It’s a truly exciting time at Mapp! After kicking off our venture of joining the MACH alliance, we’ve hit a new milestone. Three of our very own Mappsters have joined three MACH alliance councils:

What does this mean for Mapp and its customers? I sat down with our VP of Global Strategy, Ricardas Montvila, to really understand what it means to be part of the coolest club in town!

Q: Firstly, this is fantastic news! What’s it like being part of the “coolest tech club in town”?

A: Thanks! Well, I think it’s important to know that you don’t become cool by simply joining – being cool is actually pre-requisite for joining …
But all jokes aside, MACH Alliance is so much more than bragging rights. It’s an inevitable movement and is growing faster than anyone could have anticipated. If we succeed, it could soon be the “only tech club in town”.

Q: It’s great to see Mapp being a part of such an important initiative! For our readers who may not know much about MACH Alliance, can you explain it a bit more?

A: It’s way more than a certification and a badge. It’s a community of like-minded people and companies that share the same strategy and belief: MACH and composable architecture provide a superior advantage when it comes to agility, time to value, and innovation.

I know, “agility” and “time to value” sound like those marketing buzzwords. But I can assