MACH Global Research 2023 Blog Series Pt. 4: The Myriad Benefits of MACH

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:

  1. Challenges to upgrading infrastructure
  2. Influences on transformation
  3. MACH utilization
  4. Evidence of MACH benefits

Parts one, two and three of the series have been published, which brings us to our fourth and final part of the series. Today, we’re looking at the benefits of MACH and how increasing MACH empowers businesses.

Bold, Agile, Proactive

Increasing MACH infrastructure correlates with words like these. According to the research, organizations that significantly increased their MACH infrastructure over the past 12 months are more likely considered to be process driven, bold, agile, proactive and early adopters. That’s compared to companies that kept their proportion of MACH roughly the same. That faction erred closer on the axis to descriptors like: Customer driven, cautious, cumbersome, reactive and late adopters.

Further, those who have increased the presence of MACH in their IT architecture said they are more likely to believe:

  • They are staying ahead of the competition
  • Their infrastructure is keeping up with end-user demands
  • Their leadership team is supported by other leadership teams
  • Their organization is able to deliver improvements to the end-user experience at speed

Anecdotally, IT leaders who noted in the research that their companies were embracing MACH spoke to benefits like having more nimble operations because all applications work within the same architectures. Others spoke to how MACH has increased the value of their business, as well as enhanced functionality and infrastructure improvements over time. And one respondent spoke to the outcomes of seamless customization and innovation, going so far as to say their business could launch a rebrand overnight if need be. Yes, you read that correctly - overnight thanks to the speed, flexibility and ease of customization afforded by MACH.

In part three of the research blog series, we dug into the driving forces behind the growth in MACH adoption and the urgency decision makers feel to embrace it. It’s worth noting again in this post that the top driver, as noted by survey respondents, is the ability to respond to changes in the market faster, followed by the need to build and implement new functionality quicker. That speaks to the respondent anecdotes which emphasize how seamless customization, innovation and the ability to pivot as the needs of the market change is so incredibly important, and we don’t see this changing anytime soon.A Refresh of Key Takeaways

To close out this series, we wanted to recap a few key takeaways from the research in its entirety, and leave you with a question:

  • Economic volatility is driving MACH adoption. Four in five decision makers 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.

  • Time and money spent on upgrades is an expensive ongoing problem. The research found that little has changed from a year ago regarding the time and money being spent on upgrade projects. Upgrading is evidently a burden which organizations are struggling to solve: Over a quarter are running more than 20 projects each year. One in five are spending over half of their IT budget on upgrades, and the same number say upgrades are taking up over half of IT teams’ time

  • Investment is increasingly moving from front- to back-end. The research found front-end solutions are still receiving the most focus for investment, however, this is changing year-over-year. While 54 percent prioritized front-end investment in the 2022 report, just 39 percent stated this in 2023.

The MACH Alliance serves to help usher businesses along in their MACH transformation. We see so clearly that the benefits of transitioning to MACH are there. And in recent months, we’ve even seen some of the software behemoths like SAP and Adobe enter the composable commerce ring. So, what’s holding you back?

If your company is still unclear if and how MACH can fit into the mix, we want to hear from you. While MACH may not be for everyone, sometimes it takes a third party point of view to see the bigger picture, and we want to help paint that picture for you. This is the way forward for enterprise technology. Don’t be left behind.

Let’s talk:

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