MACH Alliance

The MACH Alliance is a non-profit profit advocacy group whose members include software vendors, systems integrators, agencies, and individual experts known as "Ambassadors",^[1] advocating for open technology ecosystems.^[2][3] The Alliance was formed in June 2020^[4] and has, as of July 2024, over 111 members^[5] spanning six continents.^[6] 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.

The MACH Alliance

Logo of The MACH Alliance
Company type	Advocacy group
Industry	Information technology
Founded	2020
Area served	Global
Key people	Jon Panella (Chairperson) Casper Rasmussen (President)
Number of employees	15
Website	https://machalliance.org

History

The MACH Alliance was founded in June 2020^[4] by four companies: Contentstack, Commercetools, Valtech and EPAM Systems, plus ten inaugural members: Algolia, Amplience, Cloudinary, Constructor.io, Contentful, E2X, Fluent Commerce, Frontastic, Mobify and Vue Storefront.^[7]

MACH is an acronym for:^[8][9]

• Microservices-based,
• API-first,
• Cloud-native software-as-a-service and
• Headless offerings.

About a year later, MACH membership reached 30 members^[10] and again a year later doubled to about 60 members.^[11]

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.^[12]

Activities

The MACH alliance's main activities in support of their advocacy are events and the publication of various content pieces.^[13][14]

Services

Users can choose cloud services.^[9][15] The ability to choose only requires cloud services, which reduce costs.^{[9][15][16][17]} MACH has specialized expert applications.^[9][16][17] MACH-based cloud services provide rollouts that can be scaled faster.^[17]

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.^[9]