The market shift to composable continues to accelerate with expansion into new product categories and industry sectors. As the MACH standard is becoming more mainstream, even the most established software vendors are going composable.
With this growth, we’re seeing more complex cases coming through our admissions process from larger multi-nationals with multiple products, vendors with a history in legacy, and some with very complex funding structures. To mirror the changes in the market, we’re constantly looking to ensure our membership criteria evolves with the market while also not wavering on our stringent guidelines for certification.
Today, we’ve published a new Admissions Playbook providing additional clarity into the process and to emphasize our objective approach for evaluating applicants. By being explicit about how any company can embark on a journey towards MACH certification, we are delivering on our promise to the market. Transparency, objectivity and consistency around this process is critical to the buyers the Alliance is here to guide.
The MACH Alliance exists as a trusted industry body to educate and inform on standards, interoperability and other important buyer considerations. It is our primary goal to help buyers see what is MACH and what isn’t. In order to do this, we must make the distinction based on technology specifications only. It’s more important than ever that buyers know what they are getting, and that solutions sold as MACH meet the proper requirements.
Pascal Lagarde, Group SVP Composable at Valtech and a member of the MACH Alliance Advisory Board and Admissions Panel, provides some clarity:
“MACH certification is not a quality assessment. It’s confirmation that a company meets the standard of 100% MACH compliance. A company can build software that is 100% compliant but it might not be a great tool. That’s not what we evaluate, or if it’s a market fit, easy to work with, the performance is good…”
There is a lot of misinformation about what MACH is in the market. Our job is to be clear on how we define MACH principles - Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud native SaaS, Headless - and that’s what our membership criteria is designed to uphold.
MACH certification will continue to provide enterprises with the added level of insurance and protection they need as the market accelerates.
We have published a lot of content and information about our membership and certification criteria which at its core remains unchanged. Please refer to the following resources: