoupled services ensure the future-proof aspects of the software. Merchants can flexibly align the system to their current business needs by adding and removing 3rd party services without worrying that today's decisions will backfire tomorrow. They are never doomed to one particular tech vendor. Instead, they can cherry-pick from the best ones in the particular niche.That is general and not arguably the most important benefit, but there are more while lowering to specifics.Since the frontend and backend work separately, there is a much lower risk of errors when implementing any modifications. Changes in one layer do not affect the elements of the other. It makes the whole system much more flexible, as<ul><li>frontend and backend specialists can work independently of each other; frontend devs can implement quick updates, and backends' constantly take care of the system stability</li></ul>The flexibility of the frontend layer implies, however, another pro:<ul><li>marketers can manage (update and publish) content without the support of the frontend devs through the UX-friendly Headless CMS dashboard</li></ul>The general concerns around Headless Commerce were mainly about money, as in the past, to have a bodiless frontend, it had to be built from scratch. That, in turn, required a lot of time and money. Of course, the overall cost of creation depended mainly on the number of modules, the type of technology, and the ability to manage each element, but still, it was not easy nor cheap.However, the entry threshold for using headless technology is getting lower every year, as the landscape of Headless Commerce solutions is growing and they become more and more accessible.Merchants do not have to opt for a comprehensive migration right away; they can stay with the blackened they already have, add bodiless frontend, and see if it works for their marketing and dev's, or - if their business logic is complicated, product catalog - extended and marketing activities very unique - they can go full headless, replace backend, fronted, and add a variety of 3rd party services. What is important - they don't have to do all of it at once.<h3>Headless Commerce can be for the biggest players looking for future-proof, high-performance solutions</h3>An example of using the "full headless" approach is LoveCrafts, a sales and community platform. Initially, it decided to replace the monolithic version of Magento 1 with the second version, yet, it soon became apparent that switching to this version wouldn't necessarily be smoother than switching to a completely different vendor. Therefore, the search for a suitable platform continued.It was essential to the brand that their application offered users easy performance from the front end, while the back end had to solve the problems of finding information and storing business logic. After analyzing dozens of options, commercetools was the final choice.LoveCrafts knew from the start that choosing commercetools would require selecting the proper frontend, and Vue Storefront turned out to be the only serious contender. There was no other frontend solution that offered the flexibility the company was looking for.This combination was just the beginning, while API-first solutions allowed customization of other elements of the eCommerce puzzle, such as checkout and other modules. The headless approach proved an evident success here. The numbers speak for themselves - conversion rates increased by 3% and traffic on mobile devices by 30%.<a href="https://www.vuestorefront.io/case-studies/lovecrafts">LoveCrafts Case Study</a><h3>Headless Commerce may also be suitable for smaller businesses looking to expand their UX and marketing capabilities</h3>Another example of a move to headless technology is Pure Daily Care, an LA-based beauty and wellness brand. It had an established sales position on Amazon but wanted to move to its platform to empower its name.Pure Daily Care's website needed to be fresh, friendly, and able to shape the customer experience according to modern eCommerce standards across all possible channels and necessary tools such as - for example - loyalty programs. It was a must, mainly because the target audience of Pure Daily Care is very tech and social media savvy, and the skincare products have many features that need to be presented in a specific - informative but also user-friendly - way.The company chose Shopify because of its ease of use and low barrier entry. However, due to Shopify's frontend limitations (it is pretty generic and, therefore, the customer experience cannot be outstanding), the team was looking for a solution that would give them the freedom to showcase their content. They chose VueStorefront and Contentful CMS, and it turned out very soon (as the implementation took just eight weeks) that this set has produced fantastic results. The conversion in the mobile version increased by a whole 23% and the sales by 130%.<a href="https://vuestorefront.io/case-studies/pure-daily-care">Pure Daily Care Case Study</a>SummaryHeadless Commerce is perfect for all businesses that want to ensure flexibility and scalability, kick off non-standard marketing activities, and implement an omnichannel strategy while saving hundreds of development hours.Author: Kaja Grzybowska, Senior Content Manager at Vue Storefront

Headless Commerce is getting more and more accessible

When a company has been evolving for over a century, digital is simply a part of that overall journey. “We’ve been around for a hundred years, so when we talk about transformation it’s in terms of what we need to do to ensure our business is around for the next hundred years.” explains Gireesh Sahukar, Senior Director of Digital at Dawn Foods, “What does our company and operating model need to look like to do that? How do we engage with our customers now and in the future? How are our customers engaging in their day to day lives and what do we need to do to meet them where they are?”For Dawn Foods, <a href="https://www.dawnfoods.com/">the leading bakery ingredient manufacturer, supplier, and distributor</a>, the choice to implement B2B eCommerce wasn’t because of a mandate to go digital but because, according to Gireesh, “In their personal lives, our customers are online, they are connected twenty-four seven and we need to be there with them on that journey to lead and be competitive in our industry.”Gireesh is no stranger to the transformative power of eCommerce, having been in the space for the last fifteen years and with experience working on over fifty eCommerce implementations.He joined Dawn Foods a little over a year as they were in the early stages of their eCommerce journey, and he recently sat down with the MACH Alliance to discuss that journey, his insights into the rapidly changing eCommerce landscape, and his <a href="https://machalliance.org/blogdetail/blt180bfdfc4b7486ef">recently announced role as a MACH Alliance Ambassador</a>.<h2>Monoliths are Going Extinct</h2>Having implemented dozens of eCommerce projects, Gireesh is familiar with the big box platforms that had dominated the market in the past. In the last few years, even before joining Dawn Foods, he has taken more interest in the emerging players.“I think some of the large platforms that have traditionally dominated the market have stagnated in their product offering. Their roadmap hasn’t changed much, they are focused more on internal reworking of their application architecture, and they haven’t been offering customers anything new with each of their releases.” Due to this legacy stagnation, when it came to selecting an approach for Dawn Foods, Gireesh was more interested in discovering what the more innovative platforms out there had to offer.Looking at the landscape, it was clear to the team that innovation in the space was being driven by an overriding principle. “Before we even chose a platform we could see that all of the market was saying the same thing. Every platform wants to be fully API compliant.” explains Gireesh, “Even if they are monoliths, they think that their future platform needs to be completely available by APIs.”That overall shift in the market led the team at Dawn Foods to an early decision on their approach, “We realized that if the industry is going towards APIs then we should really look at a platform, and a wider architecture, that is API-first and API-led.” says Gireesh. By making that decision early in the journey, the team was able to choose solution providers and partners that best fit the overall API-led architecture.<h2>Owning the Experience</h2>Before Gireesh joined the company, Dawn Foods was in the early stages of planning its eCommerce journey. When Gireesh joined it was clear that this would be a multi-year roadmap and needed to scale with the company’s ambitions. He saw that scaling up the company’s eCommerce services would require moving away from the blackbox technology thinking, to creating an architecture that allowed Dawn Foods to be more in control of their own solution roadmap.Owning the architecture not only means that Dawn Foods can better adapt to the external needs of customers, but also to the internal needs of their own teams. “The employee experience is often completely overlooked.” says Gireesh, “Decision makers tend to focus on the customer, but the experience that we can deliver to the customer is dependent on the experience we can deliver to the employee.” In a recent <a href="https://machalliance.org/blogdetail/bltcc77f300fe0158ff">roundtable on future-proofing the tech ecosystem</a>, he emphasized that a key factor of success in any business transformation is building internal confidence in the new way of working.For Dawn Foods, the internal needs present a unique challenge. Along with the external customer, the solution needed to meet the needs of sales reps, customer service reps and the technical service reps (aka, the bakery experts).“We wanted a single interface that could work for all four of these user groups, which meant we needed to control that experience ourselves.” says Gireesh, explaining why the Dawn team decided to build their own custom front-end to work with their API-led stack. “We needed to be able to react to their needs and their evolving ways of working.”“If I was in a different company building a solution for a different problem statement, my answer may have very well been using a front-end-as-a-service like Vue or Frontastic.” continued Gireesh, “For instance, if I was doing a B2C type of site one of those would likely be a better fit than custom development. It’s just that our needs at Dawn were slightly different than the direction they are heading in, so building the interface by ourselves made the most sense for us.”<h2>Modern Speed with MACH tools</h2>Dawn Foods’ choice to build their own front-end, and have it work seamlessly with the back-end tools in their stack is reflective of a growing number of companies who are leveraging API-led tools to build a composable architecture of best fit solutions.“We built our solution to be modular.” says Gireesh, “We could replace underlying APIs without ever having to replatform. In the future we could replace our front-end without having a major rehaul of everything else, because the underlying API structures are all the same.”This type of plug and play solution is enabled by the <a href="https://machalliance.com/blogdetail/blt58fdb0ad9abc4123">rise of MACH</a> principles (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless) in software design. Modern MACH tools are built to be modular and integrate from the ground up, bringing a high level of flexibility to the enterprise tech stack.“The MACH architecture gives you that kind of maturity, which is a fairly steep curve, at a very fast pace.” explains Gireesh, “You don’t have to have the large team, or the large investment, to be able to build a mature, robust application architecture that would traditionally take years to achieve.”For Gireesh and his team at Dawn Foods, a MACH architecture enabled them to go from a two person project team at the beginning of January 2020 to a fully launched eCommerce solution by July. Now with a team of eighteen, the speed they gained with a MACH architecture is allowing Dawn Foods to explore other value added services, such as digital marketing, much sooner than if they had gone with a legacy, monolithic eCommerce solution.“We were building the office, the team, and platform as we went, and we were able to go from no code and no requirements to a fully launched functional eCommerce website in twenty-two weeks.” says Gireesh, who believes that if he were to start the project today that timeline would be even shorter. Not just because of lessons learned, but because of how rapidly enterprise software is advancing.“Many tools that weren’t mature enough for us when we started this project have improved leaps and bounds in the last twelve months.” says Gireesh, “I would argue, because of how rapidly the software is maturing, that somebody launching a similar eCommerce solution would be able to do it twenty-five percent faster today than was possible a year ago.”<h2>Customers buy more from us now</h2>After a small pilot with 100 customers, it was clear that Dawn Foods’ B2B community was ready to adopt eCommerce. “We all know that customers ‘saying’ they want something and a customer ‘adopting something’ are two different things.” says Gireesh, “Our customers showed, by coming back to the site week after week, that they are very willing and eager to adopt the new way of connecting into their ordering process.”In less than a year, Dawn Foods was able to go from a sales-rep-led ordering process to a self-service eCommerce that customers could access 24/7. Not only is it convenient for customers to have all their order history and invoice management in one central place, but they also now have an easier way to explore the more than 10,000 items that Dawn Foods offers.“The benefits are more than just easy reordering, it’s the discovery aspect as well.” explains Gireesh, “I’ve talked to customers that have been with us for five, ten, twenty-five years who tell me that they have seen a product on our website they have been ordering from someone else simply because they didn’t know we carry it. It’s been great to hear feedback from long time customers who say they are now able to see that Dawn offers much more than they’ve been buying from us historically.”“Because it’s our first year having the data, as well as the pandemic, it’s very hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison of just how much this solution has impacted our business” says Gireesh, “Anecdotally, what we definitely have seen is an increase in that kind of discovery that has led to incremental ordering and better conversations around our product offerings.”<h2>Dawn Foods is a constant innovator</h2>As mentioned previously, Dawn Foods doesn’t see digital as the end game but as part of a continuing process of adapting their business to meet customer needs and to continue to lead the industry. “Our company is known as an innovator in the bakery ingredients space, people recognize us for our cutting edge products. We have a track record of knowing where the industry needs to go and taking it there,” explains Gireesh. “Sometimes we have to drag it there, but eventually it comes along.”Gireesh sees this digital advancement as a new opportunity for Dawn Foods to move the industry forward. “We’re already seen as an innovator, so this was just another way of us innovating in the space. We already had four touchpoints with our customers, and this just adds a fifth. That might not seem like a big deal, but when everyone else does three and you’re doing five that’s a huge differentiator.”While the site is a key way that Dawn Foods is currently driving innovation, the business is continuously looking for ways to lead the market in all facets of business. Overall, says Gireesh, “The whole eCommerce site is just one part of a broader company-wide initiative to make transformative changes in how we operate as a business.”<h2>MACH Alliance Ambassador</h2>The MACH Alliance is very excited to have Gireesh as one of our first <a href="https://machalliance.org/blogdetail/blt180bfdfc4b7486ef">MACH Alliance Ambassadors</a>. Our Ambassadors are a carefully selected group of business and technology experts with a wide range of experience across industries and backgrounds. Passionate about the benefits a modern architecture can bring to an enterprise, our Ambassadors have graciously committed their time to support the mission of the MACH Alliance by writing, speaking, and serving as subject matter experts to help empower companies to go MACH.If you’re interested in learning more about the composable enterprise, and understanding if it’s right for your business, you’re invited to <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sahukar/">reach out to Gireesh</a> or get in touch with us at <a href="mailto:info@machalliance.org">info@machalliance.org</a> to be matched with the MACH Alliance Ambassador most relevant to you.

Meet Your MACH Alliance Ambassador: Gireesh Sahukar, Senior Director of Digital at Dawn Foods

Starting with the launch of <a href="http://bestbuy.com/">BestBuy.com</a> in 1998, its re-platform to ATG in 2003, and its re-platform to MACH starting in 2011, Best Buy has consistently been years ahead of its competition. This case study is a prime illustration of why MACH leads to more innovation. For example, it was one of the first major U.S. retailers to offer contactless curbside pickup in response to COVID-19. That innovativeness is what has allowed it to go head to head against Amazon and thrive as a retailer in a very difficult retail climate. In this case study, the former Chief Architect of <a href="http://bestbuy.com/">BestBuy.com</a>, Joel Crabb, recounts Best Buy's eCommerce journey in his well-read <a href="http://joelcrabb.com/">blog</a>.Question: What’s the highest praise a retail brand can receive in today’s technology-driven world?Answer: “Your brand is Amazon-proof.”Best Buy received that accolade from writer Andria Cheng in a 2018 Forbes magazine article, “Why Best BuyRemains Relevant in the Age of Amazon.” After presenting a litany of statistics directly from the CEO’s 3rd quarter earnings call and providing a list of tangible examples of the brand’s most recent marketing initiatives, she boldly wrapped her story with the proclamation, “Best Buy looks to have made itself Amazon proof.”Who knows if the praise ever reached Joel Crabb, the visionary IT architect who joined Best Buy in July 2010 and 9 months later disrupted status quo at the then 44-year-old company by spearheading an initiative to move its single vendor on premise technology platform onto the cloud. He shares his version of the 3-year project that transformed BestBuy.com, into a “completely distributed, infinite scaling eCommerce platform” in his 22-post blog series, “A Digital eCommerce Transformation – A Multipart Series.”2He kicks off the series by establishing that, while the cloud and AWS existed in 2010, non-technology-related enterprises were dismissive of its potential. “At the time, large retailers had not yet awakened to the new reality that a company’s prowess in software might decide its future outcomes.” (Part II)The Scenario:Best Buy’s first retail store, The Sound of Music, opened St. Paul, MN in 1966. By 2003, the company had over 600 stores in the U.S. and had started expanding into Canada.3 While it launched BestBuy.com in 1998, corporate leadership viewed eCommerce as a “sideline business, a necessary evil.” (Part XIII). By 2010, despite a continued “inability to fathom online shopping,” (Part II), bestbuy.comBestBuy.com had become the “fourth-highest scaling eCommerce site in North America, with revenue approaching $2B.” (Part XXII)The Problem:“BestBuy.com&nbsp;was failing and needed help, there was no clear path and no engineering team that owned the site. It had been operated as a dumping ground for external integrator’s code for so long that everyone and no one claimed ownership.”At the time, the brand’s business teams handled site management, adding new items, changing pricing, removing items from the site, fixing orders, making content, creating sale landing pages, emails, etc., while the IT teams constantly scrambled to maintain stability. ”(Part V) Of course, it didn’t always work – there were outages, caching was slow, and small changes cost a small fortune and took forever, etc. This was standard for retailers at that time. (Part II)The problem at its core was the architecture of the 10-year-old ATG-based eCommerce platform could no longer support the size and scope of BestBuy.com. And, while everyone knew it, as is typical of large enterprises, organizational silos and political bottlenecks continually prevented buy-in or implementation of an actual rewrite plan that could deliver a robust, single solution. “There were at least three teams who felt they were responsible for rewriting [BestBuy.com]. Additionally, the software development on the ATG platform was spread across multiple divisions, multiple vendors, and multiple countries.” (Part IV)The SolutionIn March 2011, seven months after Crabb’s hiring, the Chief Architect of his team quit. Crabb says, “I knew the time had come to step up, it was time to put together a comprehensive plan to rewrite [BestBuy.com]. I dropped all my current responsibilities and did what anyone at [BestBuy.com] did when they were pursuing investment capital, made a deck.” (Part VII)His plan focused on evolving from the current state to the future state of BestBuy.com which required completely rebuilding the site on a modern infrastructure platform deployed in a cloud. (Part III) He presented numerous times, generally receiving the same response, “We’ve heard this pitch before, why should we believe you?” (Part VII) Then, out of nowhere, his opportunity presented itself when the CEO declared his intention to double eCommerce revenue in three years. Crabb was handed $13M and given 18 months to launch his rebuild, simply, he says, because “it was the only plan available.” (Part X)In Nov 2011, funding for the project came through which allowed Crabb to begin ramping up his team. To acknowledge the restraints put on him, which included the stipulation that “business must remain unaffected by our efforts” (Part III), his plan called for building and transitioning the site in small pieces, starting with the all-important home page and PDP pages.As he was keenly aware of the importance of “Holiday” to overall retail sales and had seen firsthand the stress it put on the site at the team, he set Nov 2012 as the deadline to achieve two goals. First, to deliver a new browse architecture for BestBuy.com that would “allow fast changes and high scale utilizing the CDN for more caching and isolating all calls to the cloud layer” (Part III) and, second, to pull off a holiday without issues. (Part XV) Accomplishing these goals would validate his vision of moving the entire system to the cloud. (Part III)He explains his logic was that coupling the front end loosely to the platform would allow the front-end teams to move quickly and change the site content in real-time if necessary – which as he pointed out – is the speed at which the business needed to move. (Part IX)Over the next three years, Crab managed his team of 200+ engineers to outcomes. “We had to deliver a flexible, maintainable, layered cloud eCommerce platform that scaled infinitely, or we were failures. “ he wrote in a 2020 blog post. “We implemented Product Management and Agile and morphed into a Product Engineering team that brought BestBuy.com into the modern world and did our part in the overall turnaround of the company."4The ResultsWhen Holiday 2012 rolled around, the Cloud Home page and Cloud PDP pages were in place, passing tests and scaling beyond expectations. ”Over the course of Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Best Buy had its most successful online holiday ever, as competitor eCommerce sites melted down all around us. Virtually every retailer was down at some point over that time period, but we survived.” (Part XXII)That win was exactly what Crabb needed to move forward. Over the next 3 years, the brand invested well over $100 million to support the complete transformation of the site to MACH architecture. By 2015, the foundation for the fully automated future that supports brand growth today was in place.Without it, the brand may have ended up, in Crabb’s opinion, “as another retailer on the trash heap of history.” Instead, in 2014 they became one of the first brands to offer to buy online/pick up in-store and has achieved steady 30% growth online. “With an eCommerce platform that allows for intra-day changes, the business teams have the tools they need to drive growth and make up for lost revenue in the stores.” (Part XXII)Best Buy’s quick response to COVID-19 crisis is a perfect example of the power of the brand’s adoption of MACH. Within weeks of the pandemic hitting the US, they built and deployed a contactless curbside pickup ordering solution that could meet the increasing demand for home office equipment and kitchen appliances while increasing the safety of employees and customers.5 While other retailers were shutting down across the country, Best Buy was serving the new needs of consumers via BestBuy.com and the Best Buy app, driving revenue, and supporting the country’s economy.While making Best Buy “Amazon proof,” may not have been part of Crabb’s vision, he acknowledges having the right architecture enables them to respond quickly to change and “achieve both known and unknown outcomes”. As the first eCommerce MACH architecture put in place by a retail brand, it has delivered value year-over-year by enabling Best Buy “to flex, scale, and build new capabilities overnight.”6Author: Kelly Goetsch Sources1 2018 https://www.forbes.com/sites/andriacheng/2018/08/28/why-best-buy-is-relevant-in-the-age-of-amazon/#4bddc2d714622Crabb, Joel. 2017. “A Digital eCommerce Transformation – A Multipart Series” http://joelcrabb.com/?p=3343 (http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/best-buy-co-inc-history/)4 http://joelcrabb.com/?p=5385 <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/22/21189846/best-buy-curbside-pickup-home-office-coronavirus">https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/22/21189846/best-buy-curbside-pickup-home-office-coronavirus</a>6 http://joelcrabb.com/?p=538

BestBuy.com’s Transformation to MACH

<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/blta31556da9efd57bc/61cc2bb6191c5560467ddc8e/MACH_Enabler.png"/>You may have caught the news that <a href="https://machalliance.org/newsroom/mach-alliance-announces-mongodb-and-netlify-as-first-members-of-new-enabler-category">we announced earlier this month</a> a new Enabler member category. The even better news is not just that we launched the category, but that MongoDB and Netlify have signed on as our first Enabler members. We couldn't be more thrilled to have them on board.So who fits into this category, and why did we decide to form it?The Enabler membership category applies to organizations that are heavily utilized by MACH organizations to deliver a MACH service or technology. They are, therefore, enabling a MACH provider and the ecosystem but don’t offer a direct MACH solution. While a Vendor member produces an application that enterprises can buy, an Enabler member delivers a service or technology vendors can use as part of a MACH integration.All Enablers are aligned to the non-functional areas of a MACH architecture. This includes, but is not limited to, monitoring, data storage, cluster or container management, tracing, service meshing, API Gateways, and orchestration. As such, they aren't suited for an Alliance membership in the Vendor or System Integrator categories for which we certify the tech and the service that companies provide as directly future-proofing the architecture.There are two types of Enabler groups:<ul><li>Technology Enablers are Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) that MACH vendors utilize to deliver their service. They are enabling MACH ISVs and aiding the promotion of the MACH architecture. MongoDB and Netlify both fit here, for example.</li></ul><ul><li>Service Enablers are service organizations that are stakeholders in MACH projects (like a specialized design agency could be) but may not have a direct involvement in implementing a MACH solution.</li></ul>We felt now was the time to establish the Enabler member group because the ecosystem of the MACH category, and the industry direction that it represents, is significantly bigger and wider than what our current 50 certified members encompass. By having Enablers represented within the Alliance ecosystem, we now better cover the full range of businesses that fit within the MACH Alliance membership guidelines who play a critical part of bringing MACH architecture to life.We'll have more exciting Enabler news to share soon, so stay tuned. In the meantime, interested in becoming an Enabler member or checking out other membership or ambassador opportunities? Awesome! Learn more here: <a href="https://machalliance.org/members. ">https://machalliance.org/membe...</a>;

Why we added an Enabler membership category

If you’re an enterprise company making or selling loads of products, then no doubt you have a ton of data and important information about those products that needs to be managed.And, it’s likely you achieve that with a product information management (PIM) system.Your PIM platform should be a system of record for all your product information – things like descriptions of the product, specifications, unique ID numbers like SKUs, and hundreds or sometimes thousands of other product attributes. But what a PIM doesn’t do is host any sort of visual or other digital asset that’s been created for that product.You do that in a digital asset management (DAM) platform.Some platforms will let you push assets from the DAM into the PIM, but you can unlock so much more value with a bi-directional integration between the two systems.Before we dive in further on why this is so valuable, let’s start by just explaining what a bi-directional integration actually means and why this should be the preferred approach.<h2></h2><h4>MACH, API-First Technologies and the Power of Integrating Best-in-class Enterprise PIM &amp; DAM Systems</h4>MACH principles call for enterprise brands to choose best-in-class, API-first technologies in order to create a flexible tech stack that leverages modern innovative technologies. By moving away from monolithic systems, these companies can leverage the cutting-edge features of each individual system, without sacrificing their ability to share data between systems and teams.This is a key component to the powerful PIM + DAM integration. Where some platforms from both categories of technologies will claim to either (in the case of DAM) host product information, or (in the case of PIM) store visual assets, in neither case are those systems capable of leveraging the full range of functionality present in modern, best-in-class platforms.Ok, in plain english: you can buy one tech that does PIM + DAM, but it’s not going to have close to the same features as if you had best-in-class versions of each platform.The value of linking two best-in-class PIM and DAM technologies is the ability to leverage their full functionalities while seamlessly sharing data and assets back and forth between them. A bi-directional integration between DAM and PIM will:<ul><li>Allow the PIM to be the system of record for all product data</li><li>Give the DAM read-only access to product data from the PIM</li><li>Allow the DAM to automatically pull in product data and attach it to assets</li><li>Enable the DAM to push assets and asset data back into the PIM</li></ul>At its core, the PIM and DAM integration is about enriching both systems with data from the other to enable greater efficiencies in terms of finding, managing and publishing product data and assets.With that in mind, here are four reasons this integration should excite you.<h2></h2><h4>1. Improved Content Discoverability in the DAM</h4>In digital asset management, we’re always thinking about ways to make it easier for users to find the content they need. That takes the shape of new metadata structures, AI-tagging, keyword strategies, and so on.But for the most part, these metadata fields in DAMs describe the asset and its subject, and not the product specifically.Instead, shouldn’t you be able to just search for a SKU number in the DAM and pull up all assets related to that product? Well, yes! From there, you can use either more product information like specifications or dimensions, or use the DAM’s metadata tags and keywords, like colors or subjects, to filter and find the right content.The ability to quickly and easily find content in the DAM using product information is an incredible time-saver for users, and has other productivity and ROI benefits, including…<h2></h2><h4>2. Improving Content Reuse</h4>One of the added benefits of making it easier to find content in the DAM is also making it easier to find content you want to reuse.Brands spend millions creating content to help them sell their products. But sometimes, if content isn’t tagged the right way or is missing certain keywords, it can get lost in the DAM. That means companies are spending even more money to recreate assets they already have in the system (this actually happens way more than most companies like to admit).Automatically pulling product data, and applying it to assets in the DAM, helps ensure content doesn’t get lost. It makes it easy for users to find assets they can reuse, thus increasing the value of each one of those assets while reducing content spending overall.<h2></h2><h4>3. Streamline Content Distribution</h4>Listing a product on an ecommerce website isn’t always as easy as it should be. You’re often copying data from your PIM into a CMS or eComm platform, manually downloading an asset from the DAM and re-uploading it to the site, and then configuring a product detail page to make the listing just right.Well, scratch that. When you integrate your PIM with your DAM, you allow the product information to automatically be attached to your content. And, depending on the DAM you have, you can then package the asset and product data together, and publish it directly to your eComm platform or website directly.You might say that the productivity gains for just one asset isn’t worth the effort of integrating the systems, but for large product and retail companies that manage this at large scale, the benefits compound into a huge time and money saver.<h2></h2><h4>4. Data Consistency&nbsp;</h4>Enterprise brands have incredible amounts of data to manage, and keeping it all organized is essential to doing so successfully. Each new system that operates in a silo increases the risk that data standards aren’t followed – things like taxonomy, tags, and other sorts of metadata. At the scale with which these companies are creating content, it can quickly devolve into data chaos.Bringing the DAM and PIM together is just another way to ensure the way you represent a product in your system of record – the PIM – is consistent across other systems like your DAM. It’s what allows data to be shared between technologies, and enables in-depth reporting and transparency that would otherwise be impossible to manage in any sort of automated way.Brands spend significant time and resources undertaking data cleanup projects and realigning their systems. Integrating the DAM and PIM is one preventative measure that pays off in terms of processes and data transparency.<h2></h2><h4>Integrating Your DAM with Your PIM</h4>As members of the MACH Alliance, Tenovos is committed to being integration-first. We believe organizations are best served purchasing best-in-class technologies, and not tools that try to do everything.Modern DAM platforms like Tenovos are designed to connect to other enterprise technologies in order to facilitate this two-way communication of data. Not all DAMs are created equal, and so it’s important to investigate with your vendor, or potential vendor if you’re in the evaluation phase of a new DAM purchase, their ability to connect to your PIM and enable the aforementioned functionalities and benefits of the integration.To learn more about how to choose a vendor capable of helping you with integrations like these, click here to read our <a href="https://tenovos.com/downloads/Guides/%5BGuide%5D%20Vendor%20Evaluation%20Guide.pdf">vendor evaluation guide</a>.<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/blt7b12bdcf99952be6/63eabcce2d0679107a695580/Mike_Waldron_profile.png"/>

4 Reasons You Should Integrate a DAM With Your PIM

With customers relying on both offline and online multichannel touchpoints and companies evolving their business models to keep up with demand, composable architectures are more important than ever before. MACH can be the <a href="https://www.epam.com/insights/blogs/digital-transformation-will-inevitably-lead-you-to-a-mach-architecture-start-now">enabler</a> to help your company stay agile and not be constrained by its technology stack.It’s very important to clearly separate your architecture from the architecture behind the MACH platforms. Your architecture may follow some MACH principles, but your business is more likely to be focused on building experiences to reach your customers across different channels rather than delivering APIs. The reason it’s important to separate your architecture from the architecture of a MACH platform is to highlight about how MACH affects and influences your architecture. The impact of MACH on your architecture is defined and also limited by its APIs. Unlike more traditional digital platforms that came before, MACH doesn’t (and arguably cannot) become the center of your architecture to give you the capabilities that you need. Your architecture can now be defined by your business goals and its complexities, not by MACH itself. Composable architecture isn’t built on or over MACH. Instead, through the value of APIs, MACH provides the capabilities and functionality you need that you cannot (or rather should not) build yourself.Having separated your composable architecture from the architecture of MACH platforms, let’s now talk about MACH principles and how each one affects you. This is the key to understanding how MACH enables composable architectures. The effects of M, A, C, and H on your architecture are not equal and some components of MACH are more important than others. “M”, for example, stands for microservices but it’s very opaque. This is about how the platform vendor operates their platform. “M” means a lot in the ability to deliver great API experiences, but if one day, a vendor learned to operate the monolith in the same way, you wouldn’t notice a difference. This is arguably very difficult if not impossible, but the feasibility of operating an API ecosystem as a monolith is beyond the point. “M” doesn’t matter nearly as much as A does. It is the API-centricity – what “A” stands for in MACH – that changes the game and enables the composable architecture. “C” is also important but in a different way. A fully SaaS API platform has zero footprint in your ecosystem and that means you don’t have to worry about operating it. And the “H” in MACH is simply a byproduct of being not only API-first but API-only. The only way you can consume a MACH platform is with a headless architecture and completely decoupled channel experiences. While it is MACH from the platform’s standpoint, it should be considered mAch from your perspective.There are four blueprints that companies typically use when integrating MACH into their architecture. Your choice will depend on what type of capabilities you are consuming (e.g. content, transactional commerce, order management, etc.), as well as the overall architecture of your solution and what problem(s) you are solving:1. Client Device to MACH API: This is a very common and relatively simple solution. It has the smallest footprint on your architecture and allows you to benefit from the full capabilities of the MACH APIs – like using GraphQL and leveraging CDNs.2. Rendering Engine to MACH API: Sometimes your architecture requires that you pre-render your experiences and that’s when you push MACH APIs a little down the stack and start working with them at rendering time before the experience reaches the client’s device.3. Your API to MACH API: When your business requires you to integrate more capabilities alongside what’s provided to you by a MACH platform, you may find it easier to just make MACH APIs part of your larger backend API.4. Back-end Service/Job to MACH API: Certain scenarios do not have a customer interaction component and yet are complex enough for you to decide to employ a third-party platform. A good example would be order management and fulfillment workflow orchestrations. A MACH platform providing these capabilities will be integrated outside of the context of the customer journey.<ol></ol>While these patterns are not the same, the principles are fairly similar – you will be consuming the APIs to enable required capabilities. This principle of only using the APIs and not building your architecture on top of a platform will ultimately impact how your team is organized. When you start using MACH, your team’s skills profile will be heavily skewed toward the technologies that you use, the technologies that make up your ecosystem. MACH doesn’t require you to use a particular programming language or deploy a specifically shaped runtime environment. These choices are yours to make. You will still need a small team of experts who understand selected MACH platforms in order to properly model your business using the abstractions and vocabulary of the selected platform, but this expertise – unlike previous digital platforms before MACH – is no longer what defines your team’s setup. Ultimately, you should focus on modern architecture principles, open technologies, API orchestration and cloud engineering.Finally, let’s talk briefly about how to engineer with MACH. I will go into more detail in future blog posts so I will keep it short for now. You do not need to build an abstraction layer over MACH APIs just because you want an “anti-corruption” layer. The abstractions and vocabulary of the selected MACH platform will bleed into your architecture at the point of consumption. Don’t fight it, embrace it and build your solutions with that same vocabulary. By operating with the same vocabulary on the same level as MACH, you can decrease complexity in your ecosystem. The simpler it is, the faster you will be able to go to market and iterate on it.The bottom line: You can continue to make your own technology choices, pick your own programming languages and frameworks, and continue to run your own tech ecosystem in the best way for your business. MACH simply enables you to support multichannel user touchpoints and changing business models by providing a powerful API that enables flexible and composable architectures.If you are interested in learning more, watch our recent webinar on Composable Architectures &amp; Repeatable Patterns:<iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/456905440?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0"></iframe>Author: Pavel Veller

Composable Architectures: Focusing on the ''A'' in MACH

Now more than ever, online businesses need to be flexible. What customers demand is always changing, and successful businesses have to be able to adapt quickly.Luckily, modern technology has kept pace with these requirements with more API-led solutions in market. To meet their needs, businesses are turning away from monoliths in favor of MACH technology architectures. These API-led, modular systems enable businesses’ fast-paced innovation.While a full microservices approach may or may not be the right choice for your business, today we’re considering the advantages of the H in MACH: headless. Let’s dive into how decoupling the front-end and back-end systems can give you a more flexible, adaptable system.<h2>Why Now?</h2>Ecommerce is always growing and changing, but the velocity of change over the last year has put us in uncharted water. Consider these numbers:<ul><li>Global ecommerce sales are expected to grow to $6.4 trillion by 2024.</li><li>Online spending represented 18.6% of total retail sales for the first two quarters of 2020.</li></ul><ul><li>B2B ecommerce sales increased 10% in 2020, despite total U.S. manufacturing and wholesale sales decreasing by 2.6%.</li></ul>Ecommerce was never going anywhere, but the past year fast-tracked a lot of changes. Shifting consumer behavior and unprecedented demand for online shopping coupled with increased shopper expectations and rising competition have created a perfect storm of both challenges and opportunities for online retailers.To compete in today’s shifting ecommerce landscape, retailers and wholesalers have to provide a powerful digital experience that operates seamlessly across an increasing number of channels. Above all, modern systems have to be agile to adapt quickly to all the changes. That’s where headless comes into play.<h2>6 Benefits of Headless for your Business</h2>Headless commerce involves separating the customer-facing ‘head’ (your storefront) and the back-end commerce engine. The head and body are then connected by APIs to pass data back and forth. This differs from a traditional monolith architecture that ties both of these systems together.Operating a headless system has a number of advantages for businesses. It can provide:Seamless omnichannel experienceToday, customers shop on a number of different channels, and they expect you to meet them on the device or platform or marketplace of their choice. Businesses are also always creating new ways to sell from social commerce on Instagram or Facebook to voice commerce on devices like Amazon Alexa or Google Home. mMonolithic systems aren’t set up to take advantage of multiple channels. Headless lets retail and wholesale businesses deliver front-end changes quickly and easily and experiment with APIs to see what works best for the customer journey. By leveraging different front-end solutions, brands can deliver content and payment options across different channels — and be ready for those that haven’t even been invented yet.ScalabilityIn addition to being ready to adopt new channels efficiently, headless also enables businesses to scale the frontend independently of the back-end systems. This is helpful if you’re rapidly growing or expanding or when you just need a temporary boost due to the holiday season or a planned product launch.InnovationWith rising competition in ecommerce, staying ahead is important. And it can be hard to predict what the next big change will be. To account for the unknown unknowns, you need a system that allows for experimentation. It’s a lot easier to innovate when you’re working with a separate back-end and front-end system because you can make changes to one without affecting the other. You can play around with new APIs to experiment, iterate, succeed or fail and try again at much faster speeds.Faster time to marketMonolithic platforms can be slow moving. When all your systems are intertwined, you need to get everything set up before getting to market. In addition to being able to make quicker changes with a headless system, you can also launch faster. This is because your entire system doesn’t have to be ready. You can start with the store you need now and then add functionality with additional APIs and solutions as you grow.Long-term cost savingsOne of the downsides of headless is often cited as the development lift in getting everything set up. After all, you’re combining multiple systems and employing or even building APIs to connect them. However, one you’re set up, a headless system can actually be less of a burden on development teams. Monolithic architectures often require expensive hacks to make changes as the business needs change. Since with a headless architecture you can easily swap out frontends, you don’t have to deal with as many issues with sunk costs if you realize you need to make a pivot.Allows teams to work independentlyHeadless has advantages for both your development teams and your marketing teams. On the frontend, your marketing teams can make customer-delighting changes quickly and experiment more readily, without having to get developer support or worry about causing damage to anything on the backend. On the developer side, your teams can spend less time assisting with marketing changes and more on back-end innovations and efficiency.<h2>Businesses Employing Headless</h2>Here are a few businesses who have started employing a headless architecture and why they made the switch.<h3><a href="https://www.garrettpopcorn.com/">Garrett Popcorn</a></h3>This beloved Chicago popcorn brand needed a headless setup to provide a superior customer experience and effectively scale their international ecommerce expansion. They worked with Codal to implement a headless build with Contentful as the CMS on the frontend.This, coupled with BigCommerce’s extensive native functionality and flexibility, helped Garrett to add a number of cool features including: Launching a custom inventory application with real-time inventory checks across the site to avoid overselling, implementing a custom “build your tin” feature with intelligent logic to allow customers to create their own unique recipe combinations in multiple sizes with optional add-ons, effectively capturing payments using BigCommerce’s beta payments API and launching promotions with the beta promotions API.<h3><a href="https://thebalconygarden.com.au/">Balcony Garden</a></h3>This Australian-based seller of designer pots and planters has both a retail and wholesale business. Balcony Garden was previously using WooCommerce and discovered limitations. They wanted better speed and security. They also wanted it to be less cumbersome to make marketing changes. Additionally, the wholesale side of the business involved a lot of custom coding to achieve the desired B2B functionality.They chose to do a headless build with BigCommerce because they could get the security and reliability of a SaaS platform with the necessary B2B functionality out of the box. Using a Storyblok headless CMS and Vue.js on the frontend, they got the complete flexibility they were looking for. The site can continue to grow with them and push the design and features of their site further.<h2>Wrapping Up</h2>Monolithic architectures were the go-to choice — and even the only option — for decades. However, changing times call for changing technologies. Today’s ecommerce market and today’s ecommerce customers demand solutions that can be launched and adapted quickly and that can serve customers wherever they shop.By decoupling and compartmentalizing technologies, a business can get a competitive edge by swapping out solutions and pivoting when needed. In an ecommerce era that is requiring more flexibility, not less, microservices and headless are the way forward.Want to learn more about headless commerce and how it can benefit your business — and your specific role in it? Check out our <a href="https://www.bigcommerce.com/dm/headless-c-suite-whitepaper/?utm_medium=lp&utm_source=blog&utm_campaign=dg_amer_us_ent_acq_bau_oa_2021_q2_mach-alliance&utm_content=june-retail-campaign">Headless Commerce for the C-Suite ebook</a>.

The Current (and Future) Age of Retail Ecommerce Demands Headless

The technology and digital capabilities needed to create the dynamic store are here. When we talk about a store that shifts to meet the daily needs of the brand and the customer, and that offers highly personalized experiences to each shopper, often retailers think the ability to create such a store is still years away. The truth is today we have that ability, and the way to enable it. Now, we need brands with the will to make a shift.Not only is the Dynamic Store possible through ‘Best of breed’ digital capabilities, equally enabling is MACH (Microservices, API-First, Cloud-Native and Headless), the organizing principal through which the Dynamic Store of the future is set up to succeed. Attempting to innovate the kinds of connected experiences that will bring the most value to your store while still locked in a channel-specific and monolithic legacy system will be both costly and ineffective.The Dynamic Store is The Essence of OmnichannelBrands have been inundated with information about the importance of an omnichannel strategy for years now. Capturing customers online as well as in-store has been such an important activity that multiple digitally native companies have opened brick and mortar stores in recent years. The Dynamic Store is the ultimate omnichannel experience. Given it’s roots in fully orchestrated customer interactions, and the reliance on data from multiple sources, to provide a highly personalized experience, the Dynamic Store simply cannot be built with channel-specific technology. The concepts, technology and digital capabilities ultimately connecting the store must embrace new touchpoints, channels and constantly changing user and business expectations to meet future needs and to sustain through potential disruptions.Equally, given the fact that the dynamic store must first and foremost be dynamic, a channel agnostic approach is the best way to realize that. For example, Dynamic Stores need to try out new experiences and see what resonates with shoppers; therefore, your platform must be ready to host a new experience on any channel that might emerge in the future. If your business is built around the physical, in-store channel, while neglecting social media shopping, the deck is stacked against you.MACH Empowers Innovative Connected ExperiencesA personalized shopping experience is a connected experience. Today’s stores rely on people navigating aisles, looking for what they want, and then purchasing it. In a Dynamic Store, every customer interaction must be capable of telling the shopper what they need, where to find it, and even how well it will pair with other purchases. To do so, the experience must be connected, contextually aware and therefore fully capable. In essence, ‘Best of breed’ solutions and MACH architectures are therefore suited to enable these experiences. It’s ability to be agile, flexible and channel agnostic make this architectural approach both appropriate and future-fitting.Also, a MACH architecture unlocks continuous improvement. Through it, retailers can look to constantly iterate, test and change, allowing them to go to market with new touchpoints, products, content and experiences quicker than ever before. This is imperative when you’re relying on dynamic experiences constantly reacting to the needs of customers and the market. Additionally, the open and technology friendly nature of MACH allows retailers to add new and differentiating digital capabilities to their existing architecture, to gain acceleration for differentiating features. For example, the Virtual Try On innovation for <a href="https://www.valtech.com/work/mac-cosmetics/">MAC Cosmetics</a> wouldn’t have been as innovation-focused and timely without MACH. With such an open architecture, we identified already ‘Best of breed’ technology to support innovative features, making the innovation less about building the AR engine and more about enabling differentiating experiences through it. MACH empowered that.The Retail Benefits of MACH Go DeeperWith MACH’s future-proof nature, there are even additional benefits that we haven’t discovered yet. The truth, however, is that any successful Dynamic Store creation will benefit greatly from a MACH style architecture at its center. If you’re interested in learning more about what kinds of connected experiences MACH can open for your brand, Valtech’s experts are available for consultations and brainstorming sessions.<a href="https://www.valtech.com/en-gb/events/dont-predict-the-future-create-it/dynamic-store/">Watch Dynamic Store in action!</a>

How MACH Enables the Dynamic Store

<h2></h2><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/bltb02ffa873a61bbb9/60a4ddd3b80011658d7f5274/lovecraft-visual.jpg"/><h2>To serve makers around the world, LoveCrafts turned to a composable architecture that helps it deliver nonstop growth</h2>LoveCrafts is on a mission to create a global community. It’s a first-of-its-kind online home for makers, offering a place for crafters to feel inspired and connected, and to find all the materials they need. Its strategy, and its clever development of a composable architecture, has vaulted LoveCrafts into a position as the world’s top destination for knitting and crochet supplies.When LoveCrafts was founded in 2012, it had two opportunities. The first was to fill an e-commerce gap that had overlooked crafters. The second was more ambitious: to build a global community for makers to share their work, learn from peers, and forge relationships.The company’s strategy is to build this experience by creating three pillars -- content, community and commerce -- intertwined for a seamless user experience, but separated enough that they can evolve and grow independently. A composable architecture, based on MACH standards, is now the foundation of the LoveCrafts IT strategy to connect the three pillars of its platform, extend its customer services, and deliver uninterrupted experiences around the world.<table><tbody><tr><td>“The most important thing in setting your IT strategy is to know your business well, and where you want to be in 5 years. Once you know where you want to go, choose the tools that enable you to focus on value creation that transforms the business, rather than spending time recreating basic functions.”</td></tr></tbody></table>LoveCrafts started its journey to a composable architecture in 2014, following the year Halil Koklu joined the company. Right from the start, he felt the connection and respect between IT and crafters. As an e-commerce business, LoveCrafts is also an IT business, and the development team contributed to strategic discussions. The connection was also personal because the long-serving IT team works closely with crafters, bonding over the surprising similarity between crafting patterns and the structure of computer code.Now serving as the Chief Technology Officer, Koklu is part of the LoveCrafts leadership team to together build a unified experience. The company’s three pillars of content, community and commerce are connected using metadata so that, for example, crafters can see a list of materials and equipment to purchase for a pattern, or sort for community-created patterns they can fashion from their existing materials. The site’s user experience frequently intermingles content and capabilities from each pillar.LoveCrafts built the first iteration of its IT foundation over roughly four years, starting in 2013. It began with a relatively standard digital commerce function. Then, it created a content platform where crafters could find new patterns, and individual designers could post and sell their custom patterns in a content marketplace. Finally, it built a community through features for users to share additional content, to engage with each other through follows and discussions, and with channels for LoveCrafts to post blogs and updates.Even as it built the basics of customer-facing features, LoveCrafts knew from an early point it wanted to embrace a strategy of an API-first, cloud-native, headless IT foundation, which could keep the pillars of its business connected but enable them to continually improve. A monolithic platform could not keep pace with LoveCrafts’ globally scaling business. And with the three pillars so intertwined in the user experience, running multiple front-ends woven together introduced performance and productivity issues. Koklu’s promise to the LoveCrafts leadership team was simple: “After we change our commerce platform to a MACH platform, we will never run a replatform project ever again, and we can change or add capability easily without disruption.”For Koklu’s 25-person IT team, “going composable was no-brainer” and signed on to a MACH philosophy from the start. Their objective was to build a flexible, open and future-proof architecture. Now, the API-first approach for all systems is nearly complete, as the IT team’s dedication and focus has delivered both continuous services and steady progress toward their ultimate goal.<table><tbody><tr><td>“We will never run a replatform project ever again and we can change or add capability easily without disruption.”</td></tr></tbody></table>The first steps toward running on a fully composable architecture started in 2014, when LoveCrafts began building its content marketplace and community pillars on headless solutions. Since then, Koklu and his team have updated the tools they use, to maintain flexibility. The content marketplace, where members can sell their patterns and grow an audience, is now running on an Angular JS frontend and Symfony backend. The community pillar runs with an API-only backend that includes features important to LoveCrafts, such as a flexible data structure to serve any type of craft, and a REST API controller with functions similar to GraphQL (which had not yet launched).In 2018, Koklu and his team streamlined the editorial content management system, retiring both WordPress (for blog content) and Magento CMS (for static pages) in favor of a headless, API-first architecture.LoveCrafts is now focused on completing its final, and most comprehensive, step toward a composable architecture across the business: moving the commerce pillar to a headless architecture. The company is migrating from the Magento e-commerce platform to a decoupled solution built on a commercetools back-end and a Vue Storefront front-end. This a nontrivial shift for LoveCrafts because the company has spent years scaling Magento, both in terms of infrastructure and function, as the company grew to a truly global business with the need for multi-warehousing, proper multi-currency and taxation capabilities, and myriad performance improvements beyond standard Magento offerings.LoveCrafts found commercetools to be an ideal back-end solution because it is inherently API-first. Combining commercetools with Vue Storefront gives LoveCrafts full control over the front-end user experience, without being constrained by functions of the back-end platform.To maintain continuity during this migration, Koklu’s team is using a strangler pattern to replace components that communicate by API piece by piece, without disrupting service. This “hot-swap” migration from a monolithic solution to a microservice implementation incrementally migrates functionality from the legacy system. When the new system completely takes over, LoveCrafts can decommission its Magento platform. Koklu is overseeing a step-by-step update of the commerce pillar as his team builds new functions including checkout, baskets, content pages, sign-in, and authentication, among others.LoveCrafts vastly prefers running on cloud native SaaS to the alternative, which is to update systems every year or two with a major overhaul. Those large, periodic updates introduce risks in terms of disruption, and incur the opportunity cost of locking in technologies or approaches for the coming years.<table><tbody><tr><td>“Most companies are anxious of taking their core applications to a multi-tenant cloud. You don’t control the roadmap and the adaptability. This strategy only works well if the platform you buy is the right one for you, that runs most of your use cases natively and has a great adaptability through APIs.”</td></tr></tbody></table>LoveCrafts chose commercetools for its back-end, API-first commerce platform only after extensive due diligence. Koklu understands why companies are nervous to migrate to SaaS products for their core business processes. It’s not feasible to truly customize multi-tenant SaaS products, but LoveCrafts found that commercetools provides sufficient flexibility, in large part because of its modular and open architecture. LoveCrafts can use certain commercetools modules, such as the shopping cart or ordering system, independently from other features. Without modifying the underlying SaaS product, LoveCrafts has the flexibility to customize its use of commercetools with other systems for product data management, taxes, or pricing engines.With the journey to a composable architecture nearly complete, Koklu acknowledges that some aspects have been challenging. Teams need to be resilient when they encounter the unexpected, and comfortable putting in effort to complete the work creatively. LoveCrafts showed commitment to its team by providing IT staff with opportunities to learn new skills and become proficient in new tools, rather than bringing in specialists or outsourcing the project.Looking to the future, Koklu sees nothing but upside. The investment in a composable architecture foundation will support agility far into the future. Now fully covered by APIs and gathering the right data, the product team can move faster and more consistently. Koklu also finds that with a headless and microservices architecture, he has more flexibility to structure teams around responsibilities and ownership. Now, for example, a team member may own the pricing or checkout functions, rather than filling a more narrow role defined by technical skills.When LoveCrafts completes the final steps of its migration to a composable architecture, it will be positioned to help makers around the world grow and connect, uninterrupted, for years to come.<table><tbody><tr><td>Building and sustaining support for MACHThe market is moving from one-stop, full-stack platforms to modular solutions that decouple front-end and back-end capabilities. But when many organizations have the option to choose an established all-in-one platform, it’s not always clear why they should support a MACH strategy. Three methods helped LoveCrafts to build support across the organization.<ol><li>Specify the business benefits</li></ol><ul><li>A MACH strategy makes the most sense when it uniquely enables your business to differentiate. In the case of LoveCrafts, technology is integral to building a product that provides integrated content, community, and commerce for a global audience. No monolithic platforms could do all this for LoveCrafts, let alone efficiently and at scale.</li></ul><ol><li>Support your IT team’s growth</li></ol><ul><li>In many companies, when tooling changes, the team changes. This isn’t the case at LoveCrafts, which has done everything in house with the same IT team, rather than outsourcing to system integrators. When the team understands their roles are protected, LoveCrafts builds team loyalty -- and builds experts in next-generation software.</li></ul><ol><li>Focus on value creation</li></ol><ul><li>Don’t spend your time reinventing basics. Instead, choose tools that can provide you with great basic functions and that connect well through APIs. Then, let your team use these building blocks to meet the specific needs of your company and customers.</li></ul></td></tr></tbody></table><table><tbody><tr><td>Choosing the right SaaSAs it looked to replace Magento, LoveCrafts did extensive market research into back-end solutions. It offers four key findings for any organization looking to select new headless technologies. This guidance is primarily for customers, but vendors, take note!<ol><li>Prioritize transparent companies</li></ol><ul><li>Look for vendors who offer transparent information up front, before you commit. Don’t sign an NDA or a contract just to get technical documentation. And don’t postpone detailed discussions to the “discovery phase” of the project, which can waste time.</li></ul><ol><li>Undertake proof of concepts with vendors</li></ol><ul><li>Companies that let you sign up for a free trial demonstrate their confidence in the product. It’s a great sign if a vendor lets you sign up yourself without a sales rep to coordinate access -- it correlates closely with their product’s level of automation and cloud-readiness.</li></ul><ol><li>Identify your use cases and required capabilities</li></ol><ul><li>Every organization has a list of must-have functions to enable the business. For example, global businesses need internationalization and localization capabilities, such as multi-currency. To make an informed decision on the relative value of different approaches, you should understand which features you need, look at the customization required from each solution, and document the implementation and running costs.</li></ul><ol><li>Choose more flexible options when possible</li></ol><ul><li>SaaS can be limiting if the solutions you choose don’t support your business needs -- yet it can be a challenge to know what functions your business may need years into the future. Consider the benefits of software that offers customizability, modularity, and composable architecture as you think about the ways your organization may evolve.</li></ul></td></tr></tbody></table>Author: Halil Köklü, CTO, LoveCrafts

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LoveCrafts loves MACH

The software industry, particularly the digital /martech space, is engulfed in a perfect storm. Several macro trends are causing significant churn, and these challenges are not distant threats but urgent issues that demand immediate attention.a) Innovation overload: The rapid influx of new marketing technology products into the market, as per <a href="https://chiefmartec.com/2023/05/2023-marketing-technology-landscape-supergraphic-11038-solutions-searchable-on-martechmap-com/">Martec</a> charts, has made it humanly impossible for executives such as CIO/CTO/CPO/CDO/CMO to stay current with most of this innovation. The number of new marketing technology products debuting into the market has grown at an average rate of over 1000 each year over the past decade. In the previous year alone, the pace has accelerated to over 3000. The pressure to adopt these new products is immense, underscoring the need for effective strategies to manage this overload.b) Technology bloat: The average number of technologies on most customer facing web sites is already north of one hundred, indicating that technology bloat is already a severe problem for tech executives.c) GenAI disruption: With every major release of GenAI, many AI startups become redundant. In fact, Sam Altman (of openAI) cautioned Harvard students embarking on entrepreneurial journeys not to focus their companies on peripheral use cases that can become a core part of the next version of a main GenAI engine. This complicates decision-making even further for the tech executive as the odds are stacked against any new technology/company they want to do business with. (i.e., 90%+ of startups don't eventually survive). So, is it safer for them to stick with the established choices supported by the analysts (Gartner, Forrester, IDC, etc.), sticking to the old adage "No CIO got into trouble for going with IBM?" But that would mean missing out on most new advancements and foregoing the early mover advantages.d) Executive turnover: The average tenure of a C-suite technology exec is now down to around three years. Whenever a new exec takes over, they are expected to show results pretty rapidly, and they are also raring to make their imprint on the company. This opens a wave of new people, ideas, and technologies and sometimes throws out previous thinking and initiatives without allowing the time to mature and come to fruition. How many of you can relate to this scenario where the direction changes, and sometimes the investments made in the last few years just go down the drain because a new executive is now in charge?<hr/>

<h3>So, what could be some strategies for the C-Suite to navigate this perfect storm of technology bloat, innovation overload, GenAI disruption, and executive turnover while maximizing ROES (Return On Engineering Spend)? </h3><ol><li>MACH , i.e. composable technologies provide one approach to mitigate this. They provide a framework to treat the IT landscape as a giant jigsaw puzzle where pieces can be combined or split easily and replaced by other pieces. This significantly reduces risk and also helps deliver results faster. Whenever there is a new proposal to try new software, whether it provides net new functionality or improves upon existing functionality, it can be piloted by directing a small percentage of the users /traffic and creating an AB test to validate the results and ROI &amp; TCO assumptions. A MACH approach makes this relatively easy, and one example of how to pilot new technologies and eventually cutover is detailed <a href="https://machalliance.org/content-hub/re-platforming-to-mach-without-any-negative-business-impact-" target="_blank">here</a>. Note that some legacy technologies might need additional pre-work and decoupling to enable this approach, but it is entirely possible. </li><li>To handle the pressure to deliver rapidly when a new executive takes charge, one approach that worked well is to Repair- Refactor - Replatform. Usually, the new executive is told that the existing system(s) is/are too old, brittle, and poorly designed, and re-platforming is the only solution. But seasoned execs double-click on that and buy some time before they bite the bullet and approve a major re-platforming, as usually, that takes much longer to deliver and causes much disruption. The way to buy time is to first identify the most pressing pain points and the key metrics that move the needle in terms of business outcomes. Usually, with some workarounds and or minor changes to business processes, those friction points can be "Repaired” to move the needle on the business outcomes and/or kill some pain. This has multiple benefits. a) the energies of the key SMEs on the team are laser-focused on improving the metric/ decreasing pain. The team demonstrates quick wins, usually within 90 days, which builds confidence and credibility for the team. b) This provides more time and context for the new exec to understand the ecosystem and underlying issues better. Process or data quality or people issues are often obfuscated and reported as platform or technology problems. Attempting a re-platforming without understanding these root causes would result in carrying over these issues to the new platform. The learnings from the "Repair" phase will provide inputs on which parts of the system or processes need to be "Refactored" for optimal gains. This would produce the next wave of business outcomes and/ or pain reduction. These outcomes further build confidence and credibility with stakeholders. By this time (usually 90-120 days), the new exec would have gained enough context and data to make an intelligent replatforming decision. This approach, which aligns with the MACH mindset, might explain the key findings of the recent Forrester <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/emilypfeiffer_today-i-published-a-forrester-wave-evaluation-activity-7193319716013137920-7_vf" target="_blank">Wave report</a> which shows that a) there are no vendors in the leader's circle of e-commerce platforms and b) very few B2C digital businesses are shopping for a new e-commerce platform. </li><li>Another approach to reducing some of this churn is discouraging shadow IT, which is proliferating because it is easy for anyone to subscribe to a SaaS solution using their credit card and expense it. Encourage it to go through a trial process and a proper experimentation framework. Include the right stakeholders in the decision process with ROI justification that accounts for TCO. Negotiating a free trial period for the experimentation allows for a better understanding of the license, training, deployment, customization, testing, and cutover costs, as well as preparing the fit-gap analysis for the decision-makers. This approach would reduce some of the technology bloat. Again, the MACH mindset helps enable such an experimentation model to AB test parts of the ecosystem to evolve to an optimal tech stack.</li></ol>Ultimately, enterprises today must strive to strike a 'goldilocks' balance between innovation, speed, and process rigor to maximize ROES (Return On Engineering Spend). This is not just a goal but a necessity to stay competitive and cost-effective in the face of these industry challenges.<hr/>

<h3 style="text-align: center;">The Author</h3>

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<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/tvprasad/" target="_blank">Prasad Tangirala</a> is the Vice President of eCommerce engineering at Conn's HomePlus and a MACH Ambassador, inventor and speaker. He has a proven track record of leading multiple large digital transformations that rapidly delivered business value using software engineering best practices, usually delivering significant results within his first 90 days. He believes in continuously improving processes, people, and technologies for sustained growth. He brings over two decades of digital transformation experience, holding engineering leadership roles at Amazon, Apple, Cognizant, Fidelity, Wells Fargo, Silicon Valley startups, etc. Prasad has a master's in computer science from IIT Kanpur, a Strategy Management certification from Wharton, and is a Scrum master. Prasad loves to share his experiences building large customer-facing systems and increasing ROES (Return On Engineering Spend) at <a href="www.linktr.ee/tvprasad/" target="_blank">www.linktr.ee/tvprasad/</a>.

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The Perfect Storm

With the MACH Alliance set to surpass 100 corporate members this year, and with MACH now decidedly “the standard,” the MACH Alliance is undertaking a wide-ranging and thorough initiative to explore what membership means in the coming years. We play a leading role in creating clear guidance for enterprises, delineating MACH technologies that foster future-proofing and vendor independence from those that don’t. That guidance is important for buyers given the rapidly shifting dynamics of the technology landscape over the past three and a half years.The rise of Composable technology and MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS, and Headless) as an architectural standard more specifically, has not gone unnoticed by big players in the industry. They are following suit, and we can not be more pleased about that. They have made pivots to their strategies and product portfolios in this direction by rearchitecting products, by acquiring MACH startups etc. This is an amazing testament to MACH as a vision for the future — a future that empowers businesses with flexibility, control, and most importantly, future-proof technology that enables growth and differentiation. That has always been the goal of the MACH Alliance and is one we hold ourselves to every day.Our strict MACH Certification criteria are in place to uphold this promise to the market, so that the responsibility of navigating vendor marketing claims is not a burden to the buyer. The reason we certify companies, not products has always been and remains that established vendors with one product in their portfolio that qualifies, may claim MACH credentials across the board. That would be detrimental to the clarity we are here to secure. While that reasoning remains sound, our focus is on the buyers, and we want them to understand what they're investing in and to ensure that their chosen solutions meet the high standards set by the MACH Alliance. Providing the best and comprehensive guidance for buyers has been and will be our endeavor always.So today, I am confirming our commitment to researching improved ways to help the buyer best in navigating the landscape. We will dedicate substantial time over the next few months to that work and communicate our findings in March. We believe that as MACH grows and evolves, so too will its value as an industry standard, and with that, the quality that we need to deliver and the scrutiny we are under.If you feel you can provide useful insights for our research, please get in touch at <a href="mailto:info@machalliance.com">info@machalliance.com</a> with the subject line: Research Guidance. We'd love to hear from you! We know we owe the buyer clear guidance and that is what we are set out to do.Author: Jon Panella, MACH Alliance Chairperson

MACH Alliance's Commitment to Clear Guidance Amidst Big Tech Acquisitions and Developments

Steve Nolan and Mark Elliott were relative newcomers to fashion e-commerce giant boohoo but they faced a conundrum when the company was rapidly assembling a ‘who’s who’ of UK retailers. Their job: to ensure that technology acted as an accelerator rather than a boat anchor slowing down the business.As well as selling under its own brand, boohoo has become home to globally recognised brands including, PrettyLittleThing, Karen Millen, Dorothy Perkins, Warehouse, Burton, Oasis, Coast and Wallis, as well as famous feminist brand Nasty Gal.Steve, boohoo’s CTO, jokes that he “aged 10 years after a rollercoaster of a journey in three years” as he helped scale its digital capability. Chief architect Mark had his “passion for high-scale performance enterprise e-commerce solutions” fully tested by boohoo as the company’s can-do culture demanded rapid deployment of systems to cope with equally rapid business expansion.The scale of boohoo’s operation can be measured in large numbers with nigh on £2bn in sales (up 61 per cent in two years), from its 14 destinations, 19 million active customers, 65 million social media followers and around 190 million items shipped globally.Little wonder that a legacy Sage 200 back-end was feeling the strain before digital transformation kicked in. And that strain would surely worsen were boohoo to be successful in chasing a global addressable market of half a billion buyers and achieve its mission of offering fashion for everyone at amazing prices with unrivalled choice.“It was hard to make changes and it was creaking,” Mark recalls, which is no surprise given that it was Sage’s biggest UK installation… and seven times the second largest.The rapid rollout of new brands as boohoo continued its M&amp;A spree meant a more adaptive infrastructure was required. It was this overarching consideration, together with a need to drive efficiency and optimize the boohoo supply chain, that led Nolan and Elliott to embark on what they call a “Sage detox” program.The plan: to jettison bolted-on functionality that sat atop Sage and replace it with a modern, composable MACH architecture plugged into Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 ERP system. Products were centralized in a single Akeneo product information management (PIM) system with the aim being that “you didn’t need an IT degree as a business user to utilize the PIM”.IT at the boohoo group operates fast in what is a fast, ever-changing sector: a WordPress project was completed in three weeks, for example. Minimal viable products are often rolled straight into production where possible.A paper-based order management system was fully automated, eliminating the up-to-25 minutes orders took to be completed when keying in was required. “The digital back-end revolutionized the way the business operates,” Mark says, enabling the company to stay on top of 25,000 SKUs that are added every week.There were other considerations too as boohoo stepped up its automation and manufacturing investments just as it was onboarding new partners and brands. And then of course there was Covid to deal with…Lessons? Nolan and Elliott can share a few. Although boohoo’ new web operations were created quickly and delivered excellent performance, access to skills in the time of the Great Resignation remains a challenge. At a time when “every person gets tapped on the shoulder for a new job every week”, that’s tough, laments Elliott. That means a lengthier-than-ideal reliance on systems integrators has been necessary.Also, dealing with the vagaries of product categorization, dynamic pricing and promotions, content publishing, staging and previewing have been challenging, requiring close collaboration between IT and merchandisers. Differentiating between caching static data and changing, personalised data for performance needed attention and, even in the age of open APIs, integration between systems is not easy.But for an adaptable e-commerce operation, they both agree “MACH is absolutely the right way to go about it,”. In a world where fashions change by season, a flexible environment is needed and that is putting the composable services world on the catwalk and in the spotlight.Authors: Mark Elliott, Chief Architect, boohoo groupSteve Nolan, CTO, boohoo group

How boohoo carved out a MACH keystone for fast-growth e-commerce

<h2>Now, more than ever, shoppers want products fulfilled their way.</h2>Long gone are the days when the only way to purchase a product was to go into a physical store. Today, customers shop for items 24/7, expecting their orders to be fulfilled how, when and where they want. For retailers, what began as relatively simple cross-channel fulfillment has expanded into omnichannel distribution. Let’s take a look at what omnichannel distribution means and why it’s a crucial strategy for every brand.Once customers began to shop online, the question of where and how to fulfill became retailers’ top priority. Suddenly, store associates were asked to perform new tasks like picking items and reserving them for customers to collect in-store. As new means of fulfillment arose, the line between distribution centers and stores blurred.<h2>Ways to fulfill online orders</h2>Consider the following fulfillment logistics and you’ll see that retailers need a comprehensive and seamless distribution strategy to succeed:<ul><li>Buy Online, Pickup In-Store (BOPIS) - Fulfilled from store inventoryA customer makes an order online, the store pulls it from store stock and the customer collects it in the store.</li><li>Buy Online, Pickup In-Store (BOPIS) - Ship to Store from DCA customer makes an order online, the Distribution Center ships the items to the store, and the customer collects their order in the store.</li><li>Buy Online, Ship from DC to HomeA customer purchases something on your website, then the DC ships it to their home or other location.</li><li>Buy Online, Ship from Store to HomeA customer purchases something on your website, then you pick it from your store stock and ship it to their home or other location.</li><li>Buy Online, ship from Drop Ship Vendor (DSV)A customer purchases something on your website, and you send the order to a Drop Ship Vendor who ships it to their home or other location.</li><li>Buy online, return in-store (BORIS)A customer purchases a product online, no longer wants it, and returns it to a physical store.</li></ul>As you can see, complex fulfillment logistics demand systems that manage inventory globally and transparently.<h2>Omnichannel distribution challenges</h2>As with any technology solution, not all omnichannel distribution solutions are created alike.<h3>Inventory visibility and virtual inventory segmentation</h3>For starters, you’ll need a system that offers a single view of inventory across all your systems. If you and your customers can’t see what you have available to sell, it will result in out of stocks or overselling. And ideally you don’t just want to see the stock you have on-hand, but also stock in transit.You’ll also need technology to support virtual inventory segmentation. This gives you the ability to control what stock is made for sale in each market, or channel. It also lets you manage buffer or safety stock, which might differ by channel, to prevent overselling and canceled orders. In addition, you’ll want a flexible way to manage your fulfillment locations. This includes grouping them into logical networks that can be used in your sourcing rules. That way you can set up rules to prioritize sourcing from one network over another. Why is this flexibility important?<h3>Sourcing and fulfillment optimization</h3>Margins. While basic inventory and order routing capabilities will let you fulfill online orders from stores, they’re not optimal. Only flexible fulfillment logic lets you fine-tune your rules over time. And without this flexibility, you have no way to maximize the margin on each order. But an enterprise distributed order management solution will ensure you fulfill orders in the way that works best. Not just for the customer but the business too. For instance, say a product is available from two stores. Where do you want to fulfill it from? The store with the most inventory? Lowest throughput? Oldest inventory? Or biggest markdowns? All these factors can impact your margins. Preservation of profits is key.<h3>Reverse Logistics</h3>Finally, you’ll want a system that can handle reverse logistics. Remember the customer who decided they didn’t want the product they purchased? The only way to process this is through reverse logistics. You need to allow stores and Distribution Centers to receive products back from the consumer. Or even send unsold merchandise back to the manufacturer so it can be taken apart, sorted, reassembled or recycled.<h2>Implications for Headless Commerce</h2>At the heart of your fulfillment operations is your Order Management System (OMS). It consumes inventory feeds from your other systems (ERP, WMS, POS, etc.) and tracks the stock you have Available to Promise (ATP) in near real time. It also optimizes sourcing and manages each step in the fulfillment process. But for omnichannel distribution to work your OMS needs to exchange data with many other systems via APIs. Key integrations include the:<ul><li>Ecommerce Platform</li><li>Notifications System</li><li>Customer Service System</li></ul>In short, omni-channel distribution is not easy. But with modern systems that take an API first approach to integration, you’ll be delighting customers in no time.Author: Nicola Kinsella, VP of Marketing, Fluent Commerce

Retailers: Why Omnichannel Distribution Matters

MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS, and Headless) technology is built for speed, allowing you to adapt quickly and follow a modular approach that makes it easy to plug in new tools. As digital technologies like Augmented Reality come to market or reach maturity, MACH technology enables teams to implement those faster than ever. At least that’s the hypothesis. But is it true?Contentstack and Valtech teamed up to put the power of MACH to the test. The idea: Build a proof of concept for an Augmented Reality application that’s pulling in content via Contentstack’s headless CMS — in just four weeks.<h2>Keeping up with an ever-changing omnichannel world: The power of a headless CMS</h2>We are living in an omnichannel world. Brands and consumers interact via countless digital channels, from websites to apps, digital billboards, email marketing, smart speakers, and wearables, and analog ‘good old’ communication with the hotline or in person at reception, in stores, branches, on platforms - the list goes on.When consumers engage with a brand, they expect a consistent message across channels. Marketers face the old challenge: delivering content across a growing number of digital touchpoints without having to update duplicate content in multiple places manually. Just that this challenge has become even more complex and more urgent than ever before. A harmonious experience across the customer’s journey is not aspirational anymore: Today, it makes or breaks businesses.Technologically, this is where the power of a MACH&nbsp;CMS such as <a href="https://www.contentstack.com/?utm_source=machall&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=2020_10_15_mach_alliance_spyglass">Contentstack</a> comes in. Simply put, a headless CMS is a modern kind of content management system that manages and organizes content without a connected front-end layer. You manage all your content and assets within your CMS, but then use APIs to distribute that content to anywhere and everywhere you need it — your website, your mobile app, your email marketing tool, or, as in our project, an AR application.But a CMS that’s powered by MACH principles doesn’t just make the day-to-day tasks of orchestrating content across channels easier. It also allows you to add new channels faster than ever before. Because a modern CMS is built from the ground-up to make it easy to add or replace services and build out new channels, it’s a powerful foundation for marketing organizations looking to adopt new technologies and customer touchpoints quickly. And that was&nbsp;exactly the goal of the&nbsp;Project Spyglass experiment.<h2>Project Spyglass: Building an Augmented Reality app for the retail space in just four weeks</h2>Together with the team at Valtech, Contentstack&nbsp;decided on the following scenario for this ambitious project:A skincare brand is looking to use the power of AR to simplify the complex information around their serums, tailor the content to customers’ needs, and ultimately make it easier to navigate the brand’s product line. In-store, the application should support the purchasing process by surfacing helpful information — including reviews, ingredients, and allergens, as well as facts on sustainability and ingredient sourcing. At home, the brand’s AR experience should give the customer personalized guidance on how and when to use the product. Additionally, it should help them keep track of how it does (or doesn’t) help their skin and suggest related products that fit their changing needs after a period of using the serum.All of this was to be delivered as a mobile-web-browser-based Augmented Reality experience, which pulled all content from Contentstack in realtime.Within four weeks, the use cases&nbsp;to be covered were fleshed out and translated into interaction designs. Then,&nbsp;an AR framework was implemented that could track the serum bottles and let the user interact with the content by swiping on-screen, and rotating and tilting the bottle, and connecting the application to Contenstack to pull in all relevant content.If you’re curious, you can read the week-by-week breakdown of the steps taken to make this idea become a reality:- Week 0: <a href="https://www.contentstack.com/blog/all-about-headless/how-to-concept-and-pitch-an-augmented-reality-demo-in-one-week?utm_source=machall&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=2020_10_15_mach_alliance_spyglass">Getting to the pitch</a>- Week 1: <a href="https://www.contentstack.com/blog/all-about-headless/augmented-reality-for-retail-from-concept-to-game-plan-week-one?utm_source=machall&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=2020_10_15_mach_alliance_spyglass">AR Framework &amp; User Research, Marker Tracking</a>- Week 2:<a href="https://www.contentstack.com/blog/all-about-headless/augmented-reality-retail-skincare-poc-week-2?utm_source=machall&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=2020_10_15_mach_alliance_spyglass">Content Modeling and Interaction Building</a>- Week 3: <a href="https://www.contentstack.com/blog/all-about-headless/building-a-working-retail-augmented-reality-prototype-final-week-of-development?utm_source=machall&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=2020_10_15_mach_alliance_spyglass">Integration: The Final Week of Development</a>When it came to pulling in the content that shaped this new AR experience, Valtech could truly leverage the flexibility of Contentstack’s <a href="https://www.contentstack.com/docs/developers/apis/graphql-content-delivery-api/?utm_source=machall&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=2020_10_15_mach_alliance_spyglass">powerful GraphQL API</a>. This was only possible because Contentstack is an API-first, headless CMS that puts you in full control over where and how you want to leverage your content.“There isn’t a long-standing tradition of AR and VR applications, and there’s no solution that is pre-built for the problems that an enterprise is going to experience when they’re developing for AR. When you’re trying to do something uncharted, you cannot let yourself be limited by something that was built with “websites” in mind.Contentstack is agnostic to the display and dynamic in the way it relates content to the display layer so that you can architect the data and the content structure in the best way for where it’s going, no matter what the end goal is.”- <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminmellsworth/">Ben Ellsworth, Solutions Architect at Contentstack</a>So how did it turn out? Just four weeks after kicking off project Spyglass, Valtech had built a working prototype — and the <a href="https://spyglass.valtech.engineering/">results</a>couldn't have been better.<iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/Fk9cfQePYeM?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" width="101.648%" height="309"></iframe>In retail now more than ever, the <a href="https://machalliance.org/blogdetail/blt96357fdc9d08dabc">secret to success lies in embracing change and doing it fast</a>. Project Spyglass shows that with tools built on MACH principles, you can leverage new technologies like AR to present existing product information in a brand new way. You can experiment with new tools and build new products that seamlessly plug into your existing tech stack without months of integration work — and can build innovative, digital experiences that set you apart from your competition.<h2>Can you keep up with the staggering pace of digital innovation?</h2>The digital world continues to evolve at rocket speed — but to many organizations adopting new channels feels like an impossible task. That’s because they’re stuck with legacy technology that causes the release of new initiatives to take months, even years, or make it too complicated to attempt at all.But it doesn’t have to be that way.If you adopt technology with a MACH mindset at its core, experimenting with new channels and technologies is a whole lot easier, setting your brand up for success in the ever-evolving world of digital innovation._________About ContentstackContentstack is a Content Experience Platform (CXP) with a headless content management system (CMS) at the core. To learn more about Contentstack, visit our<a href="https://www.contentstack.com/?utm_source=machall&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=2020_10_15_mach_alliance_spyglass">website</a>.About ValtechValtech is a global digital agency focused on business transformation. We enable clients to anticipate tomorrow’s trends and connect more directly with their consumers across digital and physical touch points, whilst optimizing time-to-market and ROI. For more information, visit<a href="http://www.valtech.com">www.valtech.com</a>.

How fast can you move with MACH? A 4-week augmented reality experiment

Welcome to MACH 3.0, a special report from VML produced for MACH THREE, the third annual MACH Alliance Conference.For us, MACH 3.0 represents a new phase of the composable journey. A phase defined by leveraging MACH architectures to create space for accelerated innovation and, more specifically, enable the race to drive value with AI.At this point, MACH is no longer just an IT differentiator. For organizations looking to thrive in the age of AI, it is now very much a business differentiator.MACH 3.0 sets out practical considerations for embedding AI in MACH environments from experts across the VML network. It offers advice and best practice methodologies for unlocking value with MACH and AI, with a particular focus on Generative AI and Personalization. Download it now and take the next steps towards harnessing AI to power success in your business for many years to come.Download the Report <a href="https://www.vml.com/insight/mach-3-0">HERE</a>This Power of MACH initiative is brought to you by <a href="https://machalliance.org/members/vml">VML.</a><a href="https://machalliance.org/members/vml"><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/bltbb0c4604b7a5479e/659d430f71535ed0a64aa2f7/VML_-_formerly_Wunderman_Thompson.svg" width="116" height="auto" style="height: auto;"/></a>

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Driving innovation with AI across the MACH ecosystem

Site search is a rare moment when a customer directly tells you what they want. Showing shoppers relevant products is now table stakes, and brands are on the hunt for new ways to help people find exactly what they're looking for.“When you look at the search experience of the new world it’s going to look much more like a magazine. You’ll have content embedded together with the product search results,” says Eli Finkelshteyn, Founder and CEO of <a href="https://constructor.io/">Constructor</a>, the AI-first site search for eCommerce. “It’s a much more visually pleasing array that also takes into account all of the different things that a company has to offer.”An overview of local hiking trails can be shown to a person browsing tents and camp cookware. The results of a search for peanut-free products can include an allergen FAQ. A designer’s video interview can sit among the products in her new line. Blending quality content with the powerful personalization of AI-driven commerce search helps shoppers discover not only the most relevant products and services, but the ones most attractive to them in each context.A recent Forrester report on <a href="https://www.forrester.com/report/Drive+Shopper+Relevance+With+AIDriven+Digital+Commerce+Search/-/E-RES165132">driving shopper relevance with AI commerce search</a> explains the role of contextual content in modern commerce:“Finding related products or content, especially when the searcher doesn’t use the precise product taxonomy, is the crux of delivering relevancy in digital commerce. What started as product recommendations has developed into mature search solutions that serve up congruent products and content related to the original query, much like how standing in a store would allow a consumer to see similar items in the aisle.”<h1>Intelligent search and scalable content</h1>A dynamic blend of content and commerce requires a search engine that goes beyond basic keyword matching and a content solution that makes it easy for marketers and merchandisers to design and scale the experience.As stated in the <a href="https://www.forrester.com/report/Drive+Shopper+Relevance+With+AIDriven+Digital+Commerce+Search/-/E-RES165132">Forrester paper on shopper relevance</a>, “Automation enables relevant personalization at scale, which is all but impossible with older manual methods, and places control in the hands of the merchandising teams. New search solutions provide predictive merchandising tools with easy interfaces to adjust results, read consolidated data, and apply changes at scale.”AI search can free up merchandising and marketing teams from tedious manual tasks, such as maintaining a synonym list so people searching for “grey blouse” are also shown “gray shirt” or creating a workaround to make your system register grammatical anomalies like “Jordan 1s”.“If merchandisers are sitting in legacy search tools correcting misspelling, that's under utilizing the really useful business information that’s in the head of the merchandiser and often not anywhere else,” says Constructor's Finkelshteyn, who explained that modern AI tools empower teams by not only taking care of menial tasks but by giving merchandisers the data, insights, and creative control to test out new ideas.“If they think a new product is going to sell like crazy, they can simply make it the first result for a few queries and the system can learn from there,” says Finkelshteyn.When intelligent search tools are combined with a headless content management solution (CMS) that makes it easy for marketers and merchandisers to create content for any channel, commerce teams can quickly scale up intelligent product discovery. Content can be designed and managed within the CMS and integrations can pull that information to a modern search engine where it’s immediately searchable and surfaced in relevant quieres.<h1>Can’t teach an old suite new tricks</h1>Legacy search solutions struggle to merge content marketing, merchandising, and product catalogues into an attractive shopping experience.Search platforms built in the age of keyword matching and Lucene indexing simply don’t have the core functionality to support AI initiatives at scale, and large “one-size-fits-all” suites lock companies into the capabilities and development roadmap of a single vendor.To compete in eCommerce, companies are turning to architectures that let them create their own ecosystem of best-fit tools. <a href="https://machalliance.org/insights/mach-approach-to-ecommerce-get-the-first-mach-alliance-ebook">This composable commerce approach is often driven by MACH </a>(microservices, API-first, cloud-native, headless) tools, which are designed to easily integrate functionality and data with other tools in your stack.From ordering results based on local in-store inventory levels, to boosting organic products to the shopper reading articles on sustainability, to providing personal sizing guides for the new summer fashions - a composable approach gives brands the freedom to design product discovery tailor-fit to their customers.<h1>Kickstart revenue without a replatform</h1>A core benefit of moving toward composable commerce is the ability to <a href="https://machalliance.org/insights/future-proofing-the-tech-ecosystem-for-an-uncertain-future">build a future-proof tech stack in steps</a>. Brands can use MACH tools to get new initiatives up and running while transitioning off legacy tools at their own pace.If, like many organizations, you are not quite ready to replace your core transactional engine, adopting MACH content and discovery tools offers a shortcut to a valuable shopping experience.“Focusing on content and search can be a great place to start because these are both directly tied to a company’s revenue,” says Finkelshteyn. “You can implement them while leaving your existing commerce platform in place and quickly see revenue lift, which you can use to gain momentum and fund the rest of your MACH transformation.”<a href="https://constructor.io/">Constructor</a> and <a href="https://www.contentstack.com/">Contentstack</a>, the headless content platform, are teaming up to showcase just how quickly brands can tap into the benefits of content and commerce - no need for a major replatform. Check out the joint <a href="https://www.contentstack.com/blog/all-about-headless/commerce-meet-consumer-demands-with-ai-and-omnichannel-cms/?utm_medium=partner-link&utm_source=machalliance.org&utm_campaign=fy22-q3-constructor&utm_content=blog">pilot project</a> to learn more about the powerful combination of flexible content, intuitive editing, and intelligent product discovery.Author: Varia Makagonova, Director of Marketing, Contentstack

Intelligent product discovery fast-tracked by MACH

The buzz about customer data platforms (CDPs) is only getting louder as e-commerce matures and consumers expect even more out of brands online. That makes the functionality of CDPs even more integral in today’s digital-first world.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cdpinstitute.org/learning-center/what-is-a-cdp/">The Customer Data Platform Institute defines a CDP</a> as “packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.” One of the key differentiators of a CDP from customer relationship management software or other systems that work with customer data is that marketers — not IT professionals — are the ones using CDPs on a daily basis.&nbsp;A <a href="https://www.bloomreach.com/en/blog/2021/customer-data-platform">customer data platform</a> should simply integrate with your existing data and facilitate easy retrieval of your stored data for marketing campaigns. It should also collect first-party customer data from different sources and link that information to specific customers in the database — this creates a <a href="https://www.bloomreach.com/en/blog/2021/single-customer-view-scv-overview-for-2021">single customer view</a>, which can then be used to set up and execute campaigns and analyze their performance.&nbsp;The CDP marketplace — which is around 15+ years old at this point —&nbsp;has slowly shifted away from traditional monoliths with closed architectures. It has matured to meet the unique demands of those working in e-commerce to serve customers online. And as modern technology evolves everywhere, companies have learned they must take advantage of what the <a href="https://machalliance.org/manifesto">MACH Alliance Manifesto</a> states are the “innovative and flexible technologies available.”&nbsp;That means just as it is across the SaaS marketplace, it’s time to advocate for open and best-of-breed technologies in the CDP market as well.&nbsp;<h4>Why Do Companies Need a Customer Data Platform?</h4>The reason why your company needs a customer data platform in today’s market is simple:&nbsp; Customers are demanding personalized experiences from your brand.&nbsp;Consider these statistics from <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-value-of-getting-personalization-right-or-wrong-is-multiplying">McKinsey</a>:&nbsp;<ul><li>76% of consumers become frustrated when they don’t get a personalized experience</li><li>78% of consumers are more likely to make a repeat purchase with a brand that personalized their online shopping experience</li><li>76% of consumers are more likely to consider purchasing from companies that use e-commerce personalization strategies&nbsp;</li></ul>Those statistics show that customers shopping online today want companies to compliantly use their data to personalize the experience. It saves the customer time and makes their shopping experience with a brand a much more enjoyable one.<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/blt68d8d16c0d2e4112/63f4c381134b561081375906/MACH-compliant_CDP_in-article_1.jpg"/>But it isn’t just on-site personalization that customers want. They also want personalized email communications, which has resulted in the SaaS market looking more to customer data platforms to create and properly segment email marketing campaigns.&nbsp;Companies have started shifting away from traditional email service providers (ESPs) to CDPs as they’ve realized the power of their customer data when it comes to properly segmenting and personalizing email campaigns. The right CDP will allow you to use your customer data to segment audiences and then personalize your emails to be as relevant to your audience as possible.&nbsp;A customer data platform also allows for the personalization of other aspects of the customer journey. The modern customer wants to be reached on the channel that best suits them, not the one that best suits your company. That means the importance of <a href="https://www.bloomreach.com/en/blog/2019/omnichannel-commerce-for-business">omnichannel</a> campaigns has skyrocketed, and a CDP is crucial in getting you the data you need to understand where and when to connect with customers for those campaigns.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<h4>The Benefits of a MACH-compliant Customer Data Platform&nbsp;</h4>Why does having a MACH-compliant customer data platform matter to you?If businesses want to truly capitalize on the promises they make customers with personalization, they need a powerful ecosystem of technology powering that venture. Not only that, but they also need to have the freedom to build that ecosystem in a way that makes sense internally.&nbsp;The fact is, this type of ecosystem operates best with a MACH-compliant CDP collecting real-time customer data for use in marketing automation campaigns.<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/bltbf992144c97fb968/63f4c3b4f9af2d1090b86169/MACH-compliant_CDP_in-article_2.jpg"/>A MACH-compliant CDP allows your company to use real-time customer data to offer personalized experiences with your brand that are unmatched, whether it’s personalized email marketing, on-site product recommendations, or SMS campaigns.&nbsp;The specific advantages of a MACH-compliant CDP are:&nbsp;&nbsp;<ul><li>Microservices architecture: There is more to developing a microservices architecture than simply breaking up the monolithic commerce software application into a collection of smaller services. To fully realize the benefits of this modern app-development methodology, it’s essential to optimize the data layer, especially if you want to personalize across all channels. You need to consider how your data is managed, build interservice communication, and synchronize that data. MACH-compliant services also allow you to extend your CDP with additional features provided by other MACH solutions (e.g., content generation, custom recommendations engines tailored to your needs, or even advanced solutions creating modern conversational services).&nbsp;</li><li>APIs and webhooks: To be able to activate data from a CDP, you could look at three main purposes:<ul><li>Front-end — Use the APIs to quickly retrieve all the information you have about your visitors and customers, as well as all the insight your CDP created, then use this data for building forms, weblayers, and truly personalized content in a headless way. Retrieve relevant product recommendations and tailor offers based on the customer’s most recent behavior.</li><li>Sending communications — API endpoints for all channels (web, email, SMS, mobile push, etc.).</li><li>Receiving data — Use APIs and webhooks to delegate endpoints for processing. Using webhooks, you can get access to actionable customer data in real time, and customer segmentation allows companies to ensure every customer receives relevant marketing communications.</li></ul></li><li>Cloud-native SaaS: With an on-premise solution, the process of passing customer data to the CDP has become overly complex in terms of authentication and performance.&nbsp; You can operate at an advantage with cloud-native SaaS CDP for several reasons:&nbsp;<ul><li>Features and integrations can be added multiple times per year.&nbsp;</li><li>Regular updates can be deployed on a weekly or biweekly basis, and critical fixes are deployed as soon as possible.&nbsp;</li><li>No downtime while updating.&nbsp;</li><li>There is only a single version, meaning all clients receive the latest version — fully supported.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s very easy to pass customer data points to other pieces of software in your technology stack. With legacy solutions, they may only have the option of importing or exporting files (and not in real time), which can lead to your customers receiving irrelevant or outdated marketing messages.</li></ul></li><li>Headless: To activate the data in an omnichannel e-commerce environment, it’s critical to have the APIs be able to interact with both your front end and all your other channels (email, SMS, WhatsApp, social, etc.).&nbsp;</li></ul>A MACH-compliant CDP offers the agility required to keep pace with rising customer demands thanks to the personalization offerings accessible from a truly open architecture.&nbsp;&nbsp;The future is MACH-compliant personalized experiences — how will your company offer them to your customers?<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/blt4503191c451bf49b/63f4c4e6778c9c3236175f4e/Carl_Bleich_profile.png"/>

The Benefits of a MACH-compliant Customer Data Platform

<h4>Describe composable architecture to a 5 year old</h4>Composable architecture is like a big toy box. Inside the toy box, there are lots of different little toys that you can use to build whatever you want. You can mix and match the toys to create different structures, and you can take them apart and put them back together again in different ways. This makes it easy to build things that are just the right size and shape for whatever you need.<h4>Describe composable architecture to a high school student</h4>Composable architecture is a design approach that allows for the creation of complex systems by combining smaller, independent components. This approach offers several benefits, such as flexibility, scalability, and modularity. In other words, with composable architecture, you can build a system out of smaller parts, and if you need to change something, you can easily swap out individual components without affecting the rest of the system. This makes it easier to build and maintain complex systems, and it allows for more efficient use of resources.<h4>Describe composable architecture to a graduate student</h4>Composable architecture is a modular design approach that allows for the creation of complex systems by combining smaller, independent components. This approach is based on the principle of "divide and conquer," which involves breaking a large, complex problem into smaller, more manageable pieces. In the context of software architecture, composable architecture allows developers to build systems out of smaller, reusable components that can be easily combined and reconfigured to meet the specific needs of a given project.This approach offers several benefits, including increased flexibility, improved scalability, and enhanced modularity. By breaking a system down into smaller components, it becomes easier to make changes and updates without affecting the overall system. Additionally, composable architecture can lead to more efficient use of resources, as it allows developers to reuse components across multiple projects, reducing the need for redundant code and speeding up development time.Composable architecture is often used in conjunction with other design principles, such as MACH (Microservices, API first, cloud native SaaS, and Headless). By leveraging these principles, developers can create systems that are built out of small, independent components that can be easily combined and reconfigured to meet the specific needs of a given project. This allows for greater flexibility, scalability, and modularity, enabling organizations to quickly respond to changing business needs and take advantage of new technologies and opportunities.<h4>Describe a composable architecture to a professional engineer</h4>A composable architecture is a modular design approach that is based on the principles of Microservices, API first, and cloud native SaaS. With this approach, complex systems are built by combining smaller, independent components that can be easily combined and reconfigured to meet the specific needs of a given project. This approach is often referred to as MACH architecture and often leverages a headless approach to customer experience as it allows for the creation of systems that are composed of interchangeable components, with each component having a specific function and purpose. This allows for greater flexibility and scalability, as individual components can be easily swapped out or updated without affecting the overall system. Additionally, by leveraging cloud native SaaS technologies, a composable architecture can be easily deployed and managed in a cloud environment and elements such as security and resilience are managed by a third party, allowing for more efficient use of resources and enabling organizations to quickly respond to changing business needs.MACH is an acronym that refers to a set of principles that are often used in the design of modern and composable software architectures. The term MACH stands for Microservices, API first, Cloud native SaaS, and Headless.Microservices: This principle involves the use of small, independent components that can be easily combined to create complex systems. Each microservice has a specific function and can be developed and deployed independently, allowing for greater flexibility and scalability.API first: This principle involves the use of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) as the primary means of communication between different components of a system. By designing APIs first, developers can ensure that components are loosely coupled and can be easily combined and reconfigured to meet changing business needs. Common communication protocols include REST, gRPC and GraphQL.Cloud native SaaS: This principle involves the use of cloud-based technologies and services to create, deploy, and manage software applications. By leveraging cloud native SaaS technologies, organizations can take advantage of the scalability, reliability, security, and flexibility of the cloud to quickly respond to changing business needs.Headless: This principle involves the use of a "headless" approach to software design, where the user interface (UI) is decoupled from the underlying system. This allows for greater flexibility and reusability, as individual components can be easily combined and reconfigured to create custom UIs that meet the specific needs of a given project.Overall, MACH represents a modern approach to software design that emphasizes modularity, flexibility, and scalability. By leveraging the principles of MACH, organizations can create complex systems that are built out of smaller, independent components, allowing them to quickly respond to changing business needs and take advantage of new technologies and opportunities.

MACH At Different Levels

Dressing well may run in the family, but Ian Rosen wants to make it easy for everyone to be expertly styled so they can look good, and feel good, in everything they do.&nbsp;Rosen, who is a third-generation leader of the well-known Canadian menswear brand, <a href="https://www.harryrosen.com/en">Harry Rosen</a>, is currently President and Chief Operating Officer of the business, which operates under three banners: The core Harry Rosen physical and online stores, the outlet division which includes five locations and the discount online experience, Final Cut by Harry Rosen. Ian’s father is CEO of the business, his brother is Vice President of the Outlet Division and his grandfather, Harry Rosen himself, is the namesake of the brand.Known for its top-notch customer service and craftsmanship, Harry Rosen has been around since 1954. It wasn’t until the COVID pandemic hit that the company fully realized not only that e-commerce was critical to keeping demand alive at a time when being in-store wasn’t an option, but that with the right technology in place, that online experience could be just as rich as being in a physical store.<h2></h2><h2></h2><h4>The Gamble&nbsp;</h4>For several years prior to joining Harry Rosen in 2018, Rosen worked at Bain &amp; Company where he found a passion for advising consumer and retail brands on their corporate strategy. That largely focused on what he refers to as their “Amazon strategies” – in other words, how to keep the giant at bay by having the precise technology and go-to-market strategies to stand out.Getting a rush out of what Rosen called the gamble of betting on what would or wouldn’t make consumers tick, Rosen decided it was time to put his chips into the family business. He joined Harry Rosen as Executive Vice President of Digital and Corporate Strategy. In this role, technology became a crucial area of his focus with Rosen and team overseeing e-commerce, digital and product development, analytics and more.&nbsp;When the pandemic brought life as we knew it to a halt in 2020, Rosen and his team were tasked with re-architecting the corporate strategy and, thus, rethinking how Harry Rosen invested in technology.&nbsp;“We took a big swing in terms of figuring out how to build an online experience to complement what was a legendary in-store experience,” he said. “We mapped out exactly what we wanted to deliver and how we would go about making that happen in the digital world. MACH ended up being the answer.”<h2></h2><h2></h2><h4>Tripling the e-commerce business&nbsp;</h4>In August of 2020, Harry Rosen re-launched with an entirely new online experience. That year, the company’s e-commerce business tripled from the previous year and online became Harry Rosen’s top-selling store.&nbsp;But building that store didn’t happen overnight.&nbsp;“We owe a lot to the MACH Alliance for helping to make our IT architecture decisions make sense,” said Rosen. “Knowing the technology had been vetted and that the vendors we chose were certified sped up our process significantly and gave us confidence in knowing we were bringing in all the right players.”&nbsp;And so came the need to stitch together a series of best-fit tools like Amplience for content management, commercetools for cart and promotions, Algolia for search, Bold Commerce for checkout, Dynamic Yield for AB testing, Orium (formerly MyPlanet) as the systems integrator … the list goes on. Rosen described how all of these different platforms could be seamlessly integrated, each serving its own specific purpose but collectively, creating this rich digital experience for shoppers that could simply not be done with a traditional monolithic platform.“Just about everything we touch now has that MACH Alliance stamp of approval,” he said.&nbsp;A deeply service-oriented company, part of Rosen’s aim when rebuilding and relaunching the Harry Rosen digital experience was to be sure those personalized offerings, such as the company’s professional clothing advisors, were still at the center.&nbsp;“We didn’t want to abandon the in-store offerings that make shopping Harry Rosen special,” said Rosen. “We invested heavily in building a tool directly into our web experience that would enable customers to still engage with a clothing advisor just as they would in a physical store. Bringing our most used customer service features right into the digital world has paid dividends.”&nbsp;<h2></h2><h2></h2><h4>Being an A Student&nbsp;</h4>Rosen would tell others considering undergoing a MACH transition that the hardest part of doing so is betting on the unknown in terms of readiness.&nbsp;“From a digital maturity perspective, we asked ourselves more than once, ‘Are we there yet?’” Rosen said. “We’re a small to mid-size company, and to take this on, you need to have a certain level of digital maturity.”&nbsp;“There are all-in-one solutions out there to be a ‘B’ student in digital,” said Rosen. “The question we kept going back to was ‘How important is it for us to become an ‘A’ student and shape a vision for retail compared to everything else that’s out there.”For Rosen and his team at Harry Rosen, the decision to take the steps and invest in order to be an A student was a simple one, even if it meant spending more up-front to build a digital backbone that could deliver e-commerce success for the long haul.As Rosen described, he and his team put a higher dollar amount than what the company had ever invested in digital tech in front of the executive board. Yet that amount was a tenth of what the company had planned to put forth to renovate a physical store. When weighing the longer-term ROI, it became clear that investing digitally made equal, if not greater sense for the business. The company would capitalize time and again on those investments, as Rosen said, and that is exactly what they’ve done.&nbsp;“The MACH Alliance has made me look smarter than I am,” Rosen said with a smile. “They helped us make sense of a very-much evolving software landscape on the commerce side of things. It’s only going to get more complex, so being able to help evangelize this point of view for others is important to me. I want to benefit the entire ecosystem as much as possible.”&nbsp;“The people behind the Alliance are completely reshaping commerce and writing a new set of rules,” he added. “When you’re a third-generation business trying to balance staying true to who you are while also reinventing yourself to avoid falling behind, you want to be part of a group like the MACH Alliance.”&nbsp;<h2></h2><h4>MACH Alliance Ambassadorship </h4>The MACH Alliance is very excited to welcome Ian as an Ambassador. Our Ambassadors are a carefully selected group of business and technology experts with a wide range of experience across industries and backgrounds. Passionate about the benefits a modern architecture can bring to an enterprise, our Ambassadors have graciously committed their time to support the mission of the MACH Alliance by writing, speaking, and serving as subject matter experts to help empower companies to go MACH.If you’re interested in learning more about a MACH approach and understanding if it’s right for your business, we welcome you to get in touch at  info@machalliance.org to be matched with the MACH Alliance Ambassador most relevant to you.

Meet Your MACH Alliance Ambassador: Ian Rosen, President and Chief Operating Officer, Harry Rosen

Are you an international retailer, faced with the complexities of trading across borders whilst trying to provide seamless customer experiences? And maybe you also own several brands and are wondering how to scale your fulfillment model across them whilst still meeting the unique requirements of each of them?<h2>The unique challenges of multinational retailers</h2>Multi-national organizations often need to accommodate region specific delivery requirements, carrier requirements, or customer expectations. They may have different distribution partners in each region. Or they may want to test a subset of their products in a new market and not offer every item in every region.<h2>Multi-brand retailers and their distinct requirements</h2>At multi-brand retailers, customers of each brand can have very different needs. What drives loyalty and customer satisfaction at one brand may vary greatly from another. For example, this may be a result of selling different product lines (e.g., apparel vs sporting goods), delivery requirements (e.g., small parcels vs bulky items), or perhaps value added services (e.g., assembly or personalization). And as new brands are added to the portfolio the parent company needs to balance how they can achieve economies of scale, yet allow for competitive brand differentiation.And what about the many retailers who fall into both of these categories? The stakes are higher, but so are the opportunities. As long as you have the right technology to help you.<h2>What to look for in a cloud native, flexible Distributed Order Management System to support international growth and multiple brands.</h2>How can an order management system help you achieve seamless cross-border and cross-brand commerce? The general answer is: it depends on how it’s structured. So if you’re looking for an order management system that can support your multi-brand or multi-national growth plans, make sure it lets you do the following: -<h3>Create a structure to fit your business</h3>Make sure you can set up your organizational structure to best suit your business needs. For example, you might divide your organization into brands or geographies or a combination of both. Or you might set up different types of organizations, such as retail, marketplace, and wholesale.<h3>Share data across business units</h3>It is crucial that you can share data across your business units. This allows each business unit to access all locations and inventory across your organization, but define their own rules for how they fulfill orders.<h3>Provide an integrated cross brand experience</h3>When each business unit can access the locations and inventory of other business units, you can explore new fulfillment models. Let’s take a look at some options.<h4>Cross Brand Click and Collect</h4>Let’s say you’re a multi-brand organization with stores, and you use your stores as pickup locations. Some customers may live closer to a Brand A store, while others will live closer to a Brand B store. If a customer places an order on the Brand A website, can they pick it up from her local Brand B store?If instead of home delivery, you offer pickup at their closest store, are they more likely to make an additional purchase while they’re there?<h4>Cross Brand Merchandising</h4>While some of your brands may have very distinct products, others may not. What if you could test popular products or accessories from one brand on the online storefront of another? Could you gain new insights into customer segments and behavior? Or increase average order value?<h4>Cross Brand Returns</h4>No one likes returns. Especially customers. They’re a hassle. But what if you could offer even more convenient return options? If customers can return an online purchase at any of the stores in your network, would that make them more inclined to buy? After all, over 50% of consumers review return policies and processes before making a buying decision.<h4>Cross Region Fulfillment</h4>What if your French website receives an order that can’t be fulfilled from a French DC or store. Can your French website check to see if the item is available in the UK or Germany instead?In short, if you can share stock and locations across your brands and regions, it gives you new ways to add value and convenience for your customers and provide a truly integrated cross-brand experience.<h3>Use operational templates to accelerate expansion</h3>As you grow, it’s important to maximize economies of scale. That’s where operational templates come in.Say you have 70% common business processes and rules across brands or regions, but want to allow for 30% customization. An OMS should allow you to create a reusable set of templates for Business Rules &amp; Processes that serves as the base fulfillment logic for each new region or brands. You should then be able to modify them to meet local or brand specific requirements. That way you can accelerate rollout, and bring on new brands or regions in a matter of weeks..<h3>Enable staff to use their local language</h3>Finally, as you expand into new geographic regions, make sure staff can use the system in their local language. Especially store staff who pick and pack online orders. This reduces training time, and user errors—which can be particularly important if you use seasonal workers to support your peak season.<h2>Multiply the opportunities</h2>Often, ‘Multi’ organizations don’t take advantage of their joint power as much as they could. Their inventory and location data sits in siloed systems. Moreover, they lack the technology for a unified approach. But with a flexible, MACH certified OMS you can break down those silos. This means you can truly reap the benefits of scale.By using a single system to manage all your orders and stock availability around the world, you can offer a fully integrated cross brand experience and get more value from every unit of stock. But the real game changer? When you create reusable templates that let you roll out faster, technology is no longer a barrier to growth, but an enabler.Author: Nicola Kinsella - VP of Marketing, Fluent Commerce

Multiple brands & multiple countries: How Retailers can leverage MACH certified Order Management to seamlessly trade and scale.

