On 25th August 2020 BIMA hosted ‘Built for Speed: How to Create Tech Systems & Cultures that Deliver’, a tech-focused event co-produced with the team at MACH Alliance. The session aimed to explain MACH (Microservices, APIs, Cloud, and Headless) technologies and the advantages and strengths particularly in the context of 2020 and the ever-changing business climate and customer demands.
Our panel for the session was:
Host: Nat Gross, VP, Brand & Marketing, EMEA, EPAM Systems & Co-President of BIMA
Dom Selvon, CTO, E2X
Kingsley Hibbert, CTO, Sagittarius
Sonja Kotrotsos, Global Head of Product Marketing, Contentstack & VP of MACH Alliance
Julien Maingard, EMEA Engineering Lead, Fastly
The changing landscape: Why MACH and why now?
It is important to understand the ever-shifting nature of our industry when it comes to tech. Sonja Kotrotsos of Contentstack highlighted what she and her peers have been observing when it comes to shifting client needs, stating “What we have seen in the last few years (more so in the last months and weeks with COVID) is that in the enterprise software space, specifically on the digital experience side, there is a new urgency for innovation. There is a new definition of speed, and organisations need to be able to pivot faster and react more quickly. Much of the legacy technology out there is just not made for agile teams and agile processes.”
Sonja also championed the values of the MACH Alliance itself and why it’s important: “MACH Alliance has been founded to advocate the new world and evangelise the best of breed tech: enterprise stack as an alternative to the legacy enterprise suites. We’re about enabling teams to leverage the technology available to its fullest.” Click here to find out more about MACH Alliance and how to get involved.
Stacks Vs. Suites
Whilst the panelists generally advocated for the former, they were also supportive of a hybrid approach. It all depends on the project you are working on but it’s important to assess not only what is needed right now, but also further into the development cycle, as Dom Selvon of E2X explained “There are several suites out there that do a very good job in the domains that they work in, however when you are working within certain cycles, rolling out a whole suite of software that covers the gamut of a particular domain is a risky undertaking.”
Dom highlighted how using MACH can be better suited to the ever-shifting nature of client needs, stating “A MACH approach, where you’ve got dedicated pieces of software that are focused on certain feature sets that you roll out behind a certain API layer allows you the flexibility and rapidity to make changes within the enterprise across the board, and as a result, over this transition period you get the best of breed across your whole enterprise.”
What you need to consider
Before any business decides to adopt a MACH approach, you also need to consider not only what your client needs, but also if your team has the right culture and capabilities to facilitate the switch. “There’s real enterprise architecture capability that you need to have front and centre of your mind when you are embarking on this journey,” said Kingsley Hibbert of Sagittarius, “there could be a multitude of services or systems that you’re potentially looking to plug together and you need to be thinking with that architecture mindset. Conversely, I’d say the legacy enterprise architecture view is very much set in stone, and it stays that way for five to ten years.“
Kingsley continued “MACH is not the same as these legacy systems. As an organization, you need to look at what needs to be adjusted, amended, or even rewritten over the years so you can maintain and operate in this new world. Some of that will require looking at the skills of the people on your team, or even training team members to understand this new way of working.”
Learning from others
In the session, our panel brought up a few real-world case studies where a MACH approach has made a real change to a business. Julien Maingard of Fastly had an extremely positive experience when working with one particular client. “I recently had the pleasure of working with Dunelm who was going through an internal migration to become a cloud-based architecture. Along the way, they realised that their incumbent CDM was being acquired by another CDM and so we were given the difficult task (and the wondrous gift) of being able to re-evaluate how everything works, and when we looked at the client’s wish list it encompassed everything that MACH stands for.”
Julien spoke to the impact of the switch: “With this opportunity, Dunelm put their head into transforming into that agile methodology which we’ve described, and since then we’ve noticed a 900% improvement in their website performance. I recently bought curtains from them and it was a very different experience than it was sixth months ago!”
It’s clear that while a switch to a MACH approach is not necessary for every business, it can be a pivotal shift for those who need specific requirements as the world around us changes and shifts. With its agile methodology, it allows teams to deliver at speed and can prove to be critical in improving performance. To see all of our panels fantastic insight and more great case studies, watch the session in its entirety here.
If you are an SI or vendor and want to know if you can be MACH certified, make sure you take the test over on MACHAlliance.org. And if you have any questions at all please do email them on info@machalliance.org.
Finally, in answer to how a mid-market player can realise the benefits of a MACH architecture, Dom Selvon of E2X has recommended this accelerator that will remove much of the development and operational complexities of a MACH architecture.
To learn how to become part of the BIMA Community, find out more by visiting our page.