The MACH Alliance is a non-profit profit

advocacy group Advocacy groups, also known as lobby groups, interest groups, special interest groups, pressure groups, or public associations, use various forms of advocacy or lobbying to influence public opinion and ultimately public policy. They play an impor ...

whose members include

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

vendor In a supply chain, a vendor, supplier, provider or a seller, is an enterprise that contributes goods or services. Generally, a supply chain vendor manufactures inventory/stock items and sells them to the next link in the chain. Today, these term ...

systems integrator A systems integrator (or system integrator) is a person or company that specializes in bringing together component subsystems into a whole and ensuring that those subsystems function together, a practice known as system integration. They also solv ...

s, agencies, and individual experts known as "Ambassadors", advocating for open technology ecosystems. The Alliance was formed in June 2020 and has, as of July 2024, over 111 members spanning six continents. The Alliance sets standards, certifies companies who can deliver open and transformative technologies and solutions at scale, and guides brands toward transformative, open, and best-of-breed solutions that will drive the next era of business evolution. By raising awareness and educating the global marketplace, the Alliance aims to foster a deeper understanding of MACH and composable best practices, enabling modern organizations to plan for their long-term digital success and achieve better business outcomes. Our MACH-certified members are trusted industry leaders who provide much-needed clarity and direction in a complex market. As the backbone of our open and industry first community, these members actively contribute to our strategy and help define as well as validate industry best practices. The MACH Alliance is guided by an elected Executive Board that exists to ensure we fulfill our commitments, and remain true to our vision, mission and values.

History

The MACH Alliance was founded in June 2020 by four companies: Contentstack,

Commercetools Commercetools, stylized as commercetools, is a cloud-based headless commerce platform that provides APIs to power e-commerce sales and similar functions for large businesses. Both the company and platform are called Commercetools. The company is ...

, Valtech and

EPAM Systems EPAM Systems, Inc. is an American company that specializes in software engineering services, digital platform engineering, and digital product design, operating out of Newtown, Pennsylvania. EPAM is a founding member of the MACH Alliance. Hi ...

, plus ten inaugural members:

Algolia Algolia is a French proprietary search-as-a-service platform, with its headquarters in San Francisco and offices in Paris and London. Its main product is a web search platform for individual websites. Company Algolia was founded in 2012 by Ni ...

, Amplience,

Cloudinary Cloudinary is a SaaS company providing cloud media management services for websites and apps. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California with offices in Israel, England, Poland, and Singapore. History Cloudinary was founded in 2011 ...

, Constructor.io,

Contentful Contentful is a German-American Headless CMS, headless content management system (CMS), founded in 2013 in Berlin, Germany, by Sascha Konietzke and Paolo Negri. The company and the platform are both called Contentful. As of June 2021, the compa ...

, E2X, Fluent Commerce, Frontastic, Mobify and Vue Storefront. MACH is an acronym for: *

Microservices In software engineering, a microservice architecture is an architectural pattern that organizes an application into a collection of loosely coupled, fine-grained services that communicate through lightweight protocols. This pattern is characterize ...

-based, *

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

-first, * Cloud-native software-as-a-service and * Headless offerings. About a year later, MACH membership reached 30 members and again a year later doubled to about 60 members.

Membership

The MACH Alliance actively seeks software vendors, systems integrators, agencies, consultancies, and individual experts who share their vision for open and best-of-breed (a collection of specialized expert applications) enterprise technology ecosystems. The MACH Alliance established certification standards that help identify those that embrace MACH philosophies and offer MACH-certified services. In order to become a member, an organization must be in full compliance.

Activities

The MACH alliance's main activities in support of their advocacy are events and the publication of various content pieces.

Services

Users can choose cloud services. The ability to choose only requires cloud services, which reduce costs. MACH has specialized expert applications. MACH-based cloud services provide rollouts that can be scaled faster. Managing many cloud services from different vendors can bring maintenance hurdles and costs associated with tracking, monitoring, securing the integration points, and integrating the service components. MACH is currently a general architecture rather than a standard specification, which implies that technologies and behaviors may differ from cloud service to cloud service.

References

External links

*{{Official website, https://machalliance.org Organizations established in 2020 Information technology lobbying organizations Application programming interfaces Cloud computing