Modern commerce requires a new set of enterprise tools. We recently sat down to discuss the disruption in retail technology with Giles Smith, Digital Director at a well known luxury retailer and <a href="https://machalliance.org/newsdetail/blt4419d398662844d0">independent member of the MACH Alliance Advisory Board</a>.Over the last two years, Giles has helped his company transition from a monolithic, legacy commerce platform to a modern, composable architecture. He took the time to share his experience with us about this journey as well as his advice for brands and retailers who are making the move to modern commerce.<h1>Why Commerce is going MACH</h1>For so many retailers the desire for new commerce technologies stems from the way our shopping habits have evolved over the last decade. “Today shoppers demand a joined-up multi channel experience in any location at any time, whether on an inspiration journey, impulse shopping or returning to aftersales” explains Giles, ”Customer needs, and their expectation around fulfilling those needs, have shifted and continue to shift faster than ever”This rapid change in customer expectations is outpacing the capabilities of traditional enterprise software. “Our legacy platform was amazing for 2011 when all it had to handle was desktop commerce but as customer expectations grew we had to build new capabilities to stay competitive.” Giles says the problem isn’t always that these custom capabilities aren’t good, but that they were built on top (and on top and on top) of so many other changes that it created a huge mess. Making it cumbersome to update, change, or even diagnose an issue in the platform. “However, the main reasons for adopting MACH are centered around the customer, not the technology. A MACH approach enables faster feature development and innovations, more joined up personalized and localized experiences, and more performant and reliable customer experiences”.“Agility is now mandatory for survival, not a differentiator.” says Giles, and software designed in the era of static shopping simply hasn’t been able to keep up with the explosive growth of digital commerce channels. “Maintaining coupled monolithic applications, or multiple front-end channels and websites with separate, fragmented code bases is a big duplication of effort”.Enterprises need architectures better equipped for change, and many are turning to <a href="https://machalliance.org/blogdetail/blt58fdb0ad9abc4123">technologies built with MACH principles</a> (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless) to become more flexible. These four factors have been a rising trend in software development and, as the market has matured, a perfect storm has brewed for enterprise adoption.“There are so many forces working together.” explains Giles, “The advancements and mainstreaming of SaaS, Cloud and API-first principles, as well as techniques like Automation. Then you throw on top a culture of agile delivery, and modern engineering practices. All combined, it means that everything is just immensely faster and more flexible than it used to be”<h1>The Benefits of Composable Commerce</h1>“A benefit of the more monolithic platforms, from a business user perspective, is that everything is in one place.” says Giles, “But the compromise is that while you might have a nine out of ten search feature in the platform, it may come with a five out of ten content management tool, or DAM. In my view, composable architecture lets you pick the right choices for your customer and teams which brings together specialist technology over generalist”For example, many luxury retailers or experiential brands don’t need a commerce engine built to handle complex promotions, enormous volumes, or range, as those features would go to waste. Instead, they can go for a lean commerce platform that has the API-based flexibility that enables the brand to focus more on content and brand moments that personalize and localize the customer experience.Choosing a composable architecture over a monolithic approach does mean dealing with more platforms, but leveraging the benefits of MACH design alleviates many of the headaches of traditional software.Firstly, truly cloud-native solutions offer rolling, backwards compatible updates which <a href="https://machalliance.org/blogdetail/blt431d049378c4175c">removes the burden of version control</a>. In Giles’ experience, “With a legacy platform, every time there is an upgrade you have to endure the disruption of doing it regardless of the customer benefit it brings. Maybe they mandate it too close to Christmas, or it needs two days of downtime, or six weeks of regression testing that you don’t have time for. None of these considerations are a big concern for me with MACH technology platforms.”Secondly, because MACH tools are built with the same API-first and microservice design they form a cohesive solution ecosystem.“Our search, our DAM, and our content platform are all built by the same lean team of engineers, who built them using consistent engineering languages and frameworks. This means that we can maintain and serve those capabilities with tight and efficient teams” says Giles, “There is a significantly tighter, more empowered, flexible and autonomous team profile when we compare legacy technology teams against those working with MACH platform integrations.”For example, Giles says he has witnessed teams finding that creating a new payment method using true MACH technology like commercetools can be more than twice the speed compared to using their legacy commerce platform.With less cost, effort, and headcount required to maintain the core platforms, those resources can be invested in more innovative areas. “This in turn frees up funds to experiment in emerging channels and capabilities like virtual selling perhaps, or gaming,” says Giles, ”Even though they aren’t MACH related, they can join the agenda because so much less time and money is spent on big teams supporting focused on such a narrow set of digital capabilities.”“Overall, when I look at it from the teams I have at work,” says Giles,” our outcomes are faster, our teams are smaller, our people are happier, and from a technical perspective the releases, outages, upgrades are all quieter. It doesn’t oddly get easier, the expectations rise again and we keep going, but then a true digital product organization’s work is never done!”<h1>Accessing MACH Benefits Requires Digital Maturity</h1>While Giles is a proponent of a composable, MACH architecture he stresses that it’s not for everyone. Adopting a model of multiple SaaS platforms, where you don’t own the features or data storage, requires a confident shift in perspective from an engineering, business, finance, and leadership point of view.“Before you go with a MACH roadmap you do need to have a really honest word with yourself about the maturity of your organization.” says Giles, “If there is a huge cultural void between I.T. and the business, or if there isn’t a good foundation of modern engineering practices, like automation, DevOps, and Agile then you may struggle.”If software is being released in months and not weeks, if you have to pull down the website to release new features, if there are big outages in getting your system back online from offline - these can all be signs that an organization isn’t yet mature enough for the benefits of MACH to outweigh the complexities.“If you don’t have the headspace to figure out how it will all glue together for your teams, and how they’ll operate across all the systems, then I think the monolith all-in-one capability platform serves a purpose of removing those headaches despite the limitations and likelihood you will end up doing a major re-platforming again in a few years when the cycle repeats itself” explains Giles.<h1>A Big Picture Mindset</h1>A main reason moving to MACH requires organizational maturity is because a successful transition requires companies to create a long term vision for their technology, instead of solving the noisiest pain points one at a time.For Giles’ team, creating that long term strategy first required a full assessment of current technology. Looking at all their digital capabilities from a customer perspective, they mapped out which ones were red, amber, and green and made a holistic plan on the best ways to turn, and keep, everything green.“In some ways at the beginning it was a bit slow and steady, with that vision, strategy and evaluation period being measured in pace and iterative in nature.” says Giles, “But had we not done those steps I genuinely think we would probably just have started building point solutions without really knowing what we were aiming for long term.”For many companies going composable, that long term strategy includes weaning off legacy platforms one microservice at a time. This means, for a while, there will be parallel development on both the old and new platforms. Investments may be made in the old platform to give customer access to new capabilities now, with the trade off that it moves the goal post slightly for a full transition to the new technologies.“Our leadership is very supportive, they understand that balance and don’t have the old school mentality around success or failure being attached solely to go-live dates.” says Giles, “No one is going to bring down the morale of a team who have dedicated the last six months to a project just because they need three extra days to add one last thing that is going to give us better stability.”“The whole attitude towards dates has shifted,” Giles continues, “We never set out to do this at record speed. We set out to do it to fast track customer benefits, to minimize disruption to our existing business, by removing the legacy technology in appropriately sized chunks.”<h1>Advice for Going MACH</h1>For companies ready to go MACH, Giles has some advice that he learned along the way.<h2>Find your own fit</h2>“It would be impossible for me to go to another brand and tell them the five microservice platforms they should go with. Although i would certainly browse the MACH community for a very authentic shortlist”. While it’s tempting to see companies that are pioneering composable architecture and simply copy their set up, Giles explains that doing this negates a major benefit of MACH tools - being able to granularly select the right tools for your specific business needs. As his friend once aptly described, “It’s like wearing your friend’s suit to a wedding. Technically you are wearing a suit, but it will also feel and look very uncomfortable compared to something tailored for you”<h2>A new approach to RFPs</h2>Previously having been a consultant himself, Giles knew that the traditional style of time consuming RFPs was neither going to bring out the best in the software vendors nor help him make a decision. Instead, there was a very lightweight RFP process to narrow the selection down to two candidates and then a hackathon to make the final decision.Giving your developers access to the technology dispels any of the myths around the sales presentations, and by seeing how different vendors tackle the same objective you can see which is a good match for your organization.<h2>Front-load the customer benefits</h2>When replacing one monolithic platform with a network of microservices, it can be difficult to know where to start. For Giles’ team, building a new search platform integration was the first priority because it was a less complex project that returned a high value in customer experience.“It was a no brainer, really.” says Giles, “If we get momentum by delivering customer value then people are going to trust us to continue the journey. It helps secure further investment, that there’s going to be confidence in our execution, and we get to front-load the benefits to show that this isn’t the old way of doing this where technology improvements meant waiting for two years before our customer and teams enjoy these new tools”<h2>Align timelines</h2>If he was to do it all again, Giles does say there are some changes he would make. “If doing a front-end and back-end re-platforming at the same time, this can get complex and perhaps a more simple approach would be to tackle one first then the other. But that said it really depends on the risk vs reward, and urgency on each agenda for the specific organization”Perhaps by organizing the front / back end programmes in sequence would have made it easier to allocate people, technology, and budget and help decouple the delicate art of aligning outcomes and timelines. Running complex plans in parallel increases the risk of misaligned timelines, which can lead to short term frustration for teams having to carry out their work in both the old and new platforms, or dual-running on operating and licence costs.“It is less than ideal if you users have this new Ferrari for some of their work activities yet still have to also drive this terrible car from ten years ago.” explains Giles, “Working in hybrid between the old and new platforms would be fine for a short defined period as a teaser, but if it goes on for a prolonged timeline it’s quite disruptive to people's’ role as well as quite frustrating when you’ve now seen what great looks like.”<h1>Want to Learn More About Composable Commerce?</h1>If you're curious to learn more about a MACH architecture for modern commerce, check out the recent <a href="https://machalliance.org/blogdetail/blt0ea6529a12a75b5b">MACH Tech Webinar - Composable Architecture and Repeatable Patterns</a>.

The Journey to Composable Commerce

MACH Alliance speaks for an entire industry. Though we have a small full-time staff, we rely primarily on volunteers to advance the cause of MACH.Like any organization, the MACH Alliance needs guidance on how to best advance the mission and where to spend scarce resources. At the founding of the MACH Alliance in 2020, an executive advisory board was called out in the articles of incorporation explicitly to provide outside oversight of and guidance to the MACH Alliance. The executive advisory board is composed of selected member company CEOs and other luminaries from across the industry.Today we’re announcing the 2023 board.Each chairperson gets to curate the advisory board, with sign-off from the nine person management board.“The executive advisory board provides invaluable guidance to the entire MACH Alliance. From questions about membership criteria, to borderline applications to join the MACH Alliance, to governance, to budgeting - the executive advisory board provides comprehensive outside guidance that the board is invaluable.”Kelly Goetsch, Chairman, MACH Alliance"As a 4th generation retailer who has been lucky enough to have a front-row seat to the digital disruption of commerce, 2023 stands out as an uncertain year for retail, with a short-term focus on profitability, brands can use this as an opportunity to get ahead of the curve and begin planning for digital transformation and sustainability. MACH is seeing solid momentum, and the MACH Alliance plays a significant role in educating and guiding them as they invest more in composable technology and optimizations."Jason Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis<h2></h2><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/bltcdb68189bb16bde8/63f3a3e826228c60cd4f75b7/Advisory-board_2023.jpg"/>

Staying Focused: Why We’re Expanding the MACH Alliance Advisory Board

The MACH Alliance has laid the groundwork for a new era of composable digital ecosystems. Phase II is set to advance this by establishing interoperability standards, ensuring ease of integration across technologies.&nbsp;Following the <a href="https://machalliance.org/content-hub/phase-ii-of-the-mach-alliance-interoperability-standards">foundational post</a> which included our first <a href="https://register.machalliance.org/hubfs/How%20to%20evaluate%20and%20integrate%20composable%20solutions.pdf">whitepaper</a> on evaluating and integrating composable solutions, we are excited to introduce the next wave of resources designed to streamline your journey towards a composable ecosystem.&nbsp;Our latest release includes comprehensive materials that guides you through the new MACH Reference Architecture and its role in fostering seamless interoperability, our reference whitepaper for understanding key Concepts and Patterns in Composable Architecture, and finally a code-first MACH diagram generator.Head to our <a href="https://machalliance.org/interoperability">Interoperability Hub</a> for an overview of all available interoperability assets.For a deeper dive into the technical specifics and architectural principles underpinning these standards, the MACH Alliance's <a href="https://github.com/machalliance/standards/blob/main/reference/architecture-explained.md">reference architecture</a> document on GitHub offers a comprehensive explanation. This resource outlines the foundational elements of a MACH architecture, providing a blueprint for developers and enterprises aiming to leverage the full potential of a composable, microservices-based approach.MACH Phase II HighlightsOur goal is speed of transition via standardization. By simplifying integration and enhancing compatibility, organizations can focus more on innovation and less on managing technological silos.The assets and interoperability guidelines are designed to assist developers and architects in the practical application of implementing composable ecosystems using MACH principles, ensuring real-world viability and efficiency.&nbsp;Detailed reference models are in the works to ease implementation of MACH components, reducing integration complexity and promoting a more unified data ecosystem.Get in touch with the interoperability task force to join the next wave of composability.<h3>Author:</h3><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/bltdadcd56f384beb43/65cf35e4e52e75295a43d63f/Chris_Bach_(1).png"/>

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Building on MACH’s Interoperability Foundations

As digital commerce growth accelerates, how can retailers use MACH principles to stay ahead of the curve?The pandemic’s catalytic impact on consumer trends propelled retail digital transformation strategies <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-covid-19-has-pushed-companies-over-the-technology-tipping-point-and-transformed-business-forever">forward by seven years</a> last year.In fact, as consumers embraced digital, worldwide retail e-commerce sales <a href="https://www.emarketer.com/content/global-ecommerce-update-2021">grew 28%</a> during the year, while total retail sales declined by 3%.Even so, social distancing in-store saw <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/us-mobile-wallets-report?r=US&IR=T">the US</a> go from being a mobile payments laggard to the second-largest market, with $465-billion worth of contactless transactions processed.Many retailers struggled to fulfil online demand, while managing the cost of either not being able to open their stores or equipping them and their staff with the extra systems and processes required to operate safely. Now they are preparing for the next phase of change.<h4>Maximizing strategic agility</h4>If one thing’s certain, digital enablement and engagement are now vital in retail. Indeed, consumers spent a record-breaking <a href="https://www.appannie.com/en/insights/market-data/consumers-spent-32-billion-on-apps-in-q1-2021-the-biggest-quarter-since-records-began/">$32 billion on mobile in-app purchases</a> during the first quarter of 2021, which was also up 40% on the same period last year.Those retailers who had already integrated digital into their offering are the ones winning with consumers now. So, embedding digital commerce capabilities into every facet of the shopping experience will be essential to maximize and maintain strategic levels of agility.To do so, retailers are taking the lead in efforts to decouple rapidly evolving customer-facing capabilities from core management systems of record for greater flexibility and resilience. They are adopting a mobile first, MACH-led approach to digital transformation.<h4>Future-proof tech investment</h4>Applying Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS and Headless (MACH) principles to technology investment and development is enabling retailers to deploy mobile-first features and services that can act as a digital bridge between online and the store.Sending timely notifications about deliveries, item availability or even queues in-store, for example, requires tight integration between store, ecommerce and supply chain systems. But surfacing this via mobile can also provide a digital flagship experience anywhere.This experience can be enriched by exploiting the native capabilities of mobile devices in-store with features to enhance navigation and inspiration, and prioritize convenience and relevance through digital store customer marketing and engagement.<h4>Optimizing digital convergence</h4>To rightsize technology deployment in support of business strategies that puts digitally enabled and data-driven customer experiences at the heart of truly 21st century shopping journeys, retailers will need to assemble the most innovative, best-of-breed capabilities.Ensuring these capabilities are mobile-first and MACH-ready will provide retailers with the best COVID exit strategy to mitigate risk, build greater resilience and manage strong recovery in the face of ongoing digital disruption and global uncertainty.Author: Helen Slaven, Chief revenue officer, Poq

Covid Exit Strategies in the New Normal

Discover the latest insights into IT innovation with the release of our fourth annual global survey. Our report dives deep into the evolving landscape of IT infrastructure, highlighting the growing importance of MACH technologies. Join us as we explore the key trends, insights, and implications shaping the digital landscape in 2023 and beyond.

We spoke to a range of Technology Decision Makers (CIO/CTOs, VP/SVP, Senior Managers) across the UK, Germany, France, US and Australia.All organizations had at least 5,000 employees and had a revenue of at least $500m annually.MACH Alliance aims to support companies to take advantage of the most innovative and flexible enterprise technologies available and to break the release cycle. This is the third iteration of the report, which aims to understand the current situation and to:• Measure and monitor readiness to transition to best-of breed• Identify drivers behind decision making• Identify barriers to MACH architecture uptake• Understand experiences from companies in transition• Identify key stakeholders in the decision making process

Methodology 

Annual Research 2023

Download the full report now

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MACH Global Research 2023

<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/blt28b40d75aceeafe3/61310c778faa7a6bbfbfee20/Blog-banner-1440x1024-santa_monica-nocopy.jpg"/>Business is booming for Santa Monica Seafood, a top seafood distributor in Southern California. But the company doesn’t look the same today as it did at the start of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic made waves among the local restaurants, caterers and retail grocers Santa Monica Seafood had loyally served for decades.Declining revenue was not unique to Santa Monica Seafood. Last year, revenues for the fishing and seafood industries declined as much as 19% to 45% and sales at restaurants, fast food locations — crucial customers for seafood distributors — fell as much as 27%.In response to this decline, the team at Santa Monica Seafood took a deep breath and a closer look at its burgeoning e-commerce presence. Where corporate wholesale connections were slowing down or pausing indefinitely, was it possible that consumers would be interested in bringing the bounty of the sea home to cook themselves?As it turns out, DTC was a blue ocean for Santa Monica Seafood, and customers quickly took notice of its new e-commerce offerings.Over a period of months, the company adopted the BigCommerce platform and implemented a headless CMS that offered customers access to hundreds of seafood products. The headless configuration provided just the right combination of robust functionality, capacity for scale and no-code front end to help Santa Monica Seafood spin up a profitable direct-to-consumer business and address its three biggest priorities through the pivot:<ul><li>Selecting and uploading the product mix onto the e-commerce store.</li><li>Responding to customer feedback for product selection, packaging and fulfilment options.</li><li>Deploying a headless CMS to seamlessly combine content and commerce.</li></ul><h2>Selecting and Uploading the Right Product Mix</h2>Expanding e-commerce operations required Santa Monica Seafood to assess its existing product mix and identify the best opportunities to connect with the DTC audience. Easier said than done, as the company brought some nuance into the situation: Many of the products would still be active for corporate wholesale operations, requiring multiple sets of SKUs for each product.“Before leaning into this new audience, we were balancing many buyers and many suppliers,” said Alfredo Chavez, Ecommerce Director at Santa Monica Seafood. “The BigCommerce platform enables us to work with these separate SKU sets, which number in the thousands,while maintaining a clear database of what’s in stock, what’s heading out the door and what’s on its way.”Once the products were loaded onto the website, the marketing team at Santa Monica Seafood quickly realized the value of a no-code front end, which allowed it to create, edit and experiment with products and offers without pulling the IT team away from critical back-end work.Khai Vuong, IT Director at Santa Monica Seafood, found Page Builder functionality to be crucial for enabling the marketing team to customize the customer experience and brand presentation.They could create and maintain content throughout the pandemic while allowing the IT team to focus on the approaching migration to a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform.For example, on the marketing side, Chavez has found it so simple to create product pages that he’s been able to take the lead in experimenting with potential product offerings. Most recently, he put up a site page with a smoked sturgeon offering and was amazed to see the interest in the form of customer clicks. Alternatively, he listed caviar and found there was not a lot of interest.“Before, we would buy a new product and see if we could sell it, which introduced a lot of risk to those decisions because I’d have been stuck with selling that caviar at cost,” Chavez said. “Now I can test items to see if they get attention and make a purchasing decision based on real data, avoiding expensive experiments.”<h2>Responding to Customer Feedback and Applying Insights</h2>While Santa Monica Seafood saw potential in growing its small, existing e-commerce footprint, the team wasn’t exactly sure what form that growth would take because there was a lot to learn about the audience. Their headless system allowed for the most flexibility and creativity in responding to the customer base along the way.“In the seafood space, we’re all fishing from the same ocean,” Chavez explained. “Our differentiation as a brand has to come from how we get the product to our customers — the safety and quality of the product, the experience of shopping online, the frequency and personalization of our follow-up. We needed a tech stack that made it easy to coordinate these efforts to reach our customers and put e-commerce best practices to work for our brand.”Best practices around fulfilment and delivery also became clear the more customers Santa Monica Seafood served. The brand worked hard to coordinate orders among the three options it offered three audiences:<ul><li>Overnight shipping via FedEx for DTC customers.</li><li>In-store and curbside pickup for local DTC consumers.</li><li>Local shipping and delivery for corporate wholesale customers.</li></ul>Ultimately, Santa Monica needed an e-commerce platform that could integrate with their ERP of choice to enable the company to deliver on the back-end warehouse management required to fill such complex orders at scale, all while providing a best-in-class customer experience that automatically provides tracking updates to the end customer along the way.“Our business relies on being able to process thousands of orders on the fly, with different cuts for different customers,” Vuong said. “We’ve been doing that for many years in our retail stores, but the strength of this platform, the flexibility and variety of features that are either built-in or available via third-party plug-ins, is what will allow us to bring what we do to a bigger, perhaps even international, audience.”<h5>Deploying a Headless CMS to Seamlessly Combine Content and Commerce</h5>In an attempt to meet the needs of a new market, Santa Monica Seafood found itself with a need to educate a new audience. That is, DTC consumers didn’t have the deep expertise in raw seafood that corporate wholesale customers did. Santa Monica Seafood saw the opportunity to educate customers about frozen and raw seafood from safe delivery to confident preparation to creative cooking.“We found that a lot of our customers were afraid to try to cook seafood at home, which makes sense as it is a popular restaurant item,” Chavez said. “It takes a little practice to get it right. So naturally, creating and maintaining recipes and instructions for our products has been very important in driving engagement and giving customers ideas for what to do with our products, which ultimately increased purchases.”Santa Monica Seafood was also able to add omnichannel sales opportunities through Instagram, Facebook and other social media platforms, while maintaining complete creative control over the analytics and messaging of those platforms.“When we first started running search engine ads, we would see good traffic but very low conversions,” Chavez explained. “Based on that data, I was able to add a first-purchase coupon, experiment with the wording of the ads and the landing page and tweak things until I saw the conversion rate go up and send more customers to our integrated email marketing newsletter — it was all easy to do.”<h2>Embarking on an Expedition in Ecommerce</h2>Without a push from the COVID-19 pandemic, would Santa Monica Seafood be connecting with consumers from coast to coast? Perhaps eventually, but not for years to come.In that way, the pivot to e-commerce and the decision to go headless have laid the foundation for incredible growth — growth that builds off the company’s rich history as a B2B seafood distributor to reach into the expansive ocean of DTC.Like any business facing the uncertainty of the market and challenges to come, building the capability to pivot and adapt to the opportunities in front of them is the most important outcome of all. Equipped with a deeper understanding of its consumer base and a robust, flexible, platform with a no-code front end to build from, the sea is the limit.Author: Big Commerce

Santa Monica Seafood Leverages Headless for DTC Success

How do you future-proof your business? It’s all well and good investing considerable sums upfront to install a shiny, all-singing, all-dancing (for now) monolithic platform. But, like the jack of all trades, these single vendor solutions tend to be the master of none. Is there a better, more efficient, more customizable approach that can be incrementally improved as demand changes?Take the restaurant industry as an example. To start out you need a good location; you need to hire a chef who can cook; you need waiting staff to serve customers; you need a menu that reflects local tastes; you need trusted suppliers. However, none of these factors are set in stone. In fact, they are interdependent components that must continually evolve to be successful.To future-proof your restaurant, you need to start with the basics above. But you also need to hire a chef who can keep up with culinary trends and can adapt the menu. You need to foster great relations with suppliers who can source seasonal produce when it is at its best, or alternatives when what you have ordered is unavailable. You need good recruitment for waiting staff in an industry where talent can be transient, and where you will need to scale to meet peaks in demand without compromising service, whether it’s Christmas or a wet Tuesday in March. This is what you might call composable commerce: interlinked competencies that can be constantly improved.As <a href="https://www.forrester.com/report/The+New+Commerce+Revolution+Off+With+Their+Heads+Or+Not/-/E-RES157055">Forrester research</a> (available to subscribers) puts it, “future-proof e-commerce allows you to evolve your customer experience and adopt any new touchpoint without being dependent on your e-commerce vendor to enable that touchpoint. With only incremental effort, you can add or replace new experiences and commerce APIs.”Composable eCommerce developmentWhen it comes to eCommerce development, the same thinking applies. When you’re setting up a digital commerce business, the first things that will come to mind will include an operational online sales platform (your location) with integrated CRM (chef and waiting staff). But what about making sure that this can also work across multiple markets and channels? And how are you going to adapt and scale as the business grows? Just as the chef will want to adapt the menu, or the manager will want to diversify the offering to cater for new markets such as home delivery, so too does an eCommerce business need to be able to add new functionality and features as and when required over time.eCommerce architecture decisionsWe recently published a white paper exploring how companies and decision-makers decide when selecting, implementing and expanding eCommerce systems. It shows there is a clear immediate need to get a functional eCommerce solution up and running as soon as possible, but that there is also a need to <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3986490">future-proof your eCommerce solution</a> so it can flexibly adapt to new requirements.When deciding on deploying a new eCommerce platform, there is rarely a single pain point or trigger that urges decision-makers to switch systems. Likewise, there are multiple criteria that come into play, including trust, developer availability, modularization, ease of integration, and marketplace capability, among others. Much as the restaurant owner must manage numerous different considerations, so too successful eCommerce operations must take into account all the spinning plates and ensure there is a clear pathway for ongoing evolution and improvement.Future-proofing your eCommerce platformOur research* identified the most important and relevant elements that will future-proof your eCommerce systems. Four key factors stood out from our interviews with C-level executives: Performance, User Experience, Modularization and Scalability. These closely relate to the best-of-breed trend in creating flexible and modular systems that can easily be scaled according to changing business requirements and growth.What becomes clear is that composability is the key to ensuring an eCommerce platform will remain fit for purpose. The composable software ecosystem is an environment where components can be continuously improved without impacting users, which scales seamlessly and can be painlessly reconfigured.This composable commerce enables a plug and play, personalized approach to eCommerce. By adopting and ‘composing’ tools for specific tasks dedicated to one particular function, companies can enjoy a best of breed solution made up from components from multiple vendors. These components can then be upgraded, swapped out and improved without any hassle.This means that companies are not tied to one monolithic, inflexible, single-vendor legacy system that demands huge maintenance overheads and where change takes time and money. Instead, they can take advantage of an agile, versatile and feature-rich solution that adapts to their needs.That paves the way for a future where you can plug in practically limitless microservices, connected via APIs, to provide new features as the market changes.Just as the best restaurants can handle peak demand even with fresh menus and new staff, you can scale up and down, add exciting new features, and upgrade existing components at the click of a button. That way you can be sure that your composable eCommerce platform is truly future-proof.To find out more about how a composable commerce approach can help to future-proof your business, you can download our whitepaper “<a href="https://www.emporix.com/emporix-whitepaper-from-monolith-to-composable-commerce-0">From Monolith to Composable Commerce</a>”.*The research was conducted by smart impact GmbH in late 2021 and comprised of 20 1-hour interviews with recruited decision-makers that came from B2B and B2C businesses — manufacturer, wholesaler and retailer. Positions of the participants ranged from CMO- to S(VP)/Director-level and the participants were based in Germany, Nordics, UK and BeNeLux.Author: Katarzyna Banasik

How to future-proof your eCommerce

Taken from <a href="https://machalliance.org/content-hub/the-benefits-of-integrating-generative-ai-within-the-mach-ecosystem">original article</a> by <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlbcopy/">Carl Bleich</a>, Head of Content, BloomreachGenerative AI, technology that generates original content, algorithms, tools, strategy, and more from automatic data analysis, lends itself perfectly to MACH Architecture. The agility that a MACH ecosystem brings with it is a natural benefit for businesses and tech leaders looking to leverage Generative AI.Artificial intelligence tools are, by their nature, designed to make the most intelligent decisions for your needs quickly and efficiently, eliminating human intervention and error. When utilized across a cohesive system of MACH partners, it can operate perfectly throughout the architecture in a number of integrated ways, ultimately driving your business forward with bespoke, optimized solutions.All well and good in broad terms, but let’s take a look at just some of the ways that Generative AI and MACH Architecture go hand in hand to help increase efficiency, reduce risk, and drive revenue.<h2>1) Modular design for agile improvement</h2>Unlike traditional monolithic architectures where you get what you’re given and are stuck with it, MACH Architecture shows that variety is the spice of life. This is highlighted perfectly when incorporated with Generative AI.MACH enables businesses to easily integrate Generative AI in a way that suits them best, down to the most granular level. Losing money because of poor stock management? No problem, generate tools to automatically forecast, order, and optimize inventory levels. Not retaining as many customers? Generative AI platforms can increase CX in customer support by developing individual profiles based on previous behavior. Each business is different and it’s your choice where and how to focus your efforts.<h2>2) Scalability and resilience</h2>A MACH ecosystem, with its many inputs and outputs of data spread around a business, is much more able to handle large traffic spikes and maintain high levels of availability. For businesses looking to leverage tools such as Generative AI proactively as opposed to reactively – which should be all of them – this is essential.When looking to grow your business, either a specific arm or as a whole, composable Architecture makes expanding with other platforms so much easier.<h2>3) A futureproof combination</h2>Businesses that don’t embrace Generative AI risk being left behind to play catch-up to more future-focused competitors. By leveraging these technologies with MACH Architecture, you unlock unparalleled opportunities for growth and innovation – all in a way that suits you best.By identifying trends and patterns across each node of your MACH ecosystem, Generative AI gives valuable insights into market conditions and customer needs. This gives you the perfect platform to make the right decision for your business to scale, develop, and grow – safe in the knowledge that you’re prepared for whatever the future brings.<h2>4) A personalized customer experience across all touchpoints</h2>Especially within e-commerce, it’s easy to leverage Generative AI on top of MACH Architecture to analyze customer data from all touchpoints. From initial browsing to customer support and feedback, the data each individual customer provides is as important as it is vast.Generative AI can work with every node of your MACH ecosystem in order to generate personalized recommendations, suggestions, and other offerings tailored to each individual customer.Customers are people, and people who feel listened to are more engaged. These bespoke customer journeys are now tailored to them across multiple touchpoints, leading to greater CX and an increased likelihood of conversion and retention.<h2>Conclusion: Getting the most out of Generative AI</h2>We’ve only touched on some of the many ways that MACH Architecture is the perfect platform with which to use Generative AI. With bespoke, AI driven solutions across a business’s MACH ecosystem and many customer touchpoints, your data goes much further with composable architecture.

