It’s that time of year again.
Predictions, like snowflakes, are fluttering in the air. As 2023 draws to a close, thoughts are already turning to the future. What will 2024 bring to the MACH and composable landscape?
To find out, we asked some members of the MACH Alliance Executive Board what they expect to see in the New Year. We also looked at Gartner and Forrester forecasts of the top enterprise tech trends for 2024. Based on all those insights, here’s what could be shaping the MACH and composable ecosystem – and influencing buyers – over the next 12 months.
According to a research note by Forrester’s Emily Pfeiffer, at least a quarter of digital tech spending will shift away from legacy maintenance projects in 2024, with “smaller, targeted moves” replacing half of replatforming initiatives. Organizations will gravitate to “more modern, flexible technology … [looking to] apply surgical precision rather than sweeping change to their technology decisions,” writes Pfeiffer, Principal Analyst at Forrester.
As businesses move on from monolithic platforms, Pfeiffer suggests they’ll embrace “standalone, modular or augmentative commerce tech solutions” in the coming year and “add specialty tech with a lighter lift to implement and a shorter time to value.”
Over at Gartner, analysts see platform engineering as a standout trend for 2024. Businesses are embracing these internal, self-service development platforms to gain flexibility and liberate their IT systems from traditional vendor lock-in.
For 2024 and beyond, Gartner urges organizations to future-proof their businesses by deploying tools that can adapt to evolving trends and demands in an agile, continuous way. As Gartner VP Analyst Bart Willemsen put it, “technology disruptions and socioeconomic uncertainties require willingness to act boldly and strategically enhance resilience over ad hoc responses.”
Modern, modular, specialized? Flexible, agile, resilient? If organizations are hungry for those ingredients in 2024, MACH and composable are ready to cater to their individual tastes.
Next, here’s what members of our Executive Board see on the horizon for next year.
AI was everything everywhere all at once in 2023, and it will become further integrated into MACH and composable technologies as well next year. New rivals will challenge OpenAI’s dominant head start, making the AI marketplace more competitive. Since the proliferation of artificial intelligence brings further risk to the table, however, companies will make ethics, security and compliance a higher priority in their AI journeys during 2024. The European Union’s new AI legislation will bring this into sharper focus.
At the beginning of 2023, Gartner predicted 70 percent of large and mid-sized enterprises would adopt a composable approach to building applications by 2024. As the curtains close on 2023, MACH and composable are likely poised to gather even more momentum in the coming months, fueled by rave reviews from early adopters: 87 percent say MACH has made their organizations more responsive and competitive.
Ongoing socioeconomic uncertainty will put corporate profitability and sustainability high on the corporate agenda in 2024. Enterprises will respond by focusing on flexibility, speed and innovation in non-CX areas of the business they haven’t prioritized until now, including supply chain and employee experience. This will propel MACH uptake further down the tech stack past the CX-obsessed front end. As word of MACH’s business benefits spreads, MACH and composable will also gain deeper traction in industry verticals outside the digital commerce space.
Waterfall workflows are on the way out. Instead of requiring separate steps, tickets and sprints, processes ranging from security scans to QA will become part of a continuous build-and-deploy cycle, saving resources and speeding up time to market. Since most monolithic stacks can’t accommodate this continuous workflow, the MACH movement will benefit as businesses embrace Continuous Everything.
The exodus from brittle, all-in-one solution suites will continue as organizations crave greater flexibility, specialization, and freedom from vendor lock-in. Platform engineering and continuous development workflows are just part of a broader trend that moves the needle further away from the traditional IT procurement model where a single vendor often holds all the cards.
MACH and composable will increasingly stand out as strong alternatives to that outdated approach by giving businesses more control, more options, more possibilities.
From many angles, the stars appear to be aligned for a bright year ahead in the MACH and composable universe.