A Deep Dive Into the MACH Themes and Topics Being Discussed at This Year’s MACH TWO
Building on the success of last year’s MACH ONE conference, we’re coming back for an even bigger, better MACH TWO 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.
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.
Let’s take a look at some of our incredible speakers and dive into the topics they will cover.
Dylan Valade, 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.
Anca lordanescu, 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.
Paul Hornby, 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.
Paul Sims, Chief Architect, and Louisa Hanover, 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.
Andreas Westendörpf, 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.
Mindy Montgomery, 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.
Sven Rosemann, 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 - Making the case for MACH. 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 TWO
Hosted by MACH Ambassadors Niall Edwards of LEGO Group and Danielle Diliberti 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 must-read guide to MACH TWO: How to maximize your time and create opportunities.