4 ways MACH can help you take advantage of generative AI

By Brian Browning, VP Technology, Kin + Carta, MACH Alliance member, Technology CouncilCompared to monolithic legacy systems, it can be easy to assume that composable technology is an automatic success, enjoying waves of error free experimentation and perfect implementations.But the truth is that, in the 23 years since Gartner first proclaimed that the future of business is composable1, there have been MACH failures.As a community built upon relentless innovation, transparency, and open-minded learning, we must assess these disappointments and find the lessons, to drive the next wave of successful MACH evolution.The strategic contextOne of the most common causes of a ‘failed’ project is the lack of a clear business strategy.Organizations still forgo defining a deliberate, intelligent start for their project. They are seduced by the possibilities of technology, instead of imposing their own vision and measurable definition of success.Composable engagements are often started - and driven - by technology leaders, rather than a focus on the holistic business outcome. The root of this is two separate audiences at two separate stages in the lifecycle of the project.Organizations begin with a technology purchase in mind and as a result, only involve technical audiences to define the buying approach.However, it is not until later that business users judge if that investment has been a success.The two audiences apply different criteria at contrasting times. In this context, failure is all but inevitable.Fixing this is a simple case of establishing a comprehensive strategy at the earliest point in the investment cycle. This strategy must be customer-centric:<ul><li>What is it that the business wants customers to do, or become?</li><li>What is the best journey to take them there?</li><li>What (MACH) tools will best achieve these objectives?</li></ul>With answers to these questions, the choices of what technology to buy, and how to implement it, becomes a clear roadmap.Consider the experience of looking through a humble product catalogue. The traditional format and structure of these properties demands that users move through them methodically (and slowly). Passively looking at product details, wondering if it is ‘the right one’ is less than ideal. It is often this sort of problem that leads businesses to assess headless tools to improve the experience and increase conversions.To solve this specific issue, the business could consider how its customer base may actually want to interact with the catalogue such as filtered search capabilities or a catalogue wizard. Using MACH-powered tools like headless search, the commerce experience is dramatically improved, and customers convert.MACH enables this functionality to be developed and added incrementally, continually feeding new data back to the business. This then feeds the strategy that defines future investment.Within the company, planning for the transition to MACH technologies is also often overlooked. Getting the buy-in of all stakeholders is critical if a move to composable is to be effective.The operational contextAnother overlooked area in considering MACH or composable ‘failures,’ is the experience of content creators and admins. This audience is typically the first wave of non-technical users. As such they are usually the group to first raise concerns and complaints – and function as a valuable ‘early warning system.’Content authors and admins are the real guinea pigs when it comes to experiencing the changes that an updated content or commerce platform demands. Businesses should focus intensively on addressing this first feedback.This audience has specific demands. Innovative technology investments should replicate the intuitive experience these content creators are used to. The legacy of prior content management systems or even DXPs can be strong, and authors want visual, rich experiences.It is an issue of managing the demands of different audiences: developers love the elegance of web forms, whereas authors see a list of tables to fill in.It is important to manage these expectations early. By establishing and reviewing the changes that a new platform will bring about, a business can not only assess how its demands have changed over time, but also eliminate friction. The opportunity to embrace the needs of reluctant users, can transform them into the organization’s biggest MACH advocates.This approach also opens up thinking to assess ‘what if?’ questions to make innovative operational improvements to address scale. Repeatedly, businesses learn the hard way that what works for 40 or 400 records, falls apart at 40,000.Content modelling is a notable example. In traditional content management and older DXP systems, content modelling is usually hidden, but in moving to headless, it becomes far more exposed. Consequently, it is vital to develop a highly performant content model, or a business will hit roadblocks later in the process.Getting back on the horse; rectificationHaving looked at what might cause project failures, the last consideration is to address how a business can get a failing project back on track.The first step in rectification is exactly the same as the strategy outlined above: assess where the project currently is and measure it against the objective. The business needs to define where the project is now and where it should be.There is a need to consider how far along the original plan the project has come and what are the biggest issues that have been encountered.This provides the backdrop to reset both the strategy and expectation of all involved parties. It is also a terrific opportunity to integrate the renewed priorities of these groups and re-establish what the project will deliver.For most MACH projects, it will be a case of a business ‘aiming small and missing small.’ Rectification of specific modules or components of a project can be done quickly, and businesses can reassert control and direction rapidly and with confidence.A MACH mindset embraces ‘failures’ as learning opportunities across the strategic, and operational aspects of a business, opening avenues for accelerated evolution.There are of course large ‘sub-problems’ but if the three key avenues of strategic planning, operational implementation and preparation for rectification are tackled at the most senior leadership level, the project will be easier to manage and more likely to succeed.Regardless of anticipating issues or fixing them, getting a MACH project ‘back on track’ offers just as many opportunities for improvement as the first planning meeting, bringing organizations into a digital future.1&nbsp;<a href="https://www.gartner.co.uk/en/articles/gartner-keynote-the-future-of-business-is-composable">The Future of Business Is Composable | Gartner Keynote</a>

Preventing MACH Project Failures: Lessons Learned from the Real World

<h3>Views and Facts</h3>We have reached a tipping point. Companies need to transform the way they do business. In many cases companies must transform their businesses completely in order to become more responsive, agile and to stay competitive. Luckily, a shift in approach from enterprise suites to MACH – microservices, API, Cloud and headless – technologies, is helping to unlock business transformation, at speed.It will be no surprise that in the face of massive disruption, brands are looking for new ways to engage with and mobilise their customer base. We are no longer in a world where companies can have a single online presence and expect to meet the demands of their customers, partners or suppliers. Instead, they need to deliver multifaceted, personalised and connected experiences across various physical and digital touchpoints; experiences that engage, move and convert. Furthermore they need to offer a customer experience that surpasses that of their competition and to capitalise on the ancillary ‘added-extra’ services that will help them to secure recurring revenue streams, across multiple channels.Take manufacturing as an industry example; these were firms that were fine-tuned for the 20th century economy which rewarded the efficiencies of scale and the globalisation of the supply-chain. Their market position now depends on their ability to transform their business at speed. They are racing to become more agile, responsive and adapted to continuous changes and market competition. They will need to embrace new digital capabilities and harness tools that will enable them to deliver better customer experiences and improve business operations. From empowering sales reps with the insights and capabilities to better respond customer needs, to the development of a more versatile supply chain that’s more in line with how customers are consuming services and products.When we apply a MACH approach to those challenges; the introduction of microservices means faster deployment times and a removal of legacy technology dependencies. Cloud hosting means the ability to scale at pace, adding new sites, systems and functionality without slowing everything else down in the process. By decoupling the front and back-end technologies brands can enable their teams to respond faster to changing market conditions and to deliver a UX that maximises conversion. It’s this ability to make connections between traditionally siloed streams of the business like CRM, Data and Commerce, that gives brands the power to see what’s really going on in their business and be much more intuitive in their response. In times of disruption or rapidly changing market conditions, you need tools and technologies that will enable you to make better business decisions faster, to continuously innovate and to incorporate continuous feedback to drive better outcomes.Companies need to rethink their organisations if they want to become more agile, reactive and innovative. They also need to rethink their digital platforms to make them more responsive, frictionless and to be able to direct content to any touchpoint at any time. Finally, these platforms must continuously evolve to support always-on consumers and to provide the necessary scalability to cope with fast-growing demand. Success requires a new generation of solutions that have this adaptability at their core. They must be easily configurable, present everywhere and infinitely scalable with perfect performance, even in the face of unknown demand.To achieve success with MACH technologies, brands really need to work with a strategic partner to support them in the design and implementation of these kinds of solutions. As a leader in this field, we’re really excited to be part of the MACH Alliance, to develop and share knowledge and best practices, and to help customers take the right approach to selecting and building these modern platforms.For brands to unlock their transformation potential, to be able to scale and respond to disruption—whether that’s a shifting customer trend or a global pandemic—they must challenge the status quo, apply modern approaches and Transform by Doing.Image credits:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.cerillion.com/Products/SaaS/Cerillion-Skyline">www.cerillion.com/Products/SaaS/Cerillion-Skyline</a>Author: Auke van Urk

MACH: Business Transformation - unlocked

Software upgrades are a pain. For many companies, the perceived value of the latest version isn’t high enough to justify the time and effort to make the switch. “Many organizations on on-premise vendors are years behind in versions.” explains Sonja Kotrotsos, Global Head of Product Marketing at Contentstack and VP of the MACH Alliance, “That means they’re years behind of the full potential of what they could reach in their use cases of digital experience.”In our latest webinar, our panel of SaaS experts discussed why companies are turning to Cloud-native technologies to escape the software upgrade treadmill and the bottleneck that comes with it.Check out the replay for the full conversation, or keep scrolling for a quick recap on why SaaS is now in the spotlight, what it adds to enterprise strategy, and how to identify <a href="https://machalliance.com/blogdetail/blta18ca4780c002c1d">truly Cloud-native software</a> in an increasing “Cloudwashed” market.<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/473036403?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0"></iframe><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/bltd1b7610c86fb1f70/5f9997fc878c0d548cdc1de9/SaaS_Webinar_recap_pics.jpg"/>Simply put, SaaS has done a lot of growing up this decade.“I would have been on the other side back then.” says Mehdi Fassaie, CTO and Founder of Fluent Commerce. For a CTO or CIO your main objective is to provide reliability to the organization, and early SaaS options did not yet have the credentials to be enterprise-ready. “What’s happened since then is not only the SaaS applications, but SaaS and Cloud platforms, have significantly matured to a point that you can depend on the reliability, security, data protection, and all the important things from an enterprise perspective.”As the market matures, more companies are choosing SaaS strategically and<a href="https://www.techrepublic.com/article/top-cloud-trends-for-2021-forrester-predicts-spike-in-cloud-native-tech-public-cloud-and-more/">Forrester predicts a spike in Cloud-native technologies in 2021</a>. “SaaS has become an easy decision,” says Fassaie, “but it has been an evolution over the last 10 years.”<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/blt440fbab4160b9ffa/5f99988b67a7c35492602c27/SaaS_Webinar_recap_pics_(1).jpg"/>The<a href="https://machalliance.com/blogdetail/blta18ca4780c002c1d">definition of SaaS</a> can be murky, and if you go by the “Microsoft Office model” where you pay a subscription fee for a static tool then SaaS can feel like nothing more than a change in pricing structure.“We mean something different when we talk about SaaS.” explains Markus Tillmann, Executive Vice President of Mindcurv, “When we talk about Cloud-native SaaS we are talking about enterprise grade applications that can cater to and carry businesses processes and in the end help generate revenue. We’re not talking about delivery of a software package in a different format.”<a href="https://machalliance.com/blogdetail/blt288174aba006ceb2">Modern SaaS tools are more than a subscription model</a>, they simplify delivery to give companies access to a scaling supply of resources and ensures continuous delivery of the latest features and innovations of the vendor.<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/blta01cc1abe31ec918/5f99985f1a81c1644e99675f/SaaS_Webinar_recap_pics_(2).jpg"/>“If a business comes to me and says they have a very specific need, my response is always ‘Yes, you do.’” says Steve Davis, CTO of Four51. He believes a <a href="https://machalliance.com/blogdetail/blt0ea6529a12a75b5b">composable SaaS architecture</a>is the best choice for many of his commerce customers. “We are trying to sell you a client-owned system. We want you to be able to own this and run it and adapt it to what your business does. Rather than tell you to adapt your business processes to the software.”The adaptability of these systems can be attributed to the<a href="https://machalliance.com/blogdetail/blt58fdb0ad9abc4123">rise of MACH</a> principles (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless) in software design which bring more flexibility to the enterprise tech stack. “It’s a composable system,” explains Davis, “which creates opportunities for you to plug and play solutions looking at what meets your needs today and also what meets the needs of a migration. So you don’t have to take your entire stack and move it all at once in one long project.”<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/blt540630631b2db2d5/5f99991a45fa7d72ddd1e652/SaaS_Webinar_recap_pics_(5).jpg"/>Our panelists agreed that the best way to uncover the cloud-credentials of a solution is to ask open-ended questions. As you get into discussion around versioning, scaling, and availability you’ll quickly start to see patterns around cloud maturity.“What we’ve seen work well is simply asking to have a look at the documentation of the APIs that vendors claim to have. ” says Tillmann, “You’ll see some people raising their eyebrows because their documentation is spread all over the place. They say they are API-first but in fact have very few APIs that they offer as API-first.”A highly recommended approach is to use an advanced use case as a proof of concept. This allows you to evaluate how the software supports your actual business processes and helps you see under the hood of the solution.<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/bltb1c3e5d0bfaac8f1/5f999936209f0756c89d46e3/SaaS_Webinar_recap_pics_(3).jpg"/>It’s cool to be Cloud. It’s also pretty much expected from today’s enterprise customer, which is why there has been a massive amount of “Cloudwashing” in the software industry. Vendors will take legacy solutions, stick it in the cloud, and sell it as a “in the cloud” solution that offers none of the benefits of Cloud-native tools.“What they’ve effectively done is taken a more traditional approach to software, probably a more on-premise software, and they’ve taken it and put it in the cloud.” explains Davis,”Effectively what they’re providing is a managed service where they've taken your traditional sysadmins, running all the hardware pieces, and have made that into a service. It is in the cloud, but it’s still traditional, on-premise software that you’re getting.”It’s not only the modern approach to deployment that these “Cloudwashed” solutions miss, but the modern approach to feature access. “Some of these ‘in the cloud’ vendors still charge premiums for their software upgrades.” explains Kotrotsos, “I’ve seen companies who have invested for five or six years, paying a subscription and continuously investing in that vendor, and are then asked to pay a premium for the new functionality that was built with that investment. That just seems wrong in 2020.”<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/bltbc25a0ebc9afe289/5f999942f9cf41781dad43d3/SaaS_Webinar_recap_pics_(4).jpg"/>Moving away from a legacy technology, that has built up years worth of dependencies across the business, is going to take effort. Ideally, once a company has put in that effort to move from on-premise to cloud it should be smooth sailing from there.However, as more traditional software vendors offer “in the cloud” models, enterprises are often faced with an extra migration. First, they go from the on-premise version to the managed service version, or “old SaaS”, and then another full migration when (or if) the vendor releases a truly API-first model, or “new SaaS”. Too many enterprise companies get stuck with a rising TCO as they wait for their legacy vendors to catch up to modern ambitions.Luckily, the modularity of new SaaS gives these companies a way to unlock themselves from legacy solutions one step at a time. “What Cloud-native does offer you is that chance to pick apart the pieces that you need to bring forward.” says Davis, “Maybe business strategy requires for some capabilities that don’t need to migrate the entire product all at once. You can take an intelligent approach to it.”To hear the full conversation about the enterprise SaaS evolution, check out the webinar <a href="https://vimeo.com/473036403">replay</a>where our guests share insights on identifying, evaluating, and adopting Cloud-native solutions.

The Case for Cloud-native SaaS

To further advance the mission of the MACH Alliance, we are proud to welcome our first six MACH Alliance Ambassadors. The ambassadors, primarily from companies implementing MACH technology, have graciously committed their time and energy to support the mission of the MACH Alliance by writing, speaking, and serving as subject matter experts on MACH. Ambassadors will also be advising the various committees of the MACH Alliance and its member organizations on how to best support MACH as a technology standard and vision.The MACH Alliance ambassador program was first announced two weeks ago and we have seen an overwhelming positive response from our community. Enterprises who have successfully modernized their architectures are excited to have a space to share what they learned along the way, and companies early in their journey are eager to tap into that valuable insight.The initial 20 seats of the MACH Alliance ambassador program are being carefully selected to provide a wide range of experience across industries and backgrounds. We’re excited to kick-off the program with six exemplary ambassadors - passionate people who believe in MACH and have experience and stature in the technology and business communities.The MACH Alliance is proud to partner with these innovative professionals to advocate for modern, composable technology as the best solution for liberating businesses across the globe. We are very pleased to introduce our community to our first six ambassadors:<h2>Adam Sturrock</h2>Adam co-founded Moltin in 2013, one of the first truly headless eCommerce platforms in the market. Moltin graduated from Ignite100, the accelerator program, in late 2013 and Y Combinator's Winter 2015 batch, going on to raise over $10 million in funding and attracting tens of thousands of developers to the platform. Moltin was acquired in late 2019 and Adam has since become a consultant for SaaS vendors and a solution architect for enterprise retailers and brands.<h2>Eric Halvorsen</h2>Eric Halvorsen is a Senior Digital Architect at Ulta Beauty, leading the architecture and design of new, cloud-native digital commerce experiences built on the principles of MACH. During his time at Ulta, he's played several roles, including ATG Solution Architect and Full-Stack Developer for Ulta.com. As Solution Architect, he defined and executed a multi-year technical roadmap for adopting headless architecture. Before working at Ulta, he was a Senior Software Engineer at Kohl's.<h2>Gireesh Sahukar</h2>Gireesh Sahukar is the Senior Director of Digital at Dawn Foods, and oversees Dawn’s Digital Innovation Hub, an office created to drive digital innovation and elevate the company’s service offerings to exceed customers’ needs. Gireesh has been helping companies adopt, grow and stabilize eCommerce, engage customers online and help them build business models that enable their future state.Before joining Dawn, Gireesh was Director of Digital Architecture and Delivery at Keurig Dr Pepper, where he led the direct-to-consumer eCommerce, data analytics, customer service, and brand marketing platforms used to run their omnichannel business.<h2>Matt Webb</h2>Matt is a technology lead with over 20 years of global experience at CTO level for large digital agencies, delivering projects in the field ranging from enterprise content management, eCommerce, data and microservices architectures, through to the Internet of things (IoT), Augmented/Virtual reality, and Artificial Intelligence. Matt has built, integrated and led tech teams all over the world. He also lectures in Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality and IoT at many training workshops and universities.<h2>Peter Burggraaff</h2>Peter Burggraaff is Partner &amp; Director at Boston Consulting Group, where he works with leading retailers and consumer brands around the world. Together with client tech teams and partners he designs and executes omnichannel digital transformations, including set-up of microservices architecture and product organization.Before joining BCG 12 years ago, Peter was CIO of a retailer in New Zealand and managing partner at a digital agency in the Netherlands.<h2>Anjali Subburaj</h2>Dr Anjali Subburaj is digital commerce chief architect for Mars, where she applies her extensive knowledge and expertise as an architect to lead the strategic technology initiatives in the domain of Digital Commerce, ERP, supply chain systems, and other relevant domains.As a technology leader who has delivered multi-million pound digital transformation projects, Anjali believes in opening up the channels of communication between IT and business, in order to foster a culture of change that supports agility.<h2>Stay in the loop</h2>To stay in the loop about the latest insights of these experts, and to be the first to hear about upcoming ambassadors announcements, you can <a href="https://share.hsforms.com/1vH2ljjp8TvS1cbURdpNKbw4t5u0?utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_wP102Tahc4sabCzSuPF5HEyzpNg_lOv15aNICDdLfFXumzq7U5ictDukPOS9ITOqaCrRW">subscribe to our newsletter</a> and follow us on <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/machalliance">LinkedIn</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/MACHAlliance">Twitter</a>.

MACH Alliance Welcomes First Six Ambassadors

In March, we <a href="https://machalliance.org/newsroom/mach-global-research-2023">released the results</a> of our third annual global IT decision maker research, which surveyed 500 tech leaders from Australia, France, Germany, UK and the US. We sought to understand how MACH investment has accelerated over the past 12 months and what impact that is having on organizations’ ability to thrive in a difficult economy.We’re publishing a four part blog series to dive further into each of the four key research areas within the report, which are:<ul><li>Challenges to upgrading infrastructure</li><li>Influences on transformation</li><li>MACH utilization</li><li>Evidence of MACH benefits</li></ul>Parts <a href="https://machalliance.org/insights/mach-global-research-2023-blog-series-pt-1-so-many-upgrades-so-little-time">one</a> and <a href="https://machalliance.org/insights/mach-global-research-2023-blog-series-pt-2-the-growing-urgency-for-tech-innovation">two</a> of the series have been published. Today, we’re looking at the next section: MACH utilization, including examining the growing adoption of MACH and what’s driving it.<h2></h2>Momentum at MACH speed<h2></h2>MACH is on the rise. Eighty-five percent of research respondents said they’ve increased the percentage of MACH in their infrastructure over the past 12 months. We also learned that organizations plan to increase MACH further within the (very) near term. More than 80% said they have plans to do so within the next six months.So we sought to know what’s driving both that growth in adoption and the urgency decision makers are feeling to embrace MACH. We weren’t especially surprised to find that the top answer was responding to changes in the market faster, followed by the need to build and implement new functionality quicker.We’ve known since our inception in 2020 that MACH enables businesses to pivot quickly. We really saw that come to life during the pandemic when businesses built with best-of-breed solutions were able to quickly deploy new features like click-and-collect when stores shut-down, for example, or they were able to launch a contactless check-out feature where there wasn’t one previously. For many, this made the difference between the companies that survived the pandemic and those that struggled or even shuttered. While the COVID era was a dark period of time, it was an opportunity for MACH to take center stage, and it really shined.In a similar vein, four in five research respondents acknowledged that they view MACH as a way to respond to economic volatility, noting the rocky economy has been a contributing factor to their organization's attitudes toward MACH. That has also led to a decreased resistance to change among IT teams. Year-over-year compared to our 2022 research, resistance to change has fallen from 39% to 30%. We don’t take a 10% drop lightly and believe this helps affirm that MACH Alliance’s efforts to showcase the clear and measurable benefits – and the long-term value – of MACH are working. The shift toward MACH has become impossible to ignore.<h2></h2>Adapting to an evolving landscape<h2></h2>As new digital touchpoints continue to emerge, it’s become clear that legacy platforms simply weren’t built to accommodate constant change. Improving the customer experience by being able to respond to change quickly is the only way businesses will meet buyers where they are today. Case in point: Fifty-five percent of respondents said improving customer experience is a main driver behind their transition to MACH infrastructure. Composable commerce opens the door to creating truly omnichannel CX whereby differentiated, personalized experiences can be delivered.So many leaders from within the Alliance network have shared compelling anecdotes or best practices for making a business digital-first and customer-led. For example: Costa Coffee’s Digital Technology Director <a href="https://machalliance.org/insights/meet-your-mach-alliance-ambassador-gordon-lucas-global-digital-technology-director-costa-coffee">Gordon Lucas</a> described how the company poured its focus into revamping its app and loyalty programs with MACH elements. Doing so has paid dividends. Costa has one of the largest non-grocery loyalty programs in the UK with millions of members. And member Frontastic <a href="https://machalliance.org/insights/how-mach-technologies-allow-you-to-adapt-your-digital-experiences-easily">dove into</a> how MACH technologies allow for easy adaptation of digital experiences, touching on how commerce teams can create outstanding digital experiences fast thanks to the power of headless.This is the way forward. Adapt and thrive, or be complacent and fail. That’s the option businesses have today, and we saw in our research that more and more organizations refuse to stand idly by while the competition evolves.Stay tuned for the fourth part of this four-part series, which will focus on evidence of MACH benefits.

MACH Global Research 2023  Blog Series Pt. 3: Adapting To An Evolving Landscape

What do we mean by MACH?The MACH (Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud native SaaS, Headless) architectural pattern is an effective way to implement a composable architecture. Businesses can integrate a collection of flexible cloud native technologies using an ecosystem of independent components that deliver packaged business capabilities. Flexibility is then realized through an experience layer that is decoupled from the application layer through the consistent use of APIs. <img asset_uid="bltab3378328b062588" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/bltab3378328b062588/64adc7894eb51ceac435ee78/Microservices_icon.png" width="31" height="32" max-width="31" style="max-width: 31px;width: 31;height: 32;"/> MicroservicesIndividual pieces of business functionality that are independently developed, deployed, and managed<img asset_uid="blt78cac8194f54f3e8" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/blt78cac8194f54f3e8/64add2cc838cdeaef641f110/API_First_icon.png" width="32" height="33" max-width="32" style="max-width: 32px;width: 32;height: 33;"/> API-FirstBuilt with APIs from the ground up. All functionality is exposed through an API.<img asset_uid="blt6b4e6cbff8ffaed8" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/blt6b4e6cbff8ffaed8/64add2cc30901b740fdb7939/Cloud_Native_SaaS_icon.png" width="32" height="33" max-width="32" style="max-width: 32px;width: 32;height: 33;"/> Cloud-Native SaaSSoftware-as-a-Service that leverages the full capabilities of the cloud, beyond storage and hosting, including elastic scaling of highly available resources. Functionality is updated automatically, no manual effort required.<img asset_uid="blteb619839ea05e780" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/blteb619839ea05e780/64add2ccbd5d8a4a04722708/Headless_icon.png" width="32" height="33" max-width="32" style="max-width: 32px;width: 32;height: 33;"/> HeadlessFront-end presentation is completely decoupled from backend logic. Designed to be channel, programming language, and framework agnostic.

Are you ready to bring the power of MACH to your Organization?

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" There are three drivers generally for companies adopting this architecture, either you have a need for speed to react to the market, you need greater channel and GTM flexibility, or you need better and more integrated omni-channel business processes. If you’re looking to adopt a composable architecture, the MACH Alliance established certification standards that help identify vendors and integrators that embrace MACH philosophies and offer MACH-certified services. It’s a good place to start! "Casper Rasmussen, President MACH Alliance

Growth EnablementImprove your agility, allowing delivery of change at speed by breaking down larger, complex business systems into smaller, more manageable components.Unlock your team's ability to deliver innovative experience and advanced business paradigms such as Dynamic Pricing and Inventory Sourcing Optimization.Improve agility and knowledge sharing with teams focused on specific domains and services.Cost OptimizationOptimize spending on custom development through a blend of SaaS products and in-house components composed into a consistent experienceReduces the overheads and hidden costs of technical debt and restrictive and manual development and deployment processesRisk ReductionsEnable greater consistency through automation in the deployment of software and the provisioning of infrastructure.Reduce risk when introducing new capability by moving from ‘big bang’ deliveries with long implementation timelines to the incremental delivery of new capability deployed at a higher frequency.Avoid employee attrition related to technology and solution stagnation, allowing your people to stay engaged and excited to work with modern technology. <hr/>

What benefits can you expect from MACH?

The objective of this maturity assessment is to evaluate your organization’s readiness to make the transition to adopt MACH. The quiz is designed to be high-level and quick focusing on your business as a whole rather than just on your technical landscape.Questions are focused on 6 pillars of Strategy and Transformation, Organization and Governance, Process and Metrics, People and Culture, Technology and Architecture and Business Intelligence as a broad measure to assess the organizational readiness to make the shift.

Objectives of this Maturity Assessment

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As an organization considering MACH, having a clear idea of what success looks like across both business ambition and digital capability is a fundamental starting point. Business and technology are intrinsically linked and an understanding of how they enable each other is one of the primary expectations of a mature MACH mindset. An organization looking to engage in a MACH transformation should have a clear understanding of its business objectives and the key areas of transformation required to achieve those goals. This part of the assessment will seek to highlight where a MACH approach may be applicable based on your organization’s current view of transformation across domains and as a whole.To maximize value enabled by MACH technologies, highly mature companies are following these best practices: Digital transformation, powered by MACH<ul><li>Journey towards MACH is seen as a digital transformation initiative, aligned with business goals and objectives</li><li>Broad understanding that a shift towards MACH has people at the core (it's not just a technology play)</li><li>Clear, cross-functional and comprehensive MACH strategy and roadmap exists – sponsored by C-suite</li><li>Digital first thinking: understanding that all revenue is impacted by digital</li><li>Transformative investments supported by business cases &amp; ROI models</li><li>See ROI not just as Return on Investment, but also Rate of Innovation</li><li>Baby steps: you don’t need to jump start, but the right partner can get you started</li></ul>

Strategy and Transformation

As part of a transition to MACH you will need to understand how your organization currently takes technology decisions. This includes understanding whether the decision making process you currently employ can support rapid change cycles and could integrate with multiple external suppliers.You may have to adapt your operating model and/or augment to be more focused around digital products. You will need to be able to delegate governance and decision-making processes while ensuring they are underpinned by an agreed set of principles. Along with adopting a ‘solution first’ mindset these practices should be viewed as foundational to supporting an effective transition to MACH.To maximize value enabled by MACH technologies, highly mature companies are following these best practices:Customer centric business<ul><li>Customer-centric operating model throughout the enterprise</li><li>Teams organized around the customer journey, converging online &amp; offline (from P&amp;L to operations)</li><li>Centralized governance with localized autonomy: freedom within a framework but shared incentives</li><li>Consistency in operations with functional independency to innovate</li><li>Agencies &amp; partners deliver on business outcomes</li></ul>

Organization and Governance

Any approach to adopting MACH will have knock-on effects to process and metrics. For example, some fundamental requirements to successfully support a distributed system of smaller components include:<ul><li>An Agile project management framework to support the software development life cycle.</li></ul><ul><li>Metrics and reporting that expose the health and performance of processes that span business domains.</li><li>Measure your DORA (DevOps) metrics to understand how you stack up against other enterprise.</li><li>Business processes for the procurement, provisioning, and onboarding of a variety of external systems.</li></ul>Organizations that have been able to benefit most from MACH have consistently been able to use agile planning and development tooling to reduce their cycle times and move to a continuous delivery model. Reporting on the delivery process itself using tools that capture data on metrics such as velocity, burndown, value delivery and throughput can help to optimize the benefits delivered.To maximize value enabled by MACH technologies, highly mature companies are following these best practices:Defined, measured &amp; optimize<ul><li>Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) approach is well defined and governed for rapid deployment of new capabilities</li><li>Shared success metrics (KPIs/OKRs) across teams and business units are defined and tracked</li><li>Data-driven decision making is the norm for continuous improvement</li><li>Buy commodity SaaS and build your unique differentiation as the norm for software procurement</li></ul>

Process and Metrics

People are the key to any organization’s success and consequently so too is the facilities and management surrounding them. Distribution of people in teams, alignment of those teams to business goals and the enabling of frictionless communications between teams are all important factors to consider with the adoption of MACH based technology. The culture and dynamics of your teams and the expertise within them should empower autonomy and independent delivery aligned to business objectives and key results. When you consider adopting a MACH architecture it is worth considering whether you could do more to establish a culture of personal ownership for decisions within the context of domains paired with shared objectives that drive collaboration. You should also consider whether an appetite for change, the desire to develop new digital skills and a passion for innovation exist in your company’s people and culture. To maximize value enabled by MACH technologies, highly mature companies are following these best practices: Digital hearts &amp; mind<ul><li>Digital leaders at all levels in the organization (including C-suite)</li><li>Adaptive &amp; collaborative mindset: change is the only constant, teamwork makes the dream work</li><li>Culture with a freedom to innovate, experiment, fail fast &amp; grow</li><li>Ability to attract &amp; retain the best talent</li><li>Active knowledge sharing with in-house digital academy</li></ul>

People and Culture

Technology is central to a modern digital platform, and your approach to and adoption of technology will play a big part in your transition to MACH. The paradigm shift from larger multi-functional systems into more granular components that sit within bounded contexts drives a need to reconsider several aspects of the technical and architectural landscape.To this end, we need to consider how comfortable your engineers and architects are with microservices and working within domains or bounded contexts. They will need to be comfortable with the adoption of cloud native technology and the processes involved in building and maintaining these environments and connecting out to other cloudbased systems. In addition, the discovery, usage and management of APIs and event-based integrations to allow for effective decoupling and composition of internal and externally hosted services will play a key role in the speed of adoption of MACH and the future agility of the solution.While MACH technology can sit alongside more traditional architecture components, understanding how to efficiently integrate to it and evolve with it will be key to success.To maximize value enabled by MACH technologies, highly mature companies are following these best practices:Technology as a value driver<ul><li>Technology is seen as a strategic value driver &amp; differentiate</li><li>Flexible, modular, and scalable technology target architecture, where MACH is the norm to enable business objectives (such as omnichannel)</li><li>Maximize automation, especially around infrastructure &amp; application management</li><li>No technical debt (e.g. version overhead) and vendor lock-in</li><li>Predictable &amp; cost-effective technology spend</li></ul>

Technology and Architecture

A mature organization has a keen understanding of its data, the processes around its management and how it serves decision making. Utilizing domain understanding and map data across those domains and into actionable insights across components is key to unlocking value from a MACH Architecture.Tools for analysis and visualization that aim to enable data-driven decisions are at the heart of a mature digital capability. A good understanding of data across technical, operational, and business metrics is paramount when delivering a successful transition to MACH.A MACH optimized organization will seek to leverage data-driven decisioning across teams and systems, reviewing performance metrics, trends over time and the aggregation of data across business lines. To this end we will attempt to understand your relationship with your data, how it is collected, how it is distributed and how insights are derived.To maximize value enabled by MACH technologies, highly mature companies are following these best practices:Intelligent enterprise, driven by data<ul><li>Data is an asset: governance and visualization is aligned with strategic business objectives</li><li>Data, advanced analytics, AI, and machine learning are leveraged to generate actionable (customer) insights and drive business growth</li><li>Customer experience powered by near-real time data transparency and customer segmentation</li></ul>

Business Intelligence

This MACH maturity assessment is a starting point in garnering a greater understanding of your organization's readiness to adapt MACH components or move to a MACH architecture. It is split across the areas we've just talked about identified by a team of MACH Alliance members. The assessment consists of 20 questions and within a few minutes will provide an indication of your organization’s maturity in relation to MACH along with insights into key areas that you might look to improve.

Closing statement

Download the PDF version of the Whitepaper here

MACH Maturity Assessment

Start your Assessment now

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In today’s fast-paced retail industry where the consumer experience is constantly changing, one thing remains constant: the need to adapt to changing times and rapidly launch digital initiatives to stay relevant in the market. Although, the main obstacle arises during project delivery, where excessive time and resources are wasted on integrations instead of enhancing the end customer experience. By the time the experience is launched to the consumers, it doesn’t look anything like the initial design idea as the digital team got trapped in an endless loop of lack-of-data frustration when moving from ideation to delivery.<h3>How does your old tech stack adversely affect your CX innovation and why you need to rethink your approach?</h3>The current "old" tech stack in many organizations is hindering CX innovation and impacting the ability to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Typically, investments are made in system of records like CRM, PIM, and CMS to manage specific domain data. However, this results in fragmented data silos, making it challenging to provide a unified customer experience in the frontends.Consequently, companies are stuck in a cycle where innovation and launching new experiences require building everything from scratch, which is time-consuming and costly. This restricts digital teams and marketers from adapting to rapidly changing customer behaviors. Projects can take over a year to launch, posing a significant obstacle in today's fast-paced digital landscape where agility is essential to close the gap between consumer expectations and brand initiatives. For companies to get closer to their customers and drive brand loyalty, it is essential to not only constantly collect consumer data but also to effectively use this data to launch hyper-personalized campaigns that boost the customer’s trust in the brand. If you’re too far behind in catching up with the digitally mature audiences of today, you’ve already lost round one of this battle!<h3>But this frustrating slowdown can be overcome! How you ask?</h3>Enter MACH (Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless) - a composable approach to your tech stack that enables the seamless integration of best-of-breed solutions. MACH enables a composable enterprise architecture that offers flexibility and scalability. Every component within this architecture is modular, allowing for easy replacement and continuous improvement through agile development, aligning with evolving business needs. Previously, this process required advanced technical expertise, limiting access to tech-savvy and developer-heavy organizations.The Composable approach is a game-changer in software development as it facilitates back-end developers and individual system suppliers to focus on developing and optimizing their APIs, while front-end developers can focus on creating a stunning user experience. This groundbreaking approach is now transitioning to a low-code state, making it accessible to less technically mature organizations as well. A win-win situation for all!You may want to read: <a href="https://www.occtoo.com/blog/ralph-urmel-alpro">Digital experience manager Ralph Urmel talks about the success of Alpro and moving to MACH</a><h3>Transition from an engineering-heavy to a business-user-first approach!</h3>By adopting a business-user-first approach, companies can bridge the gap between technical complexity and business requirements. It allows digital team to have more autonomy and agility in shaping digital experiences, reducing reliance on developers for routine tasks and changes. This shift not only speeds up the process of delivering new features and experiences but also promotes innovation and enables faster response to changing market dynamics.With a business-user-first approach, organizations can leverage low-code or no-code platforms that provide intuitive interfaces and visual tools. These platforms enable business users to directly configure, customize, and manage aspects of their digital solutions without extensive coding knowledge. This empowers them to go from idea to execution quickly, experiment with new ideas, make changes, geo-scale applications and optimize the overall customer experience in real-time, resulting in improved engagement, conversion rates, business growth and customer satisfaction.The MACH approach permits you to move quickly with the changing CX demands, while an <a href="https://www.occtoo.com/experience-data-platform">Experience Data Platform (XDP) </a>takes MACH/Composable into a low code state being able to be operated by business-oriented digital team. By taking the MACH approach to building your stack you can effortlessly combine and activate data from any system through new experience APIs, delivering exceptional unified customer experiences without starting from scratch. I firmly believe that this is the key to accelerating and adapting CX innovation like never before.

