Composable Conference 2025: MACH maturity tested

Tribalism, interoperability and agentic AI top challenges for nonprofit technology movement, writes Miya Knights, Retail Technology Publisher

A nonprofit tech advocacy organisation of enterprise end-users, vendors, agencies, and system integrators (SIs) is facing several challenges that are testing its maturity, it emerged this week.

Reflecting current socioeconomic and political trends, tribalism, interoperability and agentic artificial intelligence (AI) were top of mind at the Composable Conference held in Chicago, US. 

The Conference serves its ecosystem by adhering to a microservices, application programming interface (API)-first, cloud-native, and headless (MACH) approach to IT architecture.

But Casper Rasmussen, MACH Alliance president and chief transformation officer of founding Alliance member and digital agency, Valtech, urged members to consider their mindset. 

Resolving integration complexity

Rasmussen used his opening address to urge MACH Alliance members to eschew what he described as the effect of “tribalism” at a time when division is also rife on a global scale. 

Tackling recent criticisms that the Alliance is stymied by dogma and complexity, he said: “The Alliance is rooted in the principles of composability, connectedness, openness and autonomy.”

He referenced the launch this month of an Open Data Model initiative to resolve interoperability and integration complexities faced by enterprises, SIs, and vendors.

Several MACH-certified vendors contributed to its canonical data model, which will be made publicly available under an open-source license on GitHub.

Rasmussen added that the Alliance’s Interoperability Working Group would actively expand and enhance the model, aiming for full member consumption by the end of June 2025.

Moving beyond the acronym 

The MACH Alliance Executive Advisory Board also admitted in a press conference that it had been slow in rolling out its Open Data Model, given it had been in development for three years.

Providing best practices for interoperability in building internet-scale software, Board members said the Model would help to educate members about MACH principles beyond the acronym. 

“We tend to wait too long and work to too high a degree of perfection before we share our work,” commented Jasmin Guthmann, MACH Alliance vice president (VP) and composable consulting VP at mindcurv group.

“We are already so collaborative, but we want to start to pull as many members as possible into the innovation talks and concepts way earlier.”

Procurement best practice 

The Board discussion also highlighted the importance of addressing financial stakeholders and adapting to market changes while maintaining the core MACH principles of composability.

Krithika Ganesamoorthi, MACH Alliance VP and Amazon Web Services solutions architecture senior manager, cited efforts to develop and launch accelerators among MACH partners. 

“We're giving them an option to say, you can go and make the entire approach a lot easier, or you can pick and choose,” she said. “For procurement, we also have our marketplaces.”

The event also enabled the Board to update on the progress of a feasibility study focused on pricing initiatives, procurement best practices, and service level and contract alignment.

Taking a hybrid approach 

Mark Demeny, MACH Alliance technology analyst, told RetailTechnology.co.uk that the results of the feasibility study conducted last year highlighted the need to support hybrid approaches.

“The study confirmed that, more often than not, members are acquiring not just MACH technology,” he said. “They're building on top of non-MACH systems, such as ERPs [enterprise resource planning systems], and working with other data sources.”

Demeny added that part of his work also involved qualifying the quality of APIs. “One end-user said they were using SOAP to connect with a system, which is a 15-year-old XML.

“We laughed, but they actually said that’s the good API. The bad version is dumping a CSV file into a folder that you have to secure with an FTP to then consume and parse the file.”

He added that, with a hybrid approach, there is a spectrum of acceptability: “Something like a SOAP API is acceptable, and REST is a minimum. 

“So, it's interesting for us to try and start to quantify workarounds and best practices, and see how people are making a hybrid approach work.”

The impact of agentic AI

In seeking to match levels of maturity for composability, the Alliance also launched the MACH AI Exchange at the event to guide the impact of AI on MACH architectures. 

Amanda Elam, chief marketing officer at content management system (CMS) provider and Alliance member Bloomreach, said the AI Exchange would create a peer-led community.

Referencing the latest industry developments around agentic AI, she said the Exchange would aim to answer: “How can I, if I have an agent in one system, make sure that it's working with agents in another system?

”MACH has to be in that conversation, and we have a unique opportunity to bring together, as we always have, the integrators, tech and cloud infrastructure providers and brands, to build what that future should look like.”

Elam also said the Exchange will focus on delivering hands-on sessions on the commercialisation of AI across products, agent-to-agent frameworks, open model context protocol (MCP) standards, and even artificial general intelligence (AGI) agents to facilitate the use of robots in stores, for example.

Malte Ubl, MACH Alliance executive advisory board member and chief technology officer of member organisation Vercel, added that MACH still underpinned the principles of agentic AI.

“[With agentic] I'm effectively building a new front end for my existing back end, which is the whole point of composability,” said Ubi. “Then, if you’re talking about agent-to-agent communication, again, it's just composition.”