In March, we released the results 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:
Parts one and two 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.
Momentum at MACH speed
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.
Adapting to an evolving landscape
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 Gordon Lucas 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 dove into 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.