Embrace Agility: Empower your team with a Low-Code MACH Strategy to match the fast-paced and ever-changing CX demands

<h3 style="text-align: center;">MACH Certification Serves as a Vendor Benchmark for the Market Shift to Composable</h3>We have been vocal for some time that the market shift to MACH technology represents a major challenge to the position of long-established enterprise suites. Even the biggest tech companies are going composable with a focus on APIs and desire to be MACH. We fully encourage it.Yet as a result of this maturing market, we have to take our role as gatekeepers (or ‘<a href="https://www.forrester.com/blogs/buy-an-integrated-platform-not-a-box-of-rocks/">bouncers</a>’, as we’ve been called by Forrester’s Joe Cicman) even more seriously, particularly when considering certification for companies who have reshaped their portfolio and product strategy from monolith to MACH. In any case, we will only grant MACH membership if all our certification criteria are met.The MACH Alliance membership comes with the requirement that a vendor's entire active portfolio has to meet MACH criteria. So, if a company has a legacy past, we have an additional requirement. That is for them to agree that they no longer actively sell nor promote any legacy product so that they don’t create buyer confusion. <a href="https://www.machalliance.com/insights/why-only-companies-can-be-mach-certified-and-not-products">Certification is for the company and not individual solutions</a>. Buying MACH is a seal of being future proof. Hybrid-MACH isn’t a thing.Until recently, we haven’t had any vendor members that have reshaped their portfolio substantially enough for the new global trend to become MACH certified. All of our members have to date been founded MACH-first. What we do see, however, is that all tech vendors at scale are moving in the direction of MACH, but only MACH certification will show who is truly adhering to the standards that make enterprise software flexible and swappable and will actually ensure future-proof tech-stacks.<h3><h4> The Why Behind Our Certification Standards</h4></h3>We’ve always been crystal clear about what our certification standards are (you can read the full breakdown <a href="https://machalliance.org/insights/mach-certification-a-seal-of-confidence">here</a>). We believe the Alliance has a responsibility to the market to approach MACH certification with a high degree of objectivity and scrutiny. We know how hard it can be for a buyer to cut through industry jargon to understand if a vendor or agency is truly following composable architecture principles. MACH Alliance certification is our word that we have evaluated the technology, references and roadmap of a member and that they have proven they meet all the criteria for the Alliance to recommend them as part of a future-proof technology stack.Every organization should have the opportunity to prove that as the market changes, they too are eager to change. And when they meet all of our criteria with their present day product strategy, if the voting group has reached consensus, we welcome them with open arms to join in our mission.

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MACH Certification

In the<a href="https://machalliance.org/insights/the-role-of-accelerators-in-the-mach-world-part-1"> previous post,</a> I explained what accelerators are, what are the benefits of using an accelerator, and what to look out for when choosing one to work with. In this blog post, I am going to compare accelerators to Digital Experience Composition platforms which are an emerging category of SaaS within the MACH space.<h3>One step further than accelerators — Digital Experience Composition (DXC)</h3>DXCs are a new category of SaaS solutions that offer similar benefits to MACH accelerators. You can think of a DXC as a universal accelerator for API-first applications, where you can pull any kind of REST or graphql APIs into a visual workspace where developers or business users can manage omni-channel digital experiences within a visual, low-code editor. DXC speeds up time to value for composable architecture, lowers development cost, and makes it easy for business users to build digital experiences that pull information from many headless data sources.“DXC is emerging to handle digital multi-experience orchestration in a 'headless,' decoupled, composable world. Extending from front-end as a service (FEaaS) or 'visual page builders', these tools allow developers to set up digital experiences and hand them to business users for day-to-day management in no-code environments.” — Gartner, 2022, Hype Cycle for Digital CommerceRead more <a href="https://machalliance.org/insights/why-is-gartner-so-excited-by-new-digital-commerce-waves-" target="_blank">here</a>. <h3> Accelerators vs DXC</h3>What is the difference between a DXC and an accelerator?It is like comparing apples and oranges, moreover, every accelerator is different and every DXC can offer a different set of features.A rough and oversimplified comparison between the two categories is that accelerators are usually built and maintained by a commerce platform vendor or an SI. They offer documentation but as they are a tool in the SI arsenal that needs further customization, not a SaaS, therefore, they usually do not provide SLAs or regular tool audits. They offer less flexibility than DXC in terms of which APIs can be used within the solution. Accelerators can be customized to add the integrations for a specific customer but that takes additional time and work. Accelerators are a point-in-time solution to get started and onboarded on the commerce project which then evolves and gets further customized. Accelerators typically have a wider use case.DXCs offer more integrations out-of-the-box and continuously develop new connections. DXC is a SaaS and the implementation is either on the customer or SI side. DXC can be used to build omni-channel experiences and pull together many data sources for content-heavy pages or displays. DXC (or DXO) can be leveraged within an accelerator that adds even more commerce-related functionalities on top of what a DXC provides.<table><tbody><tr><td> </td><td>DXC</td><td>Accelerator</td></tr><tr><td>SaaS</td><td>Yes</td><td>-</td></tr><tr><td>Cost</td><td>Subscription-based</td><td>Can be free or paid within the SI-offered services or an ISV subscription</td></tr><tr><td>Implementation</td><td>Not provided by a DXC vendor but can be delivered by an external SI.</td><td>Usually done by the SI who built the accelerator.&nbsp;</td></tr><tr><td>SLAs</td><td>DXC provides its own SLAs</td><td>SLAs from the independent contracts with the vendors.</td></tr><tr><td>External audits</td><td>Usually yes</td><td>Usually not</td></tr><tr><td>Visual workspace</td><td>Usually yes</td><td>Usually not</td></tr><tr><td>Flexibility</td><td>Visual workspace provided for a higher number of API-based tools vs an accelerator. </td><td>Usually each accelerator has a fixed commerce platform and some flexibility with the other software solutions to choose from. Can be swapped by the SI but takes extra time.</td></tr><tr><td>Use case</td><td>Building personalized digital experiences that require pulling together data from many headless data sources.&nbsp;</td><td>Starting a commerce project on a MACH architecture, migrating off legacy architecture.</td></tr></tbody></table><h3>Summary</h3>Accelerators play a pivotal role in adapting MACH Architectures, they speed up the implementation time and help to standardize the approach to MACH software-based projects. The number of accelerators available on the market is impressive and the choice may seem overwhelming at first, this is why we will follow up with a second post in this series covering how to choose the right accelerator and how to implement them.Here is a list of Accelerators that the author of this article has put together:<a href="https://26525540.fs1.hubspotusercontent-eu1.net/hubfs/26525540/Ebooks/Accelerators%20List.pdf"> Click here</a> to see the list.This list is not exhaustive, if you know of an accelerator that is not listed here please write to <a href="mailto:katarzyna.banasik@voucherify.io">katarzyna.banasik@voucherify.io</a> and they will consider including it in the list.<h3>Author of the article:</h3>Katarzyna Banasik, Product Marketing Manager, <a href=" https://www.voucherify.io/">Voucherify</a><h3>Contributors:</h3>Anton Koval, Partner Manager Accelerators, commercetoolsRicardas Montvila, VP Global Strategy, MAPP DigitalEverett Zufelt, Vice President of Product and Partnerships, OriumAndrew Kumar, GVP, Uniform.devUday Lakkoju, Global Vice President - Composable Products &amp; GTM, ValtechKrzysztof Molin, Senior Director, Software Engineering at EPAMDom Selvon, CTO, Apply Digital

The role of accelerators in the MACH world: Part 3

It's an increasingly complex world out there (as composable reaches early majority status) and what end-users need is trust in certified MACH products and services. We provide that through being open and accessible but ultimately strict and thorough in our assessment.Many of the ISV / Enabler members of the Alliance are relatively new companies who have built their products from scratch adhering to what we now consider MACH principles. Yet, there is also a category of (potential) Alliance members who have a longer history and have/had products that were not MACH-native.As the market matures, similar to how cloud computing rose to mainstream status, we’re now seeing MACH follow a similar trajectory, and with it, more complex admissions cases. There’s a lot in between on the MACH - Monolith spectrum! That’s why we’ve chosen to consolidate everything there is to know about our admissions process and publish a comprehensive new <a href="https://qrco.de/MACHCriteria">admissions criteria guide,</a> adding rigor to the process and focusing on consistency and clarity for buyers.According to Benoit Rossignol, Head of the MACH Alliance Admissions Panel, “The MACH Alliance is adapting to a maturing market and being realistic and inclusive of the reality that is out there as more vendors transition their product strategies for a composable future. MACH is expanding from front-end to back-end solutions and into new industries, touching every component of an enterprise tech stack. We need to ensure a level playing field for all assessments.”Ensuring a level playing field means constantly evolving our criteria based on our experience of new application considerations. Bloomreach for example, who joined the MACH Alliance in 2022, are a multi-product company, but unlike larger legacy platforms, they are composable. However, their path to MACH certification wasn’t straightforward. It was their commitment to MACH principles and their vision for the future that prompted a strategy change which got them over the line.Tjeerd Brenninkmeijer, EVP, EMEA at Bloomreach, provides some insight into the process and why achieving MACH certification was important to them."At Bloomreach, we firmly believe that cloud-based composable architecture represents the future of tech. The underlying MACH principles enable us to deliver faster innovation for our customers, ensure better availability, and provide businesses with the ability to rapidly expand their commerce ecosystem as their technology needs evolve. These architectural and developmental principles ultimately deliver greater value to our customers. The transparency offered by the MACH Alliance is invaluable, as it helps customers and partners make informed decisions about their future endeavors. This aligns perfectly with our goals, so obtaining MACH certification was crucial to us.“We thoroughly reviewed every aspect of our technology to achieve MACH certification. Operating a SaaS business necessitates complete ownership of the software we provide to our customers. During our technology review, one area that required particular attention was our content management offering. Our CMS was initially a private cloud solution, also known as PaaS (platform as a service). Our team dedicated two years to rewriting this software, resulting in the birth of a new product: a MACH-compliant content management solution. The certification process was intense and took six months, involving numerous deep dives into our architecture. We take great pride in passing the test in 2022."<a href="https://machalliance.org/insights/evolving-our-membership-criteria-for-a-maturing-market">MACH certification </a>will continue to provide enterprises with the added level of insurance and protection they need as the market accelerates. If you would like to learn more about our membership and certification criteria, please refer to the following resources:<ul><li><a href="https://machalliance.org/insights/mach-certification-a-seal-of-confidence">MACH certification: A seal of confidence</a></li><li><a href="https://machalliance.org/insights/what-does-it-mean-to-be-mach-certified-">What does it mean to be MACH certified?</a></li><li><a href="https://machalliance.org/insights/the-mach-tech-check--prerequisites-for-vendors">MACH certification - prerequisites for vendors</a></li><li><a href="https://machalliance.org/insights/mach-certification-prerequisites-for-si">MACH certification - prerequisites for SIs</a></li><li><a href="https://machalliance.org/insights/mach-certification-serves-as-a-vendor-benchmark-for-the-market-shift-to-composable">MACH certification serves as a vendor benchmark for the market shift to composable</a></li></ul>

MACH Complexity and Why Certification Matters More Than Ever

As one of the world’s largest food and beverage companies, Kraft Heinz is synonymous with a multitude of timeless and iconic brands found in cupboards and fridges around the globe. But the secret ingredient behind this trusted producer of high-quality staples is to look beyond what’s on the dinner table and not only understand — but evolve with — their consumers.That’s why Kraft Heinz’s Head of Digital Experience Justin Thomas doesn’t just think outside of the box, he focuses on breaking that box completely. He knows that innovation that truly moves technology forward isn’t rooted in change for the sake of change, but comes from an obsession with serving consumers in completely new and differentiated ways. This is also why Justin has joined the MACH Alliance as an official Ambassador.“MACH isn’t just a philosophy, it's the future of technology. MACH provides best-of-need, best-of-breed digital solutions for today’s landscape and also sets businesses up to adapt agility to new technologies as they emerge, and then try them out right away with a very low cost of experimentation,” Justin explains.Meaningful Cross-Functional Agility for the First TimeOnce Justin and his team began making the transition to MACH, they discovered an unexpected benefit.“When we first began this process, we thought it would be a chance to work closely with creative and technology, to integrate and align our vision for our users. However, the biggest change I’ve seen is the engagement and collaboration with our partners within the organization. This is due to the fact that now they feel empowered to influence the digital experience thanks to the flexibility of a MACH tech stack.”“It’s really helping us not just as a team, but as an organization to bring more agility to what we’re trying to do here. This is something we didn’t have enough of before, and it’s really meaningful and exciting,” he adds.Flexibility and Scalability, Just in TimeIn Justin’s experience, the role of fresh, up-to-the-second content is only going to become increasingly important in curating impactful digital experiences in the near future. And that necessitates a flexible, adaptable tech stack that can deliver directly to users at scale.“Consumers are increasingly expecting brands to provide more than just basic information online. These days, the expectation is that a brand should entertain and engage in new, novel, and digital ways at every touchpoint,” he says. “So, now more than ever it’s important to have the capability to deliver a much vaster scope of content, and to ensure that you’re actually doing something to deliver that moment of delight as a value-add to your customer. Otherwise, you simply won’t be able to keep up.”“Creative is no longer left waiting on tech tickets to be answered, and can instead be empowered with easy-to-use technology to push content live,” he explains. “Similarly, tech is freed from answering low-value easily automated tech tickets and can instead focus on building and experimenting. MACH is really the most effective technological and digital solution out there.”It all comes down to serving up a solution that meets the appetites of today’s consumers, and sets Kraft Heinz up to lead the future of a digital food experience tomorrow — and that sounds pretty delicious.MACH Alliance Ambassadorship The MACH Alliance is very excited to welcome Justin as a MACH Ambassador. Our Ambassadors are a carefully selected group of business and technology experts with a wide range of experience across industries and backgrounds. Passionate about the benefits a modern architecture can bring to an enterprise, our Ambassadors have graciously committed their time to support the mission of the MACH Alliance by writing, speaking, and serving as subject matter experts to help empower companies to go MACH.If you’re interested in learning more about a MACH approach and understanding if it’s right for your business, we welcome you to get in touch at <a href="mailto:info@machalliance.org">info@machalliance.org</a> to be matched with the MACH Alliance Ambassador most relevant to you.

Meet Your MACH Ambassador: Justin Thomas, Head of Digital Experience at Kraft Heinz

Recently the MACH Alliance welcomed its<a href="https://machalliance.org/newsroom/mach-alliance-surpasses-100-members-as-it-closes-out-milestone-2023"> 100th member</a> and both the Alliance and its members have seen incredible traction in the last few years.It continues to amaze me how fast ‘composable’ has gone from a whisper in the corridors of the cool developer kids to what is quickly becoming a default architecture for digital experiences created for and by enterprises.To understand how composable architectures arrived in the marbled halls of enterprises, we have to look back around 10 years where it all started with the decoupling of the front-end and back-end.Back then, it is fair to say that the web was in trouble. The architecture didn’t scale well, security concerns were rampant, it wasn’t performant enough, and it was all starting to lead to walled gardens such as App Stores and company pages on social platforms.At the time my co-founder of Netlify and I were toying around with different ideas of building something to try and address this when we started looking deeper at the concepts behind standalone frontends.I’ll admit that at first the notion of not having the backend render the presentation layer or UI for every visitor seemed like a technical curiosity at most, but I soon started realizing the potential impact of this decoupling could be tremendous.First off, it would allow for removing the dependency on a single origin server for the websites themselves. Instead, you could have multiple points of origin, and you could distribute the front-end leading to higher scalability, better security and faster load times.Secondly, it could give developers superpowers. Instead of having to send off frontends for implementation into monolithic backend systems, you could instead just pull data IN from those systems. That would mean no more squeezing frontends into templates that didn’t fit, and no more waiting around for implementations. Just push the code live and you’re done.Lastly and perhaps most impactful, it could pave the way for a composable architecture. Not having a monolith dictate the digital experiences and touchpoints would leave one free to compose best-in-class components into nimble solutions that could be upgraded interchangeably and continuously. This would greatly enable omnichannel solutions as digital touchpoints multiplied and could create a whole new digital experience economy.This approach promised to be a fundamentally better way to build digital experiences, and we embarked on creating the first front-end cloud in the market.Of course, back then you really couldn’t build digital experiences of much significance as the ecosystem of services needed simply didn’t exist yet. An example of a lacking element was enterprise-focused e-commerce as that existed as monolithic offerings only.However, the market quickly started evolving tremendously. In fact you’d be hard-pressed to find a single CMS or e-commerce solution that has come to market in the last few years that isn’t natively headless, and today the notion of decoupling the front-end has become the default.This saturation of the category also meant that in the last few years, we’ve started seeing enough services to cater to building out complex digital experience platforms in a composable manner.That in turn meant that the large analyst firms feeding enterprises insights into tech trends started leaning in, and composable architectures started becoming crystalized from a business point of view.<a href="https://www.forrester.com/report/understanding-the-architect-of-your-digital-experience-platform/RES178363">“DXPs… are built by enterprises, not bought from vendors”, wrote senior analyst from Forrester, Joe Cicman,</a> in 2022, referring to the notion that enterprises would now piece together their platforms from best-in-class providers rather than just buy a huge monolith from a single provider.<a href="https://www.gartner.ca/en/articles/gartner-keynote-the-future-of-business-is-composable">“The Future of Business is Composable” wrote Gartner. </a>The reasoning is that “building blocks of composable business enable organizations to pivot quickly, provide resilience, and make development faster, easier and more effective”.But if the analysts provided the “Why” of using composable components in your digital architecture, the enterprises were still to some extent left wondering “How?”.What should a “composable” component actually look like and how should it operate? The trademark of a burgeoning category that in essence is deeply technical and has a broad reach is that it necessarily contains a certain amount of murkiness to start with. The path hasn’t been beaten, and guardrails are something that is typically built out gradually.Clarity was needed to help enterprises along, which was the reason for the birth of the MACH Alliance.There was a clear focus from the outset. To cut through more or less substantiated vendor claims, and provide real clarity for anyone looking to adopt composable components for digital experiences.This led to a rigorous process to certify the companies providing the needed cloud-native, API-First, multi-tenant SaaS offerings, and the enablers and service companies to implement them.Today, thousands of hours are spent every month by an army of dedicated volunteers and a core MACH Alliance staff to bring the best education, events and certification processes to help enterprises start embracing composable architectures and there are now MACH Alliance ambassadors working at many of the most prominent companies in the world helping to spread best practices to an ever-growing audience.And it’s the success of this movement that leads us to this next step of composable implementations and the next step of the MACH Alliance.Composable and MACH are no longer just employed for single projects and stand-alone solutions. With scale more enterprises find themselves needing to integrate larger solutions with ever more components and to find ways to work together with existing technologies.To solve for that we need to turn our gaze towards interoperability.After onboarding almost 5 million developers and businesses I’ve had countless stakeholders share why they want to go composable and headless. Amongst the top reasons are always faster time to market, greater flexibility and better conversion rates.However choosing the right components like a CMS or commerce solution, doesn’t in itself deliver on those promises.If they don’t interact well, and if operations are kept as usual, with the same way of siloed groups manually running infrastructures in a traditional waterfall structure - then even the best headless APIs on the planet can’t give you a fast time to market, nor a performant digital touchpoint.If a company wants to stay agile enough to be able to implement new solutions and upgrade them gradually instead of lifting and shifting monoliths, then it needs to reconsider how it operates those digital experiences and to what standards those solutions will interact.This is why I’m so incredibly excited to be involved in the second phase of the MACH Alliance - The Interoperability Standards.The Interoperability Task Force was launched with several key technologists at member companies and a mandate for 2023/2024 to produce assets that will help buyers understand the landscape.This year the task force will release a number of assets on a regular basis, covering audiences ranging from architects to business stakeholders.<h3>We’ll cover areas including:</h3><ul><li>How organizations can manage change in this digital transformation:- Who should be involved in a re-architecture using MACH principles?</li></ul><ul><li>How does this architecture unlock business goals?- What a composable workflow actually looks like (including high-level current common practices such as “infrastructure as code”)</li><li>How parts of the system interact:- What composition/orchestration layers are needed to be successful? How does this all fit together?- At a lower level, how are individual components expected to interact with one another? How do they work in tandem to unlock end-to-end scenarios?- How are legacy components integrated into a modern, composable architecture?</li></ul>How can architects be sure that individual components follow MACH principles? How can they avoid monoliths?<h3>Assets will include:</h3><ul><li>Podcasts</li><li>Whitepapers (such as “<a href="https://machalliance.org/content-hub/how-to-evaluate-and-integrate-composable-solutions-mach-interoperability-1" target="_blank">How to evaluate and integrate composable technologies</a>”) and</li><li>Reference architectures, including a “code first” model in GitHub so organizations can create their own as needed for internal planning or building RFPs.</li></ul>We’re excited to bring about a focus on this next set of best practices to help ensure successful MACH projects as they continue to scale inside in size and complexity!<h3>Author:</h3><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianbachdk/"><img alt="Chris_Bach_(1).png" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/bltc2cda08e264c0cc1/65cf363ea35e3be30822a3f7/Chris_Bach_(1).png" width="571" height="314" style="height: 314;"/></a>

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Phase II of the MACH Alliance: Interoperability Standards

<h3 style="text-align: center;">MACH Alliance Announces Open Data Model Initiative to Accelerate Interoperability Across Enterprise Technologies</h3> The MACH Alliance, the industry group dedicated to future-proofing enterprise technology through open, connected, and composable digital experiences, today announces the launch of a new Open Data Model initiative. This initiative aims to resolve longstanding interoperability and integration complexities faced by enterprises, systems integrators, and software vendors.The Open Data Model will be made publicly available under an open-source license on GitHub, ensuring transparency, accessibility, and broad community engagement. The MACH Alliance Interoperability Working Group will actively expand and enhance this model, aiming for full member consumption by the end of Q2 2025.To jumpstart this ambitious initiative, the MACH Alliance is working with several MACH Certified Vendors who have offered up sample material including Conscia, Alokai, Commercetools, Bluestone PIM, Occtoo and finally, Pipe17 who has contributed its open, comprehensive, canonical data model as a starting point. Leading the initiative are MACH Certified System Integrators Apply Digital, Novicell, and Valtech with the support of Certified Enabler AWS.

We built our data model over five years. It sits at the heart of our solution, has been rigorously tested in real-world use, continuously refined, and has always been open-source from day one. We’re thrilled to contribute it to the MACH Alliance, further empowering the commerce ecosystem to innovate and scale faster

Interoperability continues to be a critical strategic concern for businesses navigating rapidly changing digital landscapes. "Interoperability has been a primary focus for the MACH Alliance" said Adam Peter Nielsen, CTO of Novicell and MACH Alliance Interoperability Lead. "With a shared data model recipe, we can make tangible progress toward seamless integration and strategic agility across diverse technologies."Bob Howland, Chairperson of the MACH Alliance, emphasized the initiative’s business impact: "Enterprises demand solutions that work together. By standardizing an Open Data Model, we dramatically simplify integrations. Vendors adopting the Open Data Model will find faster implementation cycles and significantly reduced complexity—enabling true interoperability that powers digital innovation."This Open Data Model promises significant benefits, including:<ul><li>Merchants can adopt this data model as their own, and can then effortlessly connect their existing homegrown systems with MACH-compliant solutions.</li><li>Systems Integrators and Agencies can build repeatable solutions, enhance efficiency, and speed up MACH implementations, delivering rapid value to merchants.</li><li>MACH Alliance Vendors have immediate access to a robust foundational data model, dramatically reducing initial development effort and enhancing seamless data flow between partner solutions.</li></ul>By establishing a vendor-neutral, Open Data Model, the MACH Alliance is also laying critical groundwork for the use of agentic AI and support for MCP powered agents. Without a shared data model, enterprises face fragmented, siloed data environments that limit AI’s ability to make accurate decisions, take action, and deliver real business value.For more information about the Open Data Model initiative and to contribute to this groundbreaking project, visit <a href="https://machalliance.org/open-data-model-initiative" target="_self">https://machalliance.org/open-data-model-initiative</a>

MACH Alliance Announces Open Data Model Initiative

Technology continues to evolve as we move toward a future of modular digital experience technology architectures that are flexible and easy to maintain. As an industry body advocating for this future, one of our core objectives is supporting buyers to navigate the journey to composable architectures. Including when and where to start, and how to evaluate the right vendors. Our certification program is designed to help, with vendors, SIs and enablers evaluated against strict criteria.Analyst evaluations like the Forrester Wave(™) and the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ remain a hugely important resource for companies considering and evaluating solutions for their stack. However, there is some confusion in the market about how to read these reports through a MACH lens.You are not “everyone”It is important to remember that there is no such thing as a generic analyst evaluation. Every company has a different set of requirements for their business. Simply looking at the vendor positioning with the dots in the Wave or Quadrant, is not going to help you in selecting the solutions for you.Analyst firms recommend you identify the solution that best serves your current technology gap and requirements. They specialize in defining and classifying criteria that vendors are benchmarked against and there is a lot of transparency underneath the ‘dot’ that can help buyers with the identification. Yet, few buyers seem to know about the additional layer that is so important for internal due diligence.All Forrester analyst evaluations are designed for the respective target audiences of the analyst firms. This is typically upper mid-market and enterprise organizations, covering the full spectrum of technology adoption profiles - it’s for laggards as much as it is for early adopters. If you are a company looking to modernize your set-up, it is helpful to approach evaluations from your unique perspective. We believe this holds true for Gartner analyst evaluations as well.How to customize a Forrester WaveThe Forrester Wave comprises three key components: A report which talks about trends and criteria in a summary version; the graphic with the dots that we all know and love; and a high level overview of the different criteria that make up the dots. It also provides vendor profiles with strengths and weaknesses of the solutions.What is most interesting is how the dots come together. This is based on how weak or strong a vendor’s current offering is, and the functionality available today for you to use (ie. all the buttons you can click and APIs to work with etc.) on the y axis. Vendors that have been in the market the longest will typically have a more complete feature set. It also takes into account strategy on the x axis - usually how well does the vendor’s business model and roadmap set it up for the future. The size of the dot shows market presence usually based on number of customers and product revenue.Analyst assessments the MACH way - build your own waveEach Wave includes a list of criteria that companies are benchmarked against. Taking Forrester’s B2C Commerce Solutions Wave as an example, Forrester benchmarks vendors against criteria such as ‘commerce experience’, and ‘search and merchandising’. For Forrester clients, those criteria are explained in an underlying spreadsheet which also shows how the scoring is defined. Next to the Forrester scores and rankings, there is a ‘Custom Score’ tab. As a MACH buyer, if you are also a Forrester subscriber, this is where you can tailor the Wave to your business and architectural needs.To briefly explain the scoring, every criterion, like commerce experience, is a direct or calculated score based on defined elements. A score of 1 is below par relative to others in this evaluation (important distinction). 3 is indicative of the current market standard as defined by Forrester and on par with others in the evaluation. Anything above 3 is above par compared to others in the evaluation and potentially ahead of what the market needs today.To give a concrete MACH example, front end management for a company looking to go headless might not be as relevant as for one with a tightly coupled architectural mandate. A vendor may score low on a particular criterion because they have actively decided that certain functionality is not part of their native offering but to partner with adjacent vendors to retain focus and follow composable architectural principles. The custom score capability lets you weigh the features and criteria that are relevant and important to you, just as you would for your stack - the MACH way.Based on your customized scoring, the vendor ranking on the first tab of the spreadsheet will change. As a MACH company, your priorities are different from the average buyer. It’s your responsibility to look at the report in the context of your business and technology strategy.How to customize a Gartner® Magic Quadrant™The <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/magic-quadrants-research">Gartner Magic Quadrant</a> according to Gartner, “is a culmination of research in a specific market, giving you a wide-angle view of the relative positions of the market’s competitors. By applying a graphical treatment and a uniform set of evaluation criteria, a Magic Quadrant helps you quickly ascertain how well technology providers are executing their stated visions and how well they are performing against Gartner’s market view.”The interactive version provided with the report available to Gartner clients also shows how vendors have moved in the Quadrant over the past few years, which can be helpful to take vendor trajectory into account. Remember that, even if a vendor hasn’t moved, they may still be evolving as the criteria itself changes with the changing market.Gartner doesn’t provide a spreadsheet. If you are a Gartner Client, you do have customization tools available on the Portal that allow you to change weighting of criteria. For instance, you may not care about a vendor’s sales strategy which goes into the Gartner positioning of the vendor on the Quadrant.Gartner Critical Capabilities report explains the high level criteria and will help with your understanding of the assessment. It includes predefined Use Cases for every category to help you customize capabilities and weightings without the need to create them yourself.From a MACH lens, Gartner has made some level of customization easier for us through its Composable Business Use Case in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce and Critical Capabilities report. This use case is not yet part of all Magic Quadrant evaluations however and it remains the user’s responsibility to check, depending on the Quadrant and product category, if there is a MACH/composable equivalent. Though a detailed explanation of the criteria and scoring is not provided, the vendor write up articulates how they perform in different use cases.Our final words of adviceAbove and beyond all customization of analyst reports, the best way to read these assessments with your specific needs in mind is to call the evaluating analysts. As a Forrester or Gartner client, you may have Inquiries available that allow you to have a real-life two-way conversation and receive the analyst’s expert advice specific to your priorities.As the monolith / composable divide in the enterprise technology space has grown, the analysts’ mandate has become more difficult because they have to serve both sides of the chasm equally - in one single evaluation. As a buyer, to make the right investment choice and avoid selecting technology that won’t fit your business strategy and priorities, you have to look beyond the dot - for now.GARTNER and MAGIC QUADRANT are registered trademarks and service marks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research &amp; Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Mind the Dot: How to read analyst evaluations through a MACH lens

"Smarter, better, faster, convenient. Everywhere I go" — this is what the famous Daft Punk song's title (Harder, better, faster, stronger) could sound like if it was about perfect customer experience. Well, it might not be so catchy anymore, but it says a lot about the expectations of modern customers. Creating an engaging and seamless customer experience (CX) is challenging, but the game is worth the candle; as the <a href="https://www.pwc.com/us/en/services/consulting/library/consumer-intelligence-series/future-of-customer-experience.html">PwC survey</a> shows, 73% of customers agree that customer experience helps to drive their buying decision.&nbsp;The harsh truth is that customers will not find your company and products by themselves; you have to meet them, whatever they are, by creating omnichannel personalized campaigns and strengthening your brand's digital visibility.&nbsp;A composable approach driven by open architectures such as MACH architecture enables the delivery of omnichannel strategies efficiently by using the best in class solutions. MACH offers businesses digital agility and the freedom to create a more consistent omnichannel experience than ever before.&nbsp;<h3>A key ingredient of tasty omnichannel CX soup</h3><h4>The right content in the right channel</h4>In your marketing and sales efforts, depending on your available space and media format, you may need to adjust your product content to get the best results. For example, if you are using your product content for advertising, your needs will be completely different when posting image-heavy content on social media than text-based ads.Accurate, rich, and personalized information about your brand and products is crucial in nailing the <a href="https://www.bluestonepim.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-driving-online-sales-with-product-information#meet-customers-where-they-are">omnichannel experience</a>. This layer should be included in building engaging and seamless customer experiences throughout the customer journey.<h4>Touch a digital product</h4>In the digital world, the shopping experience does not exist without product experience first. When we shop online, we also expect to get as many details about the product as possible to make a final decision.&nbsp;The research and comparison stages of the customer journey are primarily influenced by coherent product content (product descriptions, high-quality images, videos) that is exhaustive and evocative enough to give the customer a glimpse of touching a physical product. However, not in one version and in one place (product page) but everywhere the customer goes online.&nbsp;<h4>360-degree product experience&nbsp;</h4>That's why implementing a Product Experience Management (PxM) strategy in a global business is essential.&nbsp;PxM aims to deliver customers an attractive, contextualized, and personalized experience around the product at every stage of their shopping journey and at every touchpoint. It is a <a href="https://www.bluestonepim.com/what-is-pxm">strategy</a> for creating a 360-degree product experience based on major e-commerce trends, such as omnichannel.&nbsp;<h3>In omnichannel, synchronization is everything</h3>According to Google research, omnichannel strategies drive an 80% higher rate of total store visits. Moreover, the <a href="https://www.omnisend.com/resources/reports/omnichannel-marketing-automation-statistics-2019/">Omnisend</a> survey's findings show that marketers using three or more channels in their marketing campaigns earned a 90% higher customer retention rate and 2.5x higher engagement and purchase rates.&nbsp;Omnichannel mostly starts with multichannel. Tuning of the transition requires closing gaps like:<ul><li>Identifying all sales touchpoints</li><li>Establishing a company-wide point of reference for product information,</li><li>Sync marketing and sales channels</li><li>Eliminating product content inconsistencies.</li></ul>Omnichannel marketing needs synchronization of all tech stack components, enabling a fast and smooth flow of information between all channels.&nbsp;<h3>Badass omnichannel experience? It won't work with run-of-the-mill technology</h3>Laptops, mobile devices, wearables, chatbots, virtual assistants, AI &amp; VR, and the phygital experiences on top of that — a number of channels and touchpoints is constantly emerging. Omnichannel retailers need to adapt quickly to changes in demand.&nbsp;Steve Jobs once said, "You've got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around". Today's reality of crafting excellent CX requires extreme agility. Sadly, traditional, legacy systems are not able to keep up with this fast pace. Implementation times are too long. Frequent changes are costly, and monolithic systems have limited scalability.&nbsp;That's why growth-oriented enterprises have started turning towards composable commerce and headless commerce approaches and their technological tenets, such as MACH architecture.&nbsp;According to the <a href="https://machalliance.org/insights/our-2022-research-shows-mach-adoption-is-high-on-the-agenda-for-tech-leaders">Enterprise MACHified' 2022 </a>study's findings, the shift to MACH is driven primarily by pressure to deliver CX improvements quickly. 82% of IT leaders are keeping up with customer demand, but only 52% can implement improvements at speed. Tech leaders see MACH technologies as the future of software architecture: 79% of survey respondents plan to increase their investments in MACH architecture (both within and beyond the next 12 months).<h3>Omnichannel loves headless (and APIs, too)</h3><h4>Headless architecture means great flexibility&nbsp;</h4>Separating the front-end layer from the backend layer, which headless technology allows, means that an application can work without a native user interface. This dramatically enhances connectivity and interoperability between systems and channels.Companies can modify user interface design to fit specific contexts, language, channels, and culture-specific requirements, without reconfiguring everything on the tech side.&nbsp;<h4>API means great connectivity</h4>Headless architecture combined with APIs (application programming interfaces) creates a powerful launchpad to omnichannel. API-first software is fully designed to maximize connectivity between other systems, platforms, and marketing channels.For example, the <a href="https://machalliance.org/insights/MACH-based-product-information-management">MACH-based Product Information Management solution</a> (an engine for PxM strategy) equipped with hundreds of APIs and headless capabilities can offer unlimited flexibility to connect product data to any system, platform, or channel users need. Those features can have a significant impact on retailers to create seamless omnichannel product experiences.&nbsp;<h4>Microservices never stop running</h4>Uber, Amazon, Netflix, Etsy – what do these platforms have in common? They are built on a microservices architecture. In recent years, both tech giants and smaller companies have discovered the benefits of microservices, and this trend continues to grow. Experts predict that microservices architecture will be worth $3.1 billion worldwide by <a href="https://www.dataversity.net/a-brief-history-of-microservices/">2026</a>.Microservices are resilient and can scale with demand because the entire architecture is based on modules, each of which can be managed and deployed independently. To make changes, you do not have to rewrite the entire codebase.&nbsp;If you want to develop or update some features, your software will not stop running. Microservice architecture helps organizations build and develop business applications for faster time to market, higher scalability, and lower cost of ownership.To find out more about omnichannel, headless revolution, and great customer experience, especially in creating holiday campaigns for e-commerce, download the whitepaper “<a href="https://www.bluestonepim.com/learn/getting-ready-for-e-commerce-peak-seasons">Getting Ready For E-commerce Peak Seasons</a>”.Author’s bioZuzanna Patocka is a content writer and tech journalist at Bluestone PIM, where she explains meanders of product information management, e-commerce tips, and CX in simple terms. In a previous life, she juggled the topics as an editor and multitasker PR specialist until the tech space won her heart.<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/blt7ef1e042f2876a67/63c019fdf3e90e157fe406d6/Zuzanna_Patocka.png"/>

Creating a Seamless Omnichannel Experience: Add It to Your New Year's Resolutions

The ecommerce world changes according to consumer behaviour. As consumers change how and where they shop—via mobile devices, social media, kiosks—it became clear that legacy systems could not keep up. Customer demands were ever-changing. Traditional systems are rigid and do not offer the flexibility or adaptability that is needed for today’s consumers. Changes take too long or are too complex.Headless commerce is really about being unrestricted, assembling seamless customer experiences across an array of channels and having the ability to change quickly.Jamie &amp; Alan explore 5 key areas an OMS can increase agility and reduce risk in your headless commerce approach:1 - Real-time inventory visibility - where and how do you use this to maximise your reach across channels2 - Control what you sell and where - in each channel, marketplace or region3 - Share inventory and order data - from a multitude of other systems4 - Improve product availability - match supply and demand in an increasingly complex shopping world5 - Phased rollouts - how to de-risk an OMS project<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/603891555?badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479&h=acb06e9028?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0"></iframe>

The Role of Order Management in Headless Commerce

I am the first to run for the hills when faced with stereotypical male / female classification of leadership skills. Over two decades in the male dominated tech world quite naturally lead to gender comparison fatigue.So when I was asked to do a write-up on last year's founding period of the Alliance from a female leadership perspective, I will admit I hesitated. I made a cup of coffee and reflected. Indeed, there were moments when female energy may have made a difference during the founding phase. So here is my personal rear window view on founding the MACH Alliance.<h1>Empathy and Thoroughness</h1>The MACH Alliance started in a London Pub, late summer 2019, when Matt Bradbeer, I and a few of the founding members came together to discuss how to work together better to help enterprise organizations see the business value in moving to a composable technology paradigm.I listened to the commercial folks talk about technical features and feasibility. It is easy to conclude that technical buying teams generally just didn't get the power of microservices. It is much harder to acknowledge that moving to composable is, primarily, a shift in philosophy. Consequently, for the success of a MACH transformation, organizational aspects around people and process are critical. Maybe even more so than the technical ones. I encouraged the round to face reality: This isn’t so much about features. It is about people being scared of change.When we zoomed out, we collectively knew: Enterprises are people too. People make decisions based on emotions. Change is scary, especially if the outcome is perceived to be uncertain. A fundamental change as moving to a composable business requires courage as well as a clear roadmap of the path ahead.This was the birthing hour of the MACH Alliance mandate: giving the dream makers in enterprises the map, the tools and the peer support for their journey. On the plane back to Amsterdam, I wrote to Kelly Goetsch and things developed from there.<h1>Active Listening and persevere through rejection</h1>It became clear to us founding members very quickly that in order for the alliance to be meaningful, it had to be vendor agnostic. The higher goal of education and enablement requires ditching your company agenda at the door, thinking from the perspective of the people at an enterprise. The risk of falling into the trap of self-promotion was real and so we consciously decided to found an NPO.A recent American Psychology Association article calls out that “[...] female leaders tended to be more democratic, collaborative, and participative than male leaders—that is, they more often invited input from others and attempted to build consensus [...]. Women thus did more of what is sometimes called “leading from behind,” that is, working with others to reach collective decisions.” And there certainly was a lot of that - countless calls with trusted peers at software vendors, agencies, with customers and analysts. Some fell in love with our baby right away, but many were sceptical.From the polite “We have other priorities right now.” over the non-committal “yeah… .no… well maybe…” to one analyst telling me ‘Oh my goodness Sonja, don’t....’ : rejection was felt heavily. I breathed, I cried and then I detached myself from the feedback. Because I respected each and every person I spoke to for their experience and expertise, so consequently their arguments were meaningful.On the bright side, there were the extreme positive reactions. “This is really what we´ve been waiting for.” And from “I want to be part of it now. What do I have to do?” to “You are really brave, I wish I had your courage.”Not internalizing, not taking it personal, seeing it as advice rather than judgement gave me the opportunity to sharpen the story, understand the objections and work on my own arguments. It allowed me to become really clear on what I personally and we as the MACH Alliance wanted, which proved to be extremely important going forward.<h1>Admit and pivot when you are wrong</h1>One such critical moment of active listening came just a few weeks before the original launch date in February 2020. Originally, we had planned to go live with far less members and build out from there. With the best intentions, we sent an email to those companies that we had been talking to, letting them know that the MACH Alliance was about to launch and inviting them to join. In my naivety, I anticipated excitement - so when one CTO of a potential member got very harsh with me on the phone, I was very much in shock. I remember pacing up and down the porch, letting his anger rain down on me. Through all his frustration, I somehow managed to still hear him out and hear what he had to say.When debriefing with my fellow-founding gents, the conversation quickly became defensive. The conversation did not revolve around WHAT was said, but HOW. An endearing protectiveness of me as a person was paired with a stubborn ‘we don’t need them’ counterreaction. It felt like mediation by proxy.We refocused the conversation to the cause: an Alliance to bring people together rather than dividing, one to give those who have driven change and appreciating the passion that was clearly underlying the heated debate. This CTO had a point. One we better listened to - no matter the delivery.In hindsight, this was a pivotal moment for the alliance. The request was to not launch with a few members only. But that only with a larger group, a more diverse group, only with direct competition in the MACH Alliance right from the start, would we be perceived as the vendor neutral and not-for-profit organization that we are. Perception is reality. This coincided with the start of the first pandemic and we decided to push the launch forward to June - which at the time seemed like a reasonable timeframe for the world to get back to normal. We listened, we pivoted and launched with a dozen of launching members. I am confident that this change was instrumental for the rapid success of the MACH Alliance. It was able to take a step back and listen, even though the initial response was to argue back or call it off.<h1>Ladies, dare to take the lead</h1>Female leadership matters - not just in an alliance like ours, but across the board. In the MACH Alliance, we are continuously striving for more diversity in all its facets.We are honored to have some fantastic ladies in charge, like Natalie Gross and Leoni Jannsen who made launch magic happen. Like Gordana Vuckovic as Head of Growth Council, Anna Hopp as Head of Community Council, Jasmin Guthmann as Head of Marketing Council, Pascale Dewane as Operations Manager and Nina Jonker-Voelker who made the first MACHathon ever happen. These women are rockstars and I am thankful for getting a chance to work with them and all the other hard working ladies in the councils.And if you think ‘Hey, tech is still for guys’ - you may be as surprised as I was by this recent Harvard Business Review study that found that “Women were rated more positively on 13 of the 19 competencies in our assessment that comprise overall leadership effectiveness. Men were rated more positively on one competency — technical/professional expertise — but the difference was not statistically significant.”So If you are not yet involved: Resist the urge to say ‘no’ and dare to take an active role in the MACH Alliance. Join our councils, become an Ambassador - go SHAPE the future of technology.Author: Sonja Keerl, Co-Founder and Vice President, MACH Alliance

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How female powers played an essential part in the founding of the MACH Alliance

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act withyesterday’s logic.” –&nbsp;Peter DruckerTypically, when an enterprise is looking to upgrade their technology they put out an RFP, hire a consultant to help guide the process and seek recommendations from their peers. Today, the MACH Alliance’s seal of certification is helping that process and giving enterprises confidence they are choosing best-in-class vendors that can deliver future-proof technology.The MACH Alliance created the certification process to help identify software vendors and integrators who embrace MACH philosophies and principles and offer Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud native SaaS and Headless services. They have to meet a specific set of criteria to get the certification.Why MACH certification mattersSome certifications exist to ensure proper payment for IP or to show the authenticity of an acquired piece – as with paintings and jewelry. Most certifications though are designed to provide proof an individual or company has training and expertise in a particular subject or field. MACH certification is the latter. It provides enterprises with an added level of protection by confirming the vendor understands MACH and can deliver on their promises. In that way, it’s like an insurance policy that adds value by guaranteeing future proof technology.Choosing MACH certified vendors ensures:* Composable Connectability - Tech buyers can rest assured that other applications connect easily through API* Infinite Scalability - Cloud-native ensures seamless rolling upgrades that don’t require human intervention* Ultimate swap-ability - Companies can easily add and replace software, and make changes on the fly without disrupting front end UX/UI* Adaptability/Any place, any head - The functionality of the software can be used with multiple front ends* Flexibility &amp; Transparency - Prevents vendor lock-in, allowing companies to stay in charge of their own technology and to be able to respond to any situation<ul></ul>While there’s been a lot of talk in the market about Microservices, Cloud (native), API’s and Headless, with reference to the above qualities, the MACH Alliance recognizes that the newness and complexity of technology has also created confusion with buyers. We love that the market sees MACH as an ambition and as the clear direction for the future and want to assist in giving buyers confidence in the solutions they choose. That’s why we are actively working to certify companies that are truly MACH today and can inherently insure all the above.<a href="https://www.machalliance.com/application-member">Software Vendors (ISVs), System Integrators and Enablers </a>are invited to check whether they would be compliant and eligible for certification.Why NowMACH architecture provides organizations with an open, composable and scalable foundation that enables the use of agile development methods. It gives IT teams the freedom to build, test, and implement tools and features quickly and easily. Speed is truly the key to business survival today – and COVID and an unstable economy has only reinforced its importance. Companies that respond quickly to new technological requirements created by world events are the ones that are thriving right now.The MACH Alliance, a non-profit, with over 80 members, felt compelled to create an organization to support non-tech brands navigating digital transformation. The Alliance is vendor agnostic and provides resources, education and guidance to help others make the best technology decisions possible. The goal is to support the future of business by spearheading enterprise transition to future-proof technology. MACH is the future logic, the new standard for tech to be adaptable in times of turbulence and change.

MACH Certification: A Seal of Confidence

While digital transformation is top of mind for almost every enterprise CEO, few would think a cloud-native B2B eCommerce company would need to launch a digital transformation journey after only 7 years in business. Zoro.com did.“It’s almost unheard of for a company to need to upgrade so quickly,” says Tim Daneliuk, Zoro’s Director of Architecture. He joined the company in March 2018 to help lead the technical transformation. The issue, he explains, was that the business was such a high-speed success that they were on track to expand from offering about a million products (Stock Keeping Units - SKUs) to offering 5 million by the end of 2020. “To get to that scale and still deliver an exceptional customer experience, Zoro needed flexibility in its architecture.”When Zoro launched in May 2011, their mission was to deliver an eCommerce site that could support the needs of medium and small industrial buyers. Their strategy was to capture the customer by providing a fast, easy way to procure critical Maintenance, Repair, and Operations (MRO) goods.From the outset, Zoro understood that these buyers are not typically technology-centric. So the team designed a site focused on the needs of the industrial buyer. “These buyers are busy fixing and running things. They want to find, buy, and get what they need quickly, and move on with their day.”The site, which debuted in 2011 with 180,000 SKUs, quickly generated sales. Daneliuk attributes its instant popularity to its high-touch customer service, rapid fulfillment, and the fact that it carried hard-to-find items. “Zoro’s vision was to give industrial and business buyers the same low-friction experience that had become the norm for consumer purchases.”The difference, though, is that Zoro is not a traditional third-party marketplace. The customer’s entire journey is with Zoro. From finding the goods, to ordering, to delivery, through customer support, the customer gets a “Zoro experience”—regardless of who actually ships the products. Goods arrive in Zoro packaging, with Zoro paperwork. Daneliuk notes, “One of our competitive distinctions is that customers go one place for everything. In fact, our customer service organization consistently gets top marks from our buyers.”From day one, Zoro experienced rapid growth. They continually added new SKUs, gained new customers, and hired more staff. By the end of 2014, they had added a range of traditional office products that customers needed to run their business, and by 2016, the site had hit the 1 million SKU mark.However, by 2018, the Zoro technology platform started to show stress fractures. “Our system was struggling to keep up with the scale of our increasing sales volume. We became a victim of our own success.” Late in the year, the issue became a front-and-center concern. The company announced plans to create an “Endless Aisle” of goods by offering Zoro’s platform to new partner suppliers. Daneliuk recalls, “We were basically told that we were going to bring in hundreds of new suppliers and millions of new SKUs, and that we needed a platform that would enable, and scale, to accommodate this.” He laughs, “No pressure at all.”“To make it happen, it was critical to have not only funding, but an executive team that embraces risk,” says Daneliuk. “Luckily, we had both. Our President, Kevin Weadick, told us, ‘Move fast. We know this is hard. You’re going to mess some things up. But if you do, do it quickly, fix it quickly, and move on.’” He says this attitude, and the culture it cultivated at Zoro, was key to his ability to accomplish their first digital transformation project in a mere nine months.At the time, Zoro’s backend was a monolith that handled front-end eCommerce, financials, and supply chain fulfillment. So, the first problem to tackle was to decouple the guest buying experience from that system. “We set out to build a set of microservices that could fully price and take guest shopper orders independently,” he explains. “We didn’t know it at the time, but all the cool kids were calling our new design ‘Headless eCommerce’—in our minds, we were just making changes to the architecture to improve our customer experience.”By early 2019, the Zoro team had started an API, microservices, and automation journey. The existing staff was critical to the process because they understood the current system. But Daneliuk realized Zoro also needed additional internal support and external vendors who specialized in APIs and microservices. “I wanted practical architects who could do more than just design stuff. I looked for people with one foot in the implementation and one foot in the design world.” Zoro also looked for vendors that delivered on their promises. “I’ve seen too many consultants come into companies, spend millions of dollars, and leave without delivering real solutions. So we required our potential vendors to do proof of concept as part of the qualification process. They had to take a fairly simple problem and show us a running version. We were a tough sell, I suppose.”Over the next nine months, the Zoro team took the things they knew about APIs, microservices, automation, and databases and figured out how to bolt them together to work for Zoro. Daneliuk notes that even when the new system was ready, they didn’t just flip the switch and hope for the best. “We knew there would be hardening to do. You rarely hear about hardening, but with a big, complex system like ours, built at this speed, you don’t know what you don’t know. Hardening exposes that.”To harden the system, he explains, you begin to slowly throw volume and traffic at it. “You start at 10% on the new system and 90% on the old and keep adjusting the amount going to each. This stress testing of the system exposes the flaws in the environment, the things you missed, and the ability of the system to run at scale.”Daneliuk reinforces multiple times that the commitment of leadership was critical to transformation. “The main reason we were able to do what we did and do it so fast was because of their mindset toward true transformational improvement.” He shares a story that happened as the new system was about to be fully released. “I was sitting with Andy Goodfellow (Zoro’s CTO) when I found out there was a problem that would prevent full 100% traffic flow just one day before it was supposed to go live. Andy notified Zoro’s President, Kevin Weadick, via text and his response was simply, ‘We’re learning.’” Daneliuk shakes his head, “That attitude is extraordinary and incredibly rare. Both Andy and Kevin were true advocates who understood the complexity and risks of this journey and stood by us as the work unfolded.”It took five months to identify, fix, and fully harden the new system. The results, though, exceeded expectations. “Not only did we solve an immediate problem—decoupling guest buying from the backend systems—more importantly, we created a platform for the future. Now, everything in our next generation has a place to run.” He points out another big win was getting the guest checkout process down to 5 seconds. “That’s the magic number customers notice.” Daneliuk notes, “The system has scaled as expected and, most importantly, protected our customers’ ability to ‘get on with their day’.”It’s been more than a year since the initial project delivered the first microservices, and Daneliuk recognizes Zoro still has a long way to go on their journey. While he’s proud Zoro solved the guest checkout problem internally, he says they’re not going to try to do the rest of the MACH transformation themselves. “We are going to buy a product, partner with a vendor, and enable the full eCommerce buying experience with our own customer master and headless implementation.”Even though it was difficult, he believes launching the journey internally was the right choice. “We made a point to keep people across Zoro informed about what we were doing. Ultimately, it spurred a change in thinking that has spread across the organization. Headless, APIs, and microservices are now common in the Zoro vernacular. Today, not only does our guest checkout run on microservices via an API, so does our search abstraction, and some of our supply chain capability.”While Zoro has yet to recognize the full benefits of MACH-driven composable architecture, Daneliuk feels they are well on their way. “The cool thing is, when we solved the guest checkout problem, we also solved payments and a large part of cart management, tax, and shipping calculations. Our headless journey won’t be easy, but it will be easier because we already have the frameworks in place that do all these things.”Words of WisdomWorking as an engineer, architect, and IT exec for more than 30 years, Daneliuk has a few observations which have guided his decisions and shaped his career.· Never build infrastructure unless you are solving a business problem at the same time. Keep the customer in mind ahead of the “roads and bridges.”· Never cede control of a project to a third party. The governance of a project belongs to the buyer.· If you hire well and hire people who know things you don’t, you’ll always be successful. Never settle just to fill an opening.· Technology is complex and people are complicated. Plan for the ongoing care of both.Knowledge Comes from Experience“You get good at something by being bad at it first.” — Tim Daneliuk1 – Involve stakeholders from every department from the very beginning.“You may not think you need input from customer service, accounting, operations, etc. until you have something to show them. Not true. We could have avoided some of our problems during the transition and hardened more quickly had we known more about the intricate details of departmental processes and needs. In retrospect, I should have involved all the stakeholders earlier than I did.”2 – To transform at scale, you need multiple SI vendors with expertise in specific areas.“It takes different vendors to solve the range of problems found in a system of Zoro’s complexity. For example, we discovered we needed one kind of vendor to handle the microservices and API components, but we needed a different vendor who was an expert in our ERP.”3 – Focus on the essential technologies that matter most first.“If something isn’t important, just pick a solution that works and live with it for a while. When we started, we knew we wanted a world-class API gateway. Ultimately, we realized we didn’t need it yet—it was just too early—so we picked an open-source gateway. Now that everything else is running, we have migrated to an enterprise-class API product.”Finding the Right MACH MatchIn their quest to find the expertise and support needed to solve Zoro’s technology problems, the Zoro team met with more than a dozen vendors. “I told the same story over and over to the point where I was sick of hearing it,” Daneliuk laughs. He points to four qualities that can give a vendor the competitive edge.(1)Show an ability to understand our needs quickly.“We’re going to tell you our story and where we need to go. If you can’t quickly grasp the problem, then you don’t understand our space.”(2)Speak and act with credibility.“Explain what you are good at and how you think you can help. Be ready with a plan for how you’ll work with us, as well as a transition plan and an exit plan.”(3)Have a partner mentality.“Promote your willingness to collaborate. Embrace partnering behavior—acknowledge in the beginning you’ll be doing most of the work and we’ll do less, but by the end we’ll do the majority and rely very little on you.”(4)Be honest.“Don’t promote skills and capabilities you don’t have. Sell us on your real expertise and be willing to admit it if something isn’t in your wheelhouse. Tell the truth. Be able to say ‘No, we can’t do that.’ That’s how you impress us.”

Zoro’s Composable Tech Captures the Customer

We are on the verge of massive changes in software development, and eCommerce. Consumers demand seamless UX no matter where they are and what devices they use. To stay relevant, enterprise organizations must re-think their approach to technology and find a way to mould it to their individual business needs. But how? All of these solutions are currently available, and we highlight them in the newly published eBook "MACH Approach to eCommerce."<a href="https://www.vuestorefront.io/resources/ebooks/mach-approach-to-ecommerce?utm_source=machalliance.org&utm_medium=external-blog&utm_campaign=blogpost-mach-ebook">Download eBook "MACH Approach to eCommerce"</a>Consumers' expectations are changing at breakneck speed, and "MACH" - which stands for Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS, and Headless solutions - is becoming the best possible way to meet these expectations. "MACH" is, however, not a sector-specific toolset ready to implement, but more of a new philosophy for building future-proof software systems.How can we be bold enough to use the phrase "future-proof" if we have already pointed out that consumer expectations change at breakneck speed? That is exactly the point. MACH doesn't pretend to be able to foresee the future and prepare for what comes next. This approach assumes the opposite, focusing on providing businesses with the agility to get them ready for whatever comes. How?Their general idea assumes that technology is used to serve the business, not the other way around. All of the units that an application consists of are focused around business goals and can be deployed or removed as needed, any time.However, this flexibility comes with some challenges. These are also discussed in the "MACH Approach to eCommerce" eBook. Even if we know that MACH solves many of the challenges companies face nowadays , we can’t suggest it’s a ‘magical cure’ for all problems or suggest that all businesses should consider that direction. We all know it is never that simple.Instead of promoting the MACH approach, we wanted to provide you with the information you need to make your own decisions.And so this eBook explains headless architecture. Find out about differences between headless and traditional CMS’s; why microservices may help your business to keep up with the consumers; see whether they are suitable for your organization; dive into details of real-live implementations of headless CMS’ based on<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/amplience">Amplience</a>'s&nbsp;experience; and - last but not least - read the stories of merchants moving towards a headless approach in the interviews with Jonathan Ribas, CTO at Zadig &amp; Voltaire and Halil Koklu, CTO at LoveCrafts.To make sure all topics are highlighted properly, we gathered all kind of knowledge from MACH Alliance members such as:<ul><li>EPAM</li><li>Fluent Commerce</li><li>Contentstack</li><li>BigCommerce</li><li>Valtech</li><li>commercetools</li><li>Cloudinary</li><li>Contentful</li><li>Amplience</li><li>Vue Storefront</li></ul>All of these household names are all pioneers and evangelists of the MACH approach and the best guarantee of the quality of content we hand you.<a href="https://www.vuestorefront.io/resources/ebooks/mach-approach-to-ecommerce?utm_source=machalliance.org&utm_medium=external-blog&utm_campaign=blogpost-mach-ebook">Download eBook "MACH Approach to eCommerce"</a>

"MACH Approach to eCommerce” - Get the First MACH Alliance eBook

<h4>Understanding the key criteria when evaluating and integrating composable solutions</h4>MACH architectures and approaches are becoming evermore mainstream as organizations need to maximize agility and embrace omnichannel. The ability to rapidly add or change technologies is key to meeting the ever-increasing demands on customer experience. MACH principles are foundational to driving interoperability between composable technologies.It’s not enough to choose the right headless and composable components. The interoperability, and how operations, orchestration and compatibility with existing technologies are also pivotal to the success of adopting composable architectures.While a composable architecture provides benefits that an enterprise can’t live without, it may also introduce a more complex evaluation process.This is why we today are releasing a new whitepaper, “How to evaluate and integrate composable technologies” which aims to help software architects quickly evaluate vendors adhering to MACH principles. It also describes how to integrate legacy components that cannot be migrated to a new solution.The whitepaper covers key priorities and concepts such as:<ul><li>Business fit and interoperability fit</li><li>Stability and longevity</li><li>Best-of-breed</li><li>Avoiding vendor lock-in</li><li>Modern architecture</li></ul>As well as specific execution steps:<ul><li>The “TIME” based approach to decision making</li><li>Approaches and architectures for working with legacy systems.</li></ul>This work is being produced by the <a href="https://machalliance.org/insights/phase-ii-of-the-mach-alliance-interoperability-standards">MACH Alliance Interoperability Task Force</a>, whose charter is to help organizations understand and implement MACH technologies. It is part of an ongoing series of assets and whitepapers for audiences ranging from executives to system architects.We’d love to get your feedback on the whitepaper! Write to us at <a href="mailto:info@machalliance.com">info@machalliance.com</a><hr/><h4 style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://register.machalliance.org/hubfs/How%20to%20evaluate%20and%20integrate%20composable%20solutions.pdf" style="text-align: center;" target="_blank">Download the whitepaper here</a></h4><hr/>

How to evaluate and integrate composable solutions: MACH Interoperability #1

We are pleased to close out 2020 having seen incredible traction in growth of <a href="https://machalliance.org/members">members</a> and <a href="https://machalliance.org/members#IndividualMembers">ambassadors</a> since our June inception. The MACH Alliance has signed on 24 members and 12 ambassadors, and many more are in the pipeline for early 2021. An astounding 70 companies have applied for membership and 50 for ambassadorship thus far.Attracting some of the most reputable company names in modern tech and beyond, our members meet a set of <a href="https://machalliance.org/blogdetail/bltfc0a3afbca44303e">certification standards </a>that embrace MACH philosophies and offer MACH-certified services. Businesses must be in full compliance in order to carry the certification seal.In addition to company members, our ambassador group brings together a powerful and diverse range of technologists all with a single vision for what futureproof technology looks like. The ambassadors are individual industry leaders who actively support and contribute to advance MACH technology and the tech standard.A Year of Progress2020 saw the pandemic as an immediate and irresistible catalyst for businesses across virtually every industry to digitize, though many were already on the path. With the need for businesses to be digitally agile in order to meet evolving end user demands, many IT and business leaders found the monolithic approach to architecture meant they simply could not adapt at the speed they needed. In those cases, businesses struggled this year. Conversely, those who had systems in place that enabled them to quickly pivot fared well given the circumstances of a pandemic world.The Appetite for Composable is SkyrocketingTake it from publicly listed MACH Alliance member companies like BigCommerce and EPAM who saw success this year. BigCommerce revenues were up 41% year over year in Q3 and the company stated it was one of their best quarters in its history. EPAM saw revenues increase nearly 11% year over year in Q3 attributing its success to an 'improving demand environment' as a trusted provider of digital solutions.Growth like that isn't happenstance during an economic downturn; it's driven by a business need, and we believe a big part of that need lies in what MACH architecture can deliver. And from within MACH system integrators, we know that enterprise inquiries have shifted to composable and MACH, up 500% compared to January.Looking Ahead to 2021We've seen movement in the direction of the MACH approach steadily becoming mainstream with even the biggest of technology giants buying into MACH. Take, for example, Salesforce's acquisition of Mobify in September. Mobify was a MACH-certified company at the time of our June launch and provides a headless storefront experience that allows brands to fully and quickly customize their commerce. The $60M deal meant Mobify would provide Salesforce Commerce Cloud with a more modernized and flexible storefront solution that, in turn, would empower brands to customize their commerce experience more rapidly and frequently.The acquisition temporarily extends Salesforce Commerce Cloud’s relevancy. However, they and other legacy enterprise vendors are still faced with the issue of outdated tech stacks that are decidedly not MACH compliant and are <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/your-legacy-software-vendors-lying-you-kelly-goetsch/">fundamentally unable to become MACH compliant</a>.From the Outside InWe've seen from experience that the front-end of enterprise software typically modernizes the fastest. That's been the case with eCommerce since the 2000s and it makes good sense: that's what the user engages with. We are now seeing a shift from the outside in where back-end systems are following the lead of the front-end. We believe order management and CRM are the systems likely to follow in 2021. We'll continue to work our way down the stack from there.ERP is Late to the GameIn terms of ERPs, they have been efficient operational back bones, but their shortcoming is that those systems are built for consistent operations, not for change.There's a great deal of resistance when ERP’s change from both the builders and the vendors. They are not in the cloud properly yet, and when they are, or when they move in that direction, the upside seems unclear, as we've seen <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/09/erp_cloud_sap_ukisug/">referenced recently by ERP leaders</a> who call into question the benefits of migrating to the cloud and generally how the cloud "works." “Adaptability comes from the microservices and API-first thinking in modern tech, that way the cloud opens up for massive adaptability”, adds Matt Bradbeer, board member of the MACH Alliance and Senior Client Director at EPAM. “We believe there is really no reason why making ERP composable would be harder than making a commerce platform composable. We're starting to see an emerging new set of solutions that sit on top of ERPs with microservices built in. Smaller, more nimble players are ushering in this move toward a more composable set-up.”It will take time before the move to a MACH approach in the ERP vendor community is a mainstream flow, but some already <a href="https://searcherp.techtarget.com/podcast/Unit4-ERP-cloud-vision-is-impressive-but-can-it-compete">seem to get it more</a> than others.Balancing the Rate of AdoptionIn terms of regional adoption, there exists quite a disparity. According to MACH expert and Partner &amp; Director at Boston Consulting Group, Peter Burggraaff, China is about five years ahead in composable discussions compared to Europe and the U.S."The gap will increase, I suspect, over the next few years, as China is already ahead and able to transition more quickly," Burggraaff said. "Adoption of a MACH architecture and the shift to composable is a long term conversation that takes time and vision, so other countries will have some catching up to do."There is hope, though, that the catching up can be expedited through innovation.ERP won't always be monolithic. Innovation is coming at a promising speed whereby start-ups are taking on parts of ERP and recomposing them.In that spirit, the MACH Alliance is hosting their first ever <a href="https://machalliance.org/MACHathon">MACHathon</a> January 22-29 so participants can showcase their most out-of-the-box ideas and prove how quickly they can be turned into reality with MACH technology and composable architectures. There are still a few spots left for participants, but they are going fast. If you´re interested in joining, look here: <a href="https://machalliance.org/MACHathon">Machathon || Enterprise MACHified.</a>. The Alliance is here to help usher in the adoption of those big ideas and be the environment and ecosystem that helps MACH take off.Here's to a year of moving at MACH speed. Stay hungry and healthy!

MACH Alliance Closes Out 2020 with 24 Members and 12 Ambassadors

Over the past three years, the MACH Alliance has grown from an idea to a movement, to an established non-profit organization with more than <a href="https://machalliance.org/members">80 international members</a> dedicated to advocating for open, best-of-breed technology ecosystems. The Alliance was initiated as a response to the paradigm shift in enterprise technology that the founders were witnessing, as businesses embraced Microservices based, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS and Headless technologies to propel their digital experience. The response we’ve seen has made it quite clear - and exciting - that this shift is happening even faster than we originally anticipated.See our latest research on MACH <a href="https://machalliance.org/newsroom/mach-global-research-2023">adoption</a> trends.As true proponents of MACH technologies, we believe the Alliance has a responsibility to the market, especially to enterprise buyers, to approach MACH certification with a high degree of objectivity and scrutiny. It can be incredibly hard for a buyer to cut through industry jargon, particularly from big companies with loud marketing, to understand if a vendor or agency is truly following composable architecture principles. Our certification is our word that we have evaluated the technology, references, and roadmap of a member and they have proven they meet all the criteria for the Alliance to recommend them as part of a future-proof technology stack. Since our June 2020 launch, we have had over 170 companies - System Integrators (SI), Independent Software Vendors (ISV) and Enablers - apply and about half have achieved certification.SI, ISV and Enabler certification criteria and application forms are available <a href="https://machalliance.org/application-member">here</a>.<h2></h2>We hold ourselves accountable to independent evaluationThe Alliance is a self-regulated organization and it is in every member’s best interest that we hold ourselves accountable to an independent, fact-based evaluation process. We have direct competitors sitting on the board, as well as in nearly every technology segment that is represented in the Alliance. For instance, our headless CMS members regularly go head-to-head in sales cycles but that does not stop the Alliance from certifying all of them. The value of a MACH certification does not come from market exclusivity, it comes from enterprise buyers’ trust in the Alliance to ensure that every certified member will enable them to accelerate, to innovate and to ultimately differentiate with their digital initiatives. In such a connected industry, earning that trust requires an unbiased and transparent review process. To ensure this, we have put in place a few essential rules:First, each applicant is reviewed by our Admissions Panel, made up of individuals from the Growth Council (evaluating from a business standpoint), the Technology Council and the Executive Board. The Admissions Panel completes an in-depth review of the information provided by the applicant and, as a critical part of the process, speaks to reference customers to ensure all accepted Alliance members provide a high quality solution in real-world applications.To avoid conflicts of interest, ISV applications are reviewed by panel members from our SI members and vice-versa. So if a search vendor applies for MACH Alliance membership, no other search vendor will be decisive in the evaluation. This is primarily to protect the competitive advantage of the applicant, but it is also crucial to protect the neutral nature of the Alliance.Secondly, we provide a clear definition of MACH compliance in our certification criteria and strictly adhere to them. As a non-commercial organization, our brand is our ultimate value. To protect the Alliance brand we err on the side of caution.We believe this rigorous approach to qualification is particularly important to help enterprise buyers navigate the shifting technology market. Nearly every enterprise software vendor has the mission - and most of them the clear roadmap - to move away from legacy towards a MACH architecture. We strongly encourage this transition and understand that doing so requires a large amount of organizational and commercial change.The Alliance has recently created an additional <a href="https://www.machalliance.com/assets/pdf/Membership_Additional_Terms_for_Legacy_Vendors.pdf">set of terms</a> to help guide applicants in the transition to becoming a MACH vendor, which at a high-level includes:- All products currently offered for sale must be MACH- Non-MACH products cannot be marketed- Last analyst evaluation from Gartner or Forrester must have been of MACH product(s) only- Cannot be doing feature releases of non-MACH product- Documentation and other technical collateral in support of existing legacy non-MACH products may still be available, but nothing is available in terms of thought leadership on the non-MACH product<h2></h2>Our guarantee to enterprise buyersAs the market evolves our criteria needs to evolve to both champion this shift to MACH and preserve the authenticity of a MACH certification. We aim to be transparent about any refinements to certification criteria.For example, our initial criteria required that every single product a software vendor offered had to be fully MACH compliant. We then saw a handful of vendors that were far along in the process of discontinuing their legacy products and were exclusively promoting and selling MACH products, but still had a few long term customers holding out on their legacy platforms. We believe it is fair for these vendors to be eligible for membership if they meet our ARR/license revenue criteria:<ul><li>100% of new license revenue in the past 6 months must be from MACH-based product(s) only (excludes additional CPUs/capacity from existing customers).</li><li>A minimum of 70% of total ARR in the past 6 months must be from MACH-based product(s)</li></ul>On the opposite end of the spectrum, in 2021 two of our certified members were successfully acquired by larger software companies and have subsequently lost their MACH certification. This is to ensure that vendors cannot use a single MACH compliant offering to “MACH-wash” the marketing for the rest of their portfolio.The MACH Alliance asks vendors, SIs and Enablers to apply for membership. In certain cases, it’s crystal clear that a technology fits with the Alliance and the applicant is accepted in a matter of weeks. Other cases have required intense scrutiny of resources and references with evaluations lasting months or longer.Our list of certified members is not a comprehensive view of every MACH-compliant enterprise player. There are vendors and agencies who comply with the full criteria but have not yet gone through the motions to apply. Our guarantee to enterprise buyers is not that we have evaluated every solution on the market, but that the members we have certified have provided extensive proof that their solutions are fully MACH and future-proof.We’re incredibly grateful to all our members who contribute their time, resources, and financial support to help the MACH Alliance thrive. We’re also grateful for the many applicants we spoke to who are well on their way to becoming composable but have not yet reached the critical threshold for MACH certification. Through these conversations especially, we’ve gained a deeper understanding of what it takes to shift from monolith to MACH and appreciate the honesty and transparency of the organizations on this journey. We’ve seen many exciting roadmaps, and we look forward to the reapplication of vendors and integrators as they execute on their MACH strategies.The past few years have demonstrated just how critical flexibility is for an enterprise business. The MACH Alliance’s mission is to help enterprise organizations to understand how and why a paradigm shift towards composable technologies offers the flexibility to deliver business outcomes better and faster. The goal of our certification program is to identify those technologies that will help them on this path. We are committed to staying true to that goal and will continue to set a high bar for MACH certification to ensure we provide value to our members and retain the trust of enterprise buyers.

What Does it Mean to be MACH Certified?

We live in troubled times. From layoffs across tech companies, to slowing consumer spending, to bank runs, it’s difficult to predict what the world will look like tomorrow and to decide what to prioritize.For e-commerce companies trying to decide how to operate in the current economy, there are a lot of question marks. Do you cut all new initiatives to conserve capital? Do you continue your digital transformation as planned? Do you hunker down and wait for the next crazy punch life will throw at us (I’m personally betting on bear attacks)?Since none of us know what tomorrow will look like, good or bad, a safe bet is choosing an initiative that works well in both kinds of economies. Something that has strong, positive ROI in a good economy or a bad one. It’s easier said than done, but e-commerce companies that are large enough to have significant clickstream data should consider on-site product discovery and search as the next step in their digital transformation.<h3>Why Product Discovery?</h3>The reason is simple: product discovery is a front-end customer experience investment and about as close as you can get to the money; there is little question that it directly impacts top-line revenue. Rearchitecting your entire e-commerce platform or investing in back-end optimizations make for a harder business case on a tight budget. Not because these aren’t worthwhile investments (they are) or won’t drive business results at all (they will), but simply because it’s more difficult to draw a straight line from investment to ROI in a relatively short time frame.Product search and discovery is one of the few places in your digital transformation where you can very literally measure the ROI directly.If you A/B test the metrics that matter to you (like purchases or revenue) by sending some of your users to your current engine and some of them to a new engine you believe may be better, you can measure exactly how much revenue per user each generates and what that investment means for your top and bottom line. If the ROI is big enough — if you can trade $1 for $10+ — that’s a good trade to make, whether the economy is good, bad, or neutral. You don’t have to predict the economic future. You just have to choose the right vendor.<h3>Where to Start</h3>Choosing the right product discovery vendor for your needs isn’t easy, and the evaluation process will require some work, but it’s easier today than it’s ever been because of the number of people who have tried each of the major vendors and the material available online about each. Here are a few suggestions for how to get started:<ul><li>The MACH Alliance recently put together<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/machalliance_the-mach-alliance-is-bringing-together-mach-certified-activity-7029419244551335937-kaZ_"> a panel of its member search vendors</a> to speak about how they see the future and what’s important to them.</li><li>More importantly, e-commerce is a small world. For just about any pair of vendors, you’ll be able to find someone who’s evaluated both, tried both, or even A/B-tested them against each other. Ask the vendors you’re looking at for this information. They should be able to help, and if they can’t or don’t want to, that might be a sign they aren’t the right vendor.</li><li>Finally, and most importantly, on-site product discovery and search is an area where a vendor should be able to prove to you how their solution will drive an ROI you feel happy with. Ask them for this evidence, and don’t accept anything less. Don’t just let them sell you on marketing materials and a fancy demo. Make them prove it.</li></ul>The additional nice component to the logic of provable ROI in product discovery is that it’s not just true of search — it’s true of every place on your site, mobile apps, and other channels where you show products. Whether it’s ranking and personalizing a category page, building a product finder that asks users questions to help them discover the right product for them, or showing recommended products to cross-sell and upsell on-site or in emails, the same logic applies.But you don’t have to do all of them at once. Taking a step towards product discovery optimization is low risk, measurable ROI, and if it works, there are immediate and clear places you can double down, often with the same vendor and with less integration work. And that’s not even mentioning the omnichannel opportunities that are possible if things are going well with your vendor of choice.<h3>The Bottom Line: Top-Line Revenue</h3>None of this is to say that on-site product discovery and search are the only important part of a digital transformation. A best-in-class customer experience requires a best-in-class e-commerce platform, PIM, CMS, and other components that fill out your tech stack of choice. The question in today’s economic environment is simply what to do next and where to prioritize.There are lots of good choices, but if proving ROI is critical — if you have to show that the initiative more than pays for itself and helps justify the rest of your digital transformation — product discovery and search is one of the very few places where that’s possible.Author: Eli Finkelshteyn, Founder and CEO at Constructor

Start Your E-commerce Transformation with Search and Discovery

Forward-looking organizations are turning towards a composable approach that gives them agility and a “DIY mindset” in composing their tech stacks with best-of-breed solutions. The changes occur from the smallest particle – master, and product data.As Gartner indicates in its newest “Hype Cycle for Data and Analytics Governance, 2022”, organizations seek to deliver the value of becoming data-driven. There is a growing need for effective master data management of product information for different business areas. The trend of MDM is in an early mainstream stage as the expected time to the plateau is less than two years.Master data management (MDM) solutions and product information management (PIM) solutions are complementary. Many PIM systems already have built-in MDM to ensure there is one source of master data.<h3>Product information, an elementary particle of digital commerce</h3>To realize the importance of product information's quality is to step into shoppers’ shoes. Photos, product descriptions, whitepapers, or testimonials are different product data types. In digital commerce, customers interact through them on various touch points before they see and experience tangible products. In most cases, the purchase decision is based on the quality of product information (its completeness, compelling written copy, etc.)Product-centric companies need to keep an eye on their data and manage them smartly to react quickly to changing customer behavior, enter new markets and add new channels. Modern automation solutions are significant once a company reaches 500+ SKUs (Stock Keeping Units). If e-commerce companies want to improve omnichannel strategy, launch products faster and control the growing volume of data, they should consider adding PIM software to their commerce stack.<h3>What is product information management (PIM) software?</h3>The main job of the PIM solution is to centralize, manage, enrich and publish product content in external channels, all in the most efficient way possible. It supports marketing, e-commerce, and IT teams in their everyday work with product information.PIM core capabilities enable comprehensive product information management, and they can include:<ul><li>team workflow,</li><li>business processes,</li><li>hierarchy management,</li><li>loading,</li><li>syncing,</li><li>modeling, and cleansing data,</li><li>distribution,</li><li>DAM,</li><li>MDM.</li></ul><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/blt291bfccd550d75e7/62ecf535d3b8a57004567013/ss-pim.png"/>A high-quality PIM solution can successfully support multi-channel retailers to overcome their main challenges. The result of efficient product information management is a better, more consistent product and customer experience across all sales and marketing channels, which can translate into increased traffic, conversion rates and customer satisfaction.<h3>Preparing for composable commerce</h3>Commerce based on a business-centric composable approach is increasingly entering the modern retail landscape. And it’s not just a buzzword coined by Gartner in 2020. 95% of <a href="https://www.elasticpath.com/resources/ebooks-white-papers-composable-commerce/state-composable-commerce-2021">Elastic Path's report</a> respondents agree that composable commerce is the approach enterprises should take. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of those "who are aware of composable commerce but not yet implemented it are likely to believe that in five years, most – if not all – companies will be on board."Companies that want to join the digital revolution are looking for modern technologies and remarkable tools. MACH architecture is one of the critical technologies that enable the implementation of composable commerce. According to <a href="https://machalliance.org/insights/our-2022-research-shows-mach-adoption-is-high-on-the-agenda-for-tech-leaders">MACH Alliance’s survey</a>, MACH adaptation is high on the agenda among tech leaders.<h3>How MACH skyrockets the PIM software capabilities?</h3>A product information management system based on MACH architecture fits other best-of-breed solutions like headless CMS, ERP, or DAM and can work with them within a composable ecosystem. With its help, enterprises can create a future-proof, scalable, and open digital stack.MACH tenets and benefits for businessThere are some key differences between ordinary PIM systems and MACH-based ones. Legacy monolithic PIM solutions are convenient for IT and business teams. However, they are often built on a single code base. That means if they get larger over time, the scalability may become limited, and the time of updates and adding new features be extended. MACH-based PIM offers unlimited scalability and agility, resulting from the implemented technology solutions:<ul><li>Microservices-based– thanks to that, PIM software enables fast reaction to technology trends, adding new features, and implementing innovation.</li></ul><ul><li>API-first – makes PIM easy to connect with existing IT components seamlessly and fast. If PIM is part of the API economy, users have unlimited flexibility to connect their product data stored to any system, platform, or channel.</li></ul><ul><li>Cloud-native SaaS – means that PIM was initially built in the cloud and offers a customer the full capabilities of cloud computing, such as elastic scalability, storage, and automatic updates. These benefits are essential, especially in cases such as the rapidly growing number of SKUs and peak sale seasons.</li></ul><ul><li>Headless – allows a free user interface design, significantly promoting omnichannel e-commerce.</li></ul><h3>Summary</h3>With the power of MACH technology, PIM software can support brands, retailers, and wholesalers in standard product information management procedures. Also, it can support business growth with long-term agility and enable customization.The newest ebook, “MACH-Based PIM. The Ultimate Guide for Tech Leaders” by Bluestone PIM, broadly explains how PIM based on MACH principles works in practice, what benefits it brings to businesses, and why it is worth an investment. The publication also includes a comparison of PIM types and frequently asked questions about the technical capabilities of PIM.The ebook is available for <a href="https://hubs.ly/Q01j1rPy0">download here</a> (ungated version).About the author:Zuzanna Patocka is a content writer and tech journalist at Bluestone PIM, where she explains meanders of product information management, e-commerce tips, and CX in simple terms. In a previous life, she juggled the topics as an editor and multitasker PR specialist until the tech space won her heart.<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/blt7ef1e042f2876a67/63c019fdf3e90e157fe406d6/Zuzanna_Patocka.png"/>

MACH-Based Product Information Management – a Step Towards Composable Commerce

<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/bltc26fe12fe02c25a7/614c6f46f6002c7a004967b7/Blog-banner-1440x1024-talon-one-dark.jpg"/>A dark store is a retail space that is set up to exclusively (or almost exclusively) focus on online shopping. It can be a ‘click and collect’ hub or a delivery fulfillment center that is optimized to manage online orders. A dark kitchen (or ‘ghost kitchen’) is the same idea, except it is a restaurant that operates exclusively online.In this article we will outline how dark stores emerged, why they’re here to say and what learnings you can take from the dark store concept to build a headless, omnichannel experience that’s industry-leading — even after the world opens back up fully.<h2>Come to the dark side</h2>The dark store concept is not new — <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/shortcuts/2014/jan/07/inside-supermarkets-dark-stores-online-shopping">the model has been around since at least 2014</a> – but it really came of age once customers become more familiar and at ease with doing their shopping online. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, many retailers and restaurants turned to dark stores/kitchens to survive when lockdown restrictions made in-person dining or shopping more difficult.“When Covid-19 hit and all our stores rapidly closed, we had millions worth of stock stuck in those locations. Fluent Commerce’s store fulfillment solution allowed us to convert our key locations into dark stores, and within a week we were able to move stock to customers. This outstanding turnaround wouldn’t have happened without the dedicated Fluent team. Thank you!”<a href="https://fluentcommerce.com/#:~:text=When%20Covid-19,team.%20Thank%20you!">Aaron Gard</a>Head of Digital, brandbank (Seed Heritage and French Connection)Now that dark stores and kitchens have established themselves in the customer-facing ecosystem, it seems like their popularity is not going to wane as the world begins to open back up. <a href="https://chainstoreage.com/report-us-q2-online-sales-318-account-145-retail-sales-2020?oly_enc_id=0339B0739001F4U&utm_source=omeda&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NL_CSA_Connected+Retail&utm_keyword=">Trends point to dark stores being a trend that will stay with us</a> now they’ve penetrated the market.<ul><li>14.5% of US retail sales in 2020 came from e-commerce.</li><li>Projected figures for 2024 estimate e-commerce sales will be 18.1% of total US retail sales.</li><li>E-commerce availability and hygiene considerations are increasing store switching behavior, with 17 percent of consumers shifting away from their primary store.</li><li><a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Retail/Our%20Insights/Adapting%20to%20the%20next%20normal%20in%20retail%20The%20customer%20experience%20imperative/Adapting-to-the-next-normal-in-retail-the-customer-experience-imperative-v3.pdf">Omnichannel models are also growing</a>: ‘click and collect’ grew 28 percent year-over-year in February, and grocery delivery is up by 57 percent.</li><li>In the same survey, some 56 percent of consumers said they’ll continue using click and collect once COVID-related restrictions ease, with 45 percent of consumers saying they plan to continue getting their groceries delivered.</li><li>Instacart <a href="https://www.talon.one/blog/how-dark-stores-are-changing-the-grocery-industry">achieved 3 years of projected growth</a> in just 3 months, with 500% year-over-year growth.</li></ul><h2>The next normal</h2>Within this wider shift towards online commerce, dark stores will have a large sway. The main reason for this is that dark stores and dark kitchens can provide the flexibility to experiment and iterate on business ideas. They’re a natural fit for the headless approach — think of it as decoupling the brick and mortar backend from the in-person shopping frontend and offering an online experience instead. Multiple ‘brands’ can operate from the one kitchen facility, and offerings can be scaled up or down based on demand.Some delivery food app operators measure how often users search for a given cuisine in an area, and how often they’re unsuccessful. <a href="https://marker.medium.com/how-a-shadow-army-of-ghost-kitchens-took-over-americas-restaurants-b7ac1a099c8c">If there’s a high volume of searches for ‘Mexican’ food in a certain neighborhood</a>, they’ll then add a Mexican food option to the dark kitchen that covers that area, meeting customer demand for a lower than average initial investment.The location of dark kitchens can be highly demographic data-driven, as this <a href="https://medium.com/civic-intelligence/data-driven-dark-kitchens-da9ea72644ff">analysis of a location strategy for dark kitchen</a> outlines. By harnessing the power of big data, expanding food companies can make low-risk plays to target specific customer personas.Since dark stores are defined by their use of off-main-street locations, they can benefit from lower rents and overall costs, especially since their fit-out costs are generally lower — they don’t need to be designed to please customers, they can be purely functional. This low cost-base means room to experiment.<h2>Why ‘dark stores’ can be a model for omnichannel excellence</h2>With lockdowns and distancing restrictions introduced across the globe, retailers moved towards bringing more of the in-store experience online. This has either been through offering virtual appoints with shop assistance or sales agents, or companies like TaoBao supporting brick-and-mortar stores to <a href="https://www.alibabagroup.com/en/news/article?news=p200330">operate product live streams</a>. The number of merchants using live streams on TaoBao increased by 719% in February 2020.The benefits of combining the personal touch of in-person shopping assistance with the online convenience offered by ecommerce is increased customer satisfaction and retention. Since purely ‘dark’ stores are focused on optimizing their digital offering, introducing this combination gives physical retailers the opportunity to compete by augmenting their brand with dark-store level convenience while not compromising on service.Headless commerce is a natural fit when building out a customer experience flow with this mindset. By looking at what your in-store experience does well, you can consider what elements of that can be translated online. For an interesting example of how MACH tools can be used to provide a seamless experience that complements your offline value proposition, Contentstack teamed with Valtech to <a href="https://www.contentstack.com/blog/all-about-headless/how-to-concept-and-pitch-an-augmented-reality-demo-in-one-week/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=organic_social&utm_campaign=2020_09_01_valtech_build_augmented_reality_poc_4_weeks">hack their way to a beauty and skincare app</a> that uses Augmented Reality (AR) to give customers rich product information.When you’re looking for ways to create touchpoints across both your physical and digital offerings, promotions are a great way to start. By creating coupons or loyalty schemes that work in both the online and offline world, you can track the customer journey from your store to your webshop — and nudge users to conversion. Talon.One’s ebook <a href="https://www.talon.one/blog/promotions-the-changing-face-of-ecommerce-white-paper">Promotions &amp; The Changing Face Of Ecommerce</a> gives you actionable insights into how this flow can be used to supercharge your digital transformation strategy using a headless approach.Ensuring your brick and mortar offering has strong links to other channels was another trend that had been emerging before the pandemic, but has intensified over the past 18 months. <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/retail/our%20insights/perspectives%20on%20retail%20and%20consumer%20goods%20number%208/perspectives-on-retail-and-consumer-goods_issue-8.pdf">Research found that opening a new location increases traffic to the retailer’s website by 37 percent the following quarter.</a><h2>What’s in the dark store stack?</h2>Modern customers are hyper-vigilant in their search for convenience, quality, and value for money. The dark store model has stripped back the shopping experience to provide convenience and value at a cutting edge level, but is still learning to provide quality at scale.To do this, dark stores deploy sophisticated warehouse management software and are constantly innovating on ‘<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/last-mile-delivery-shipping-explained">last mile delivery’</a>. Rapid grocery delivery firms like Gorillas, Flink or Doordash have used this edge in last mile delivery to be the basis of their entire value proposition.In general, e-commerce fulfillment is expensive for retailers. Ordinary retail outlets still offer some cost savings versus a delivery-only model. This poses a challenge (and particularly posed a challenge under lockdown conditions) as more of modern commerce shifts online. To combat this, and to succeed in this modern world, retailers will need to optimize ‘picking’ options in dark stores, both through layout optimization and increased use of technology. State-of-the-art warehouse management systems are needed to make sure everything keeps running smoothly.But as companies try to fit multiple modes of operation into one wider business, ensuring their stack works both independently and in tandem is something that is best solved with a headless commerce approach. By using multiple best-in-class services, and focusing on API-based interoperativity, you can have full view-through across your entire operation, and add features or services as it makes sense for your business. It also future proofs your offering, allowing you to scale up or add functions as they become needed.Sub-optimal uses of technology can lead to inefficiencies, increasing labor costs and hurting delivery times. This is especially true as retailers offer ever-expanding arrays of products, each with individual supply chains. For an example of how technology can prevent this wastage, read how an international retailer <a href="https://fluentcommerce.com/click-and-collect-to-ship-from-store-in-just-5-days/">set-up a Dark Store supply system in just 5 days</a>.<h2>The future for dark kitchens?</h2>With the most likely scenario being that COVID-19 has permanently changed how people shop, we’re likely to see <a href="https://www.talon.one/blog/how-dark-stores-are-changing-the-grocery-industry">growth in the following sectors</a>:<ul><li>‘Dark store’ brands with a delivery workforce,</li><li>Restaurant delivery apps pivoting into grocery,</li><li>Grocery stores piloting in-house services and partnerships with other platforms.</li></ul>Fully ‘dark stores’ are still an extreme model, but the importance of omnichannel cannot be overstated. By introducing ‘dark store’ elements, and using headless commerce to drive a truly seamless omnichannel experience, you can blend dark store benefits with traditional levels of customer experience and satisfaction, to create the ‘shop of the future’.Author: Henry Bewicke, Content Writer, Talon.one

Why ‘dark stores’ can be a model for omnichannel excellence

There’s nothing like knowing who you are and what you’re meant to do. It’s true in life, and as <a href="https://www.fourpillarsgin.com/?utm_source=BigCommerce&utm_medium=CaseStudy">Four Pillars Gin</a> Co-Founder and Brand Director, Matt Jones, would agree that it’s true in business as well.“We are not a retailer. We are a brand that sells,” Jones said. “And, what we sell is gin. We don’t get up everyday asking ourselves how we are going to streamline shipping or how we are going to work efficiently with a freight partner. That’s not all we’re about. We are about the craft of making gin and bringing people closer to the craft.”Jones is serious about the art of making quality gin and made from gin products. So much so, he immersed himself into learning more about it while traveling the west coast of the United States.From Seattle, Washington down to Los Angeles, California, Jones and his team visited 30+ craft distillers that were part of what he calls a contemporary and progressive distilling movement. “We came back totally charged up to make gin that was distinctive, highly creative, truly expressive and delicious with all the flavor possibilities Australia offers,” Jones said.Four Pillars launched in 2013 and since have made upward of 20 different gins using top grains and aromatic and flavorful botanicals like orange, juniper, pepperberry and lavender. The company’s winning combinations in gin creation earned them the honor of International Gin Producer of the Year two years running (2020 and 2019).<h2>Searching for a Solution to Help Tell the Four Pillars Story</h2>Four Pillars first delved into the digital space through its use of Pozible, a crowdfunding platform. The team wisely used the pause waiting for equipment and supplies to come in as a time to build awareness, get people onboard and even sell a little gin before the business officially launched. And even though Pozible stood in as a proxy for a website, using it and social media, Facebook and Instagram, worked in helping Four Pillars understand the power of having its own digital commerce space.“Pozible and social media helped us see these third-party platforms as being only as good as the destination you’re pushing people towards,” Jones said. “Social media is a place where you recruit fans and followers and build and engage a community, but there needs to be a destination for people to go to. That destination is our website where we deliver valuable content in the form of a well-told story.”From Pozible, Four Pillars graduated to a more traditional ecommerce platform with Umbraco serving as the platform’s content management system and Tea Commerce powering the back end. It was the first official ecommerce platform where Four Pillars began to tell its stories. Turns out the stories were good, but not so much the platform. They needed to expand to something that would provide them the freedom to create what they wanted.“The content management system morphed into a Frankenstein kind of thing that connected into a stack of disaster on the back end where fulfillment and shipping were affected,” Jones said. “We worked that way for five years without getting our arms around just how big the opportunity was in the digital space.”<h2>A Headless Tech Stack Provides the Perfect Solution</h2>It was late 2018 when Four Pillars realized any future growth required a full website overhaul to make it a destination that people wanted to go to. The new site needed to:<ul><li>Be fun, colorful and hospitable</li><li>Provide an elegant balance between high-functioning ecommerce and users’ expectations</li><li>Have intuitive qualities in its navigation</li><li>Effortlessly enable people to add spontaneous items to their carts</li><li>Have the creative ability to tell a brand story</li></ul>And, Jones had a lot to say about it:“We could not allow our site to become a retail platform that’s all about conversion and not about immersion. So, we decided right out of the gate to build on a specialist ecommerce platform because we didn’t want to go down the same path again of building a commerce site with commerce inspiration. We wanted to build on a commerce platform.Our goal was to find the right partner to help us strike the perfect balance between brand experience, storytelling and world-class, future-proof, scalable ecommerce. We wanted to build on top of a platform that looked absolutely like Four Pillars’ brand experience rather than something that had more of a templated feel to it.”Four Pillars opted for a headless solution and in doing so became one of the first companies in Australia to use a BigCommerce headless implementation, alongside a headless WordPress implementation with a Javascript (VueJS) front end layer on top of both.“We are using this structure to get the best of both platforms – using Wordpress for a rich custom content experience, and BigCommerce for an efficient transactional ecommerce experience,” said Paul Green, Four Pillars Website and Ecommerce Manager. “The separation of the display layer also gives us the flexibility to create a brand experience which fits with our other brand assets and real-world, in-person customer experiences at our <a href="https://www.fourpillarsgin.com/drinks-lab/visit?utm_source=BigCommerce&utm_medium=CaseStudy">tasting labs</a> and <a href="https://www.fourpillarsgin.com/distillery/visit?utm_source=BigCommerce&utm_medium=CaseStudy">distilleries</a>.”“The key thing we’re getting from BigCommerce is the flexibility from its open APIs. It gives us the ability to build what we have with WordPress and extrapolate from it to do more innovative things that we probably wouldn’t be able to do with just an ordinary, more rigid platform,” Green said.<a href="https://overdose.digital/">Overdose</a>, the digital commerce agency that built Four Pillars website, played a pivotal role in ensuring ecommerce was not relegated to the end point of the customers’ experience, but the entry point. “The site is built so you can choose your own adventure and in the process not get lost in the site. What Overdose created enables us to offer a romantic sense of seductive brand storytelling to draw people in and bring them closer to the craft,” said Jones.Headless Generates Outcomes That Move the Business ForwardFour Pillars has built an extremely engaged audience, both online and in person. Whenever a new gin is released or one of its eight, count them, eight Cyber-Mondays during any given year takes place, a massive spike in customer traffic is guaranteed. Its new headless tech stack has proven to be highly scalable, evidenced by processing an ever-increasing order volume without falling over.Four Pillars’ success with customers is evident in the growth in traffic, conversion rate and transactions, with increases of 22%, 79% and 152%, respectively.“For us to do what we do, ecommerce has to be simple and effortless and that’s what we really valued in the shift,” Jones said. “Our headless website has not only improved the experience for our customers, but there’s been a level of simplicity that as we look to do things to incentivize and enhance the shopping experience, it hasn’t been burdensome on our team. Instead they have been sort of elegant and straightforward for our team.”<h2>Elevating the Craft and Drawing People to It</h2>Future possibilities for Four Pillars include same- and next-day delivery and a click and collect option allowing customers to buy online and pick up in the store.What is for certain is that Four Pillars will continue to build its customer relationships and business through the art of storytelling and the craft of gin making.

Four Pillars Gin Spirits Lifted with Headless Tech Stack

<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/bltcb6d05aaa24437d6/628f3b31561ae95d0c3ce5ff/blog3.png"/>Modern CX leaders understand that adaption to the ever-changing landscape of customer experience is crucial to meeting the needs of customers, and that speed of digital innovation is key. To stay ahead, digital experience must flourish at the same pace as customer expectations and behavior –or you risk falling behind.“The key to success in CX digital innovation is to truly understand your customer journey and have the means to meet their changing needs. Your digital experiences must be unified and flexible.” -Jimmy EkbäckThe battle for hearts, minds and dollars is won (or lost) in micro-moments -meaning you need to provide the right information, at the right time, throughout the entire customer journey, and at every touchpoint. Customer experience is no longer driven by staff on the sales floor, it’s powered by the digital experience, and the power behind that experience is your data.It’s time to move into the new state, to shift the focus awayfrom spending time on moving data between databases and integrating data models, towards spending more time on the customer experience, a win-win for your customers, your development teams, and your bottom line.Access to experience data is key to delivering faster innovation in CXTo build new customer experiences and launch them at speed, digital teams must be armed with the right capabilities for accessing and combining data, the ability to turn enterprise data into experience data. Yesterday you needed an eCommerce store, today you need a mobile application and who knows what tomorrow holds? Are you adapting fast enough?To innovate at the speed customers and employees expect, data and frontends needs to be decoupled. Frontends must be as thin as possible, and consume the data via real-time APIs, making data and frontend truly decoupled. There must be more focus on the experience, and the look and feel(design). The more decoupled you can be in your stack, the more adaptable to future changes and anti-fragile you will be.Firstly, let’s look at the old traditional Monolithic setupA monolith structure is designed to carry out multiple tasks, given their broad scope, monolithic structures tend to have huge codebases. Making a minor change will have rippling effects, such as needing to re-compile and test the entire platform, which goes against the agile approach today’s developer's favor.Another big issue with data in a monolith approach, is that it is built on a static &amp; rigid data model (structure). If data fits the model, no problem, but if even the smallest change in data is needed, you may have a BIG problem. With such a black box, all kind of ideation gets stopped because with every new idea or innovation, everything must be rebuilt from the ground up.This will often materialize itself in:• Exceptionally long and expensive project times, due to system integration challenges.• More time spent on server testing and technical development, rather than focusing on the customer demand.•&nbsp;A large codebase that is significantly harder to understand and/or change•&nbsp;Every element is closely related and dependent on the others, so it is difficult to change to a new or advanced technology, language, or framework.MACH architecture is the key to launching digital experiences fasterMACH architecture takes a <a href="https://www.occtoo.com/blog/quick-guide-to-composable-architecture">composable</a> approach to the data. You build your capabilities with an ecosystem of individual services, different components built as small de-coupled, inter-dependent services communicating via events and APIs, also referred to as microservices. With this approach, your enterprise data will be easily available, consumed and repurposed by other services (experience data).Gartner report that by 2023 60% of organizations will seek composability within their software investments.A tech stack built on services and capabilities, is well described with the MACH definition, focusing on scalability and APIs.• Microservices: Individual pieces of business functionality that are independently developed, deployed, and managed• API first: Functionality is exposed through an API.• Cloud-native: SaaS that leverages the cloud, beyond storage and hosting, including elastic scaling and automatically updating.• Headless: Front-end presentation is decoupled from back-end logic and channel, programming language, and is framework agnostic.This modular setup enables your business to rearrange, and re-purpose data as needed, depending on external or internal factors like a shift in customer values or sudden change in supply chain or materials, without requiring a total rebuild.This approach comes with lots of advantages…. here are some:•&nbsp;If a part of your microservices ecosystem becomes a bottleneck, it is easy to scale it horizontally, independently of other app components.•&nbsp;If a service isn ́t needed anymore, it can easily be unplugged without the risk of breaking something in the main app.•&nbsp;All microservices can be fully autonomous. Thus, any collapse in one of them will not affect the work of the main app•&nbsp;Every component is pluggable, scalable, replaceable, and can be continuously improved•&nbsp;With a MACH data approach, you can reimagine your stack with an API-first approach without the need of ripping and replacing your current stack. Enhance the value you get from your previous IT investments and drive the data to be used where it adds value.Some small things to be aware of:•&nbsp;In a MACH setup, it is important to not create a data maintenance hell for your Digital teams. They deserve a unified view of the data needed for the digital roadmap and the support of the current CX initiatives. Therefore, the data must be enriched/created and maintained in capable backend applications.• You will need a platform that activates &amp; unifies the data from your services/backends: this is where an Experience Data Platform comes into play.ConclusionTo win market share and retain customers in today’s highly competitive, digitalfirst landscape, retailers and brands must deliver a strong unified digital experience: with contextual relevance and customer experience in mind.In my opinion, adopting a MACH architecture is the natural next progressive step for digitally mature organizations, and the best way to compete on customer experience, at speed! Organizations should be aware of the potential impacts on their data in the initial adoption of this approach and make sure they have the right tech stack and resources to move into this new state as smooth as possible – the result is well worth it.<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltb9eff0ec0532965e/bltd0c236c22a91a9b4/628f7745d31030576a34b962/author.png"/>Author: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimmy-ekb%C3%A4ck-8040a13/">Jimmy Ekbäck</a>&nbsp;is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Occtoo. Jimmy’s combined passion for new technology and frustration over legacy technology holding CX professionals back from launching innovative ideas is what brought the seed of Occtoo to life. Prior to founding Occtoo, Jimmy has founded and acted as CTO at inRiver, a globally recognized Product Information Management System.Occtoo is an <a href="https://www.occtoo.com/experience-data-platform">Experience Data Platform</a> combining content and context to power unified customer experience.