MACH is impacting the industry, which comes as no surprise to the MACH Alliance and the MACH community who have been educating the market on the benefits of this approach for more than three years. During that time, MACH has moved from a nascent concept to a now globally accepted tech standard that is guiding IT-related best practices for digital commerce. Especially important during a period of economic instability as companies focus on building maneuverable IT architecture. We can list numerous commerce companies that recognize and have experienced what MACH can do for them, from River Island,Boohoo and MOO to Mars, Costa Coffee and Halfords. More examples here.In the report, Gartner rephrases MACH to “modular, API-first, cloud-native, head-decoupled.” We applaud any efforts to help the industry understand exactly what this is and why it is important. According to us, Modular in place of Microservices does highlight the importance of MACH being autonomous and modular. While microservices is an understood term, it does imply that the size of the service matters, which it doesn’t. We also feel that headless better describes that the head doesn’t matter, whereas “head-decoupled” implies there’s a head that isn’t tightly coupled to the underlying stack. We’d love to hear other people’s views on this.According to the Gartner report, “The digital commerce platform market’s revenue grew by 11.2% in 2022, half of the 2021 rate. However, ongoing growth remains and we expect this rate to increase over 2023.”Our own global research of 500 technology decision makers shows that four in five state that volatility in the economy has impacted their organizations’ attitude toward MACH. This has been one of the key drivers behind 85 percent of organizations increasing the percentage of their MACH infrastructure in the past 12 months. Those companies cite increased ability to respond to changes in the market faster, to build and implement new functionality quicker and reduced costs. They’re also more likely to say their infrastructure is keeping up with customer demands and that they’re ahead of the competition than those with lower MACH adoption rates.Those already taking advantage of the opportunities the new industry standard of MACH provides, are getting ahead faster. As one of the world’s most influential forces for understanding emerging technology trends and their impacts.Transitioning to MACH represents one of those rare moments where companies can ride a new wave of technology and change the fortunes of their companies by introducing compelling new concepts and services that just weren’t possible with monolithic platforms.Gartner, “Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce” (Gartner subscription required), authored by Mike Lowndes, Penny Gillespie, Yanna Dharmasthira, Sandy Shen, Aditya Vasudevan, and Jason Daigler, 21 August 2023. Gartner and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks 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 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.
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