‘The coolest tech club in town’: how Mach is changing digital offerings

It has been called the future of archi­tec­ture and a lead­ing group of advo­cates for it has been dubbed “the coolest tech club in town”. No, it’s not the meta­verse or the next big thing in cryp­to. Instead, it’s some­thing called Mach.

Mach is an acronym (for microser­vices-based, appli­ca­tion pro­gramme inter­face-first, cloud-native soft­ware-as-a-ser­vice and head­less offer­ings). In short, it is a tech­nol­o­gy archi­tec­ture that allows busi­ness­es to have com­plete con­trol over their dig­i­tal com­merce ecosys­tem.
And accord­ing to a 2022 study by Mel Research, 79% of tech lead­ers are plan­ning to increase their invest­ments in it over the next year and beyond.

“The indi­vid­ual ele­ments of Mach have been around for some time,” explains Anjali Sub­bu­raj, dig­i­tal com­merce chief archi­tect at Mars and an ambas­sador for the Mach Alliance. “But com­bined, they offer a new struc­tured, mod­u­lar tech­nol­o­gy archi­tec­ture prin­ci­ple which is very pow­er­ful.”

As well as giv­ing busi­ness­es con­trol of their dig­i­tal com­merce, Mach pro­vides the flex­i­bil­i­ty to respond to change quick­ly and seam­less­ly, help­ing them to meet the evolv­ing needs of cus­tomers and the wider mar­ket. And as Sub­bu­raj knows, the ben­e­fits of Mach for mod­ern, direct-to-con­sumer (D2C) brands look­ing to cre­ate pre­mi­um expe­ri­ences for their cus­tomers can be enor­mous.

“Mars is look­ing to have Mach as its future tech­nol­o­gy archi­tec­ture,” she says, adding that work on a new Mach offer­ing for Mars’ flag­ship brand, M&M, start­ed last year and is due to go live soon.

The process involved tak­ing clas­sic Mach prod­ucts avail­able from ven­dors, and com­bin­ing and aug­ment­ing them with Mars’s own cus­tom solu­tions to cre­ate a seam­less, pre­mi­um omni-chan­nel solu­tion for D2C busi­ness.

“We were strug­gling with an exist­ing lega­cy plat­form that had out­lived its life,” explains Sub­bu­raj. “We need­ed top-grade solu­tions for every­thing and we were look­ing for some­thing that would give us a com­pet­i­tive edge while help­ing us to deliv­er a seam­less and per­son­alised expe­ri­ence to our con­sumers.”

Before join­ing Mars, Sub­bu­raj had worked on a D2C omni-chan­nel offer­ing for anoth­er busi­ness which had involved more tra­di­tion­al, non-Mach solu­tions. “It was a chal­leng­ing expe­ri­ence and some­what frus­trat­ing because I had to cre­ate three dif­fer­ent silos: one for the web­site, one for mobile and one for point of sale. So I knew the draw­backs of try­ing to do omni-chan­nel with a tra­di­tion­al set of tech­nolo­gies,” she says.

The indi­vid­ual ele­ments of Mach have been around for some time. But com­bined, they offer a new struc­tured, mod­u­lar tech­nol­o­gy archi­tec­ture prin­ci­ple which is very pow­er­ful

It’s a famil­iar prob­lem. Brands and retail­ers that mar­ket and sell online have relied on lega­cy soft­ware plat­forms that are inher­ent­ly inflex­i­ble and com­plex, and that lim­it inno­va­tion, explains Kel­ly Goetsch, chief strat­e­gy offi­cer at Com­merce­tools and chair of the Mach Alliance. “This reliance can make it hard for busi­ness­es to adapt quick­ly to their cus­tomers’ evolv­ing needs, and it can ulti­mate­ly leave them vul­ner­a­ble to decreased cus­tomer loy­al­ty and rev­enue,” he warns.

Sub­bu­raj adds that the chal­lenge with a com­pa­ny such as Mars was the com­plex­i­ty of the organ­i­sa­tion. “It’s not a sin­gle busi­ness,” she explains. “Mars has dif­fer­ent seg­ments, sub-seg­ments and mul­ti­ple brands, and we need­ed to find a solu­tion that’s one size fits all.”

What drew her to Mach was that it could sup­port “inno­va­tions in both a test-and-learn for­mat as well as build­ing scale”. That offers huge advan­tages for a com­plex organ­i­sa­tion in a rapid­ly evolv­ing dig­i­tal land­scape.

But despite its clear ben­e­fits, Sub­bu­raj warns chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cers (CTOs) not to “just jump on the band­wag­on” with­out hav­ing first set out a per­son­alised roadmap that clear­ly shows how it will work for their organ­i­sa­tion. That might require some per­sis­tence.

“It’s an emerg­ing tech­nol­o­gy, so tech lead­ers need to invest in under­stand­ing, edu­cat­ing and tak­ing their busi­ness­es with them,” she says. “I’ve seen a lot of chal­lenges where tech­nol­o­gy teams will say, ‘Yes, we want Mach’, but then the busi­ness stake­hold­ers are not get­ting it. So there is that ten­sion.”

Some large lega­cy organ­i­sa­tions are not geared towards agili­ty, she says, “which can slow down the deliv­ery of val­ue, mak­ing busi­ness lead­ers lose faith in some­thing they are already ner­vous about”.

Dur­ing the process with Mars, Sub­bu­raj says she worked close­ly with the Mach Alliance. Described as the “coolest tech club in town” by For­rester ana­lyst Joe Cic­man, this not-for-prof­it indus­try body advo­cates for open and best-of-breed enter­prise tech­nol­o­gy ecosys­tems. It con­sists of more than 50 ven­dor mem­bers, as well as brand ambas­sadors from the end-user com­pa­nies. Set up dur­ing the first lock­down of 2020, it aims to help organ­i­sa­tions under­stand how to use and lever­age Mach tech­nolo­gies to improve their dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences.

Sree Sreed­hararaj, CTO of French cos­met­ics giant Sepho­ra and a Mach Alliance ambas­sador, says the main ben­e­fit he has gained from the alliance has been an edu­ca­tion­al one. “As a CTO or a tech­nol­o­gist, there is much to learn dai­ly from peers and oth­er ambas­sadors,” he says.

Sreed­hararaj adds that CTOs and chief infor­ma­tion offi­cers (CIOs) have tra­di­tion­al­ly been focused on infra­struc­ture and the IT helpdesk sup­port and oper­a­tions. Tech­nol­o­gy was there­fore always seen as a cost cen­tre for busi­ness­es. But late­ly, organ­i­sa­tions have come to realise that tech­nol­o­gy is an inte­gral part of busi­ness strat­e­gy.

“Tech­nol­o­gy dri­ves new com­pa­nies and busi­ness mod­els which nev­er exist­ed before,” Sreed­hararaj explains. “While lots of organ­i­sa­tions have start­ed to realise the ben­e­fits of tech­nol­o­gy by look­ing at their peers and com­peti­tors, many chief expe­ri­ence offi­cers are stuck with a tra­di­tion­al mind­set. But tech­nol­o­gy is chang­ing and advanc­ing at a much faster pace,” he adds.

It’s an emerg­ing tech­nol­o­gy, so tech lead­ers need to invest in under­stand­ing, edu­cat­ing and tak­ing their busi­ness­es with them

Nis­hant Patel, co-founder of head­less con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem Con­tentstack and a found­ing mem­ber of the Mach Alliance, says the ease of inte­gra­tion – and sub­se­quent flex­i­bil­i­ty – that appli­ca­tion pro­gram­ming inter­faces (APIs) offer, and the range of capa­bil­i­ties pro­vid­ed by microser­vices, will only become more attrac­tive over time.

“The busi­ness case for cloud has been proven time and again, and the move towards head­less tech­nolo­gies and com­pos­able com­merce will accel­er­ate it,” he adds.

It’s a trend that is already vis­i­ble in some big retail­ers. David Edwards, head of archi­tec­ture at fash­ion retail­er Riv­er Island, reports that all of his company’s tech­nol­o­gy choic­es are now made in align­ment with Mach prin­ci­ples.

“We start­ed with a small invest­ment and now we’re accel­er­at­ing our strat­e­gy to build a cus­tomer-focused, mod­ern dig­i­tal plat­form under­pinned by Mach tech­nol­o­gy,” he says. “This will extend beyond the cur­rent imple­men­ta­tion sur­round­ing online check­out – and move across chan­nels and capa­bil­i­ties to offer our cus­tomers an unri­valled expe­ri­ence that’s uni­fied across touch­points.”

Mach enables a faster pace of change at Riv­er Island, says Edwards. “The com­pos­able nature of a Mach archi­tec­ture allows us greater flex­i­bil­i­ty to choose part­ner­ships like Com­merce­tools, Talon.one and Attraqt where it mat­ters, but to choose just good enough part­ners where it doesn’t. It also allows us to eas­i­ly change in the event that our Mach part­ners are unable to meet our needs,” he explains.

And with com­merce ecosys­tems con­stant­ly chang­ing as new trends – such as shop­pable video, social media-based sell­ing and pre­mi­um expe­ri­ences using aug­ment­ed real­i­ty, vir­tu­al real­i­ty and the meta­verse – emerge, brands need the flex­i­bil­i­ty to respond quick­ly to the mar­ket.

“Mach frees organ­i­sa­tions up to respond to change with greater cer­tain­ty,” says Goetsch. Indeed, ele­ments such as head­less tech­nol­o­gy (which is when the front end, user-fac­ing ele­ment of an online store is sep­a­rat­ed from the back end func­tion­al­i­ty to enable greater flex­i­bil­i­ty and cus­tomi­sa­tion) mean they can rapid­ly build and scale what they need and reduce costs at the same time.

And Mach prin­ci­ples don’t apply only in the D2C mar­ket. Accord­ing to Sub­bu­raj, these tech­nolo­gies offer lots of excit­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for the B2B mar­ket – and for improv­ing employ­ee expe­ri­ence.

“Why should busi­ness cus­tomers not have a pre­mi­um expe­ri­ence and speed, just like con­sumers? Their process­es and path to pur­chase are slight­ly dif­fer­ent, with dif­fer­ent com­plex­i­ties, but these cus­tomers also want to do their pur­chas­es online and they want the same online expe­ri­ence. And the same prin­ci­ples could apply to employ­ee expe­ri­ence, too,” she adds.

With many tech lead­ers now look­ing to invest in Mach for their forth­com­ing dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tions, it’s clear that the tra­di­tion­al tech­nol­o­gy archi­tec­ture of the past decade might not be suf­fi­cient to respond with speed and agili­ty to a fast-paced future envi­ron­ment, par­tic­u­lar­ly if doing so in a cost-effec­tive way remains impor­tant.

M is for microser­vices
Microser­vices are small appli­ca­tions that do one thing and do that one thing well. Inven­to­ry, pric­ing and pro­mo­tions all com­mon­ly use microser­vices. The key is that they can be built, updat­ed and deployed inde­pen­dent­ly. This allows organ­i­sa­tions and ven­dors to be con­stant­ly iter­at­ing and deploy­ing new func­tion­al­i­ty, which ulti­mate­ly leads to more top-line rev­enue.

A is for API-first
Being API-first means you start by mod­el­ling the inter­face you want and then writ­ing the code to imple­ment it. This means the APIs are a lot more user-friend­ly than if you had start­ed by writ­ing the code first.

C is for cloud native
Cloud-based mul­ti-ten­ant SaaS (soft­ware as a ser­vice) – where a sin­gle appli­ca­tion is held in the cloud and accessed by many users – means that you’re using a well-run ser­vice rather than rely­ing on code that you own, man­age and run. It’s the dif­fer­ence between get­ting a piz­za deliv­ered to your house and hav­ing to make one your­self. Busi­ness­es want to con­sume clean ser­vices that auto-scale rather than hav­ing to rely on inflex­i­ble bits of code.

H is for head­less
Head­less tech is a decou­pling of the front end (the bit the user sees) of an ecom­merce plat­form from the back end (where the func­tion­al­i­ty lies), allow­ing mul­ti­ple front ends (heads) to be inde­pen­dent­ly iter­at­ed and released, all in par­al­lel. His­tor­i­cal­ly, the “head” (there was only the web until recent­ly but now there are mobile sites and apps, too) was sim­ply embed­ded into the under­ly­ing com­merce plat­form.

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