MACH Alliance Turns Three

MACH Alliance is officially three years old today. It feels in some ways like it was just yesterday we were concepting this organization on a napkin in a London pub. In other ways, it feels like we’ve been at it forever. It’s an interesting paradox, but we’re embracing both the newness and the energy of what we’ve built while also feeling extremely proud of how far we’ve come.

Here are some of the accomplishments we’re especially proud of and a few thoughts on what’s ahead:

Maintaining controlled growth - With nearly 90 members in under three years, it may seem like our membership growth is happening quickly. And while that’s true, you’ve heard us emphasize time and again that we’re insistent on maintaining the purity of the MACH Alliance certification. We’re proud to have continued maintaining the most stringent standards for membership, keeping our stamp pure and living up to our quality over quantity promise.

At the same time, we’ve also broadened our horizons in a calculated way by diversifying our membership scope and new member categories. We’ve also expanded our geographical reach and explored under-tapped demographics with rich potential. That includes creating the Women in MACH sub-group and intentionally creating means through which women can get involved in meaningful ways. Diversity remains an area of commitment for us, and in addition to leveling the playing field for women, we’ve focused on diversity in hiring, which to date has helped us reach a 90% female led organization. Because MACH is a modern category and a community driving forward a new era in enterprise technology, we feel not only an obligation but a genuine desire to urge companies in our ecosystem to do more to nurture the success of diverse individuals.

Easing the entry to MACH - We’re well along the path to mainstream adoption of MACH through driving best practice via education and tools. This has considerably eased the entry to MACH for many businesses who’ve told us exactly that. We remain driven by our mission to ensure the best-of-breed alternative is clear and visible at every turn.

According to Ian Rosen, President and COO at Canadian retailer Harry Rosen: “We owe a lot to the MACH Alliance for helping to make our IT architecture decisions make sense. 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.”

We’ve delivered on our mission over the past three years – and especially over the past year – by getting out there more at events large and small and continuing to bring together our growing ecosystem. Our steady stream of networking and educational events has helped us deliver on our goal of demonstrating and educating the industry on the benefits of adopting an open, cloud-native, API-first, headless architecture technology ecosystem. Our recent MACH TWO event was a particular highlight. You can expect to see us out there a lot more in year four.

Increasing transparency - Lastly, we’ve significantly increased the transparency of our organization since our inception as a much needed reaction to market dynamics. We’ve evolved our admission process and criteria to ensure traceability by documenting how admission decisions are made, and amped up transparency into who and what we are versus aren’t. Our identity, our mission and our goals are crystal clear. While they’ve evolved over time, we’ve always remained true to our founding principles.

MACH Alliance has grown up a lot in three years, and we’ll continue to button up and standardize our operations to reflect the type of organization we’ve become and the type of organization the industry expects us to serve as. Growing up matters to us, as it ensures every minute spent with us creates value for our members and ambassadors. We’re removing noise, adding more efficient structure and providing tools enabling easier collaboration. That is a proper industry body, and we’re eager to step into that elevated role.

In closing, my sincere thanks to our board for having been such an essential part of all of these achievements and so many more. We’re close to time for a rotation of our board seats, so expect fresh thinking, new energy and a more ambitious future to come!

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