Now that The Forrester Wave™: Commerce Solutions for B2B, Q2 2024, is released, I can share an update of my perspective on the MACH Alliance. Four member companies were in the B2B commerce solutions Wave mix this time around, and more espoused their architectural virtues (some didn’t qualify for MACH membership, and some didn’t qualify […]

The MACH Alliance Advocates For Software Designed With Modern Characteristics A table describing the elements of MACH architecture. This graphic has an associated spreadsheet that includes all data presented. Please access the spreadsheet for details.

We found clues that a leader’s mindset is a significant driver of transformation success through statements such as, “They supported our belief and guided us down this path of wielding a MACH architecture, and then together we made believers of my stakeholders.” Transformations come at a price; the price of change is to believe.

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Experiencing significant fraud with manual verifications and microcharges, MACH Bank switched to Entrust’s biometric verification solution, reducing fraud by 93% to protect its revenue and customer base. Smartphone leasing firm SmartPay faced issues including synthetic identity fraud; it used SAS’ IDV platform with continuous customer insights to identify fake customers using synthetic identities and verify more than 90% of identities in real time.

Microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native, headless (MACH) architecture has proven itself, enabling leading vendors to outpace what single-product ecosystems can deliver. Tech leaders will face many vendor options and should pay attention to the following market dynamics. Main trend. Agentic AI democratizes access to advanced capabilities for creating digital experiences. Users can prompt AI agents in natural language, eliminating the need for meticulous configuration and coding.

Valtech Valtech has now fully integrated its 2024 Kin + Carta acquisition and is focusing on composable commerce and MACH architecture. In 2025, it released its AI Concierge contextual commerce solution to accelerate client impact. Strategy. Valtech’s differentiating vision focuses on creating better buying experiences that are effortless when they need to be and memorable when they matter.

In turn, when solutions to the semantic-layer challenge become commonplace, this will push app vendors away from selling traditional apps toward selling capabilities, much in line with what the MACH Alliance promotes. Instead of selling applications where buyers must rigidly conform their processes to the software, enterprise application vendors will sell modular capabilities oriented around use cases that buyers assemble via AI into dynamic processes.

CPQ vendors have adopted a microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native, headless (MACH) architecture. Although the market has been progressing toward a composable services architecture to enable an open and connected enterprise technology for more than a decade, the MACH Alliance formation in 2020 that drove adoption in e-commerce systems has driven CPQ vendors to embrace composability as well.

Excerpt from the transcript: And that's what the MACH Alliance is attempting to do, to spread the word of cloud native technology. So look for more stories over the next 18 months. And in the near term, look for a case study from myself and Betsy Summers, who's on our future work team, that tells one story of how coaching supported the transformation to composing an enterprise platform using MACH architecture. Okay, so let's look at the Wave graphic from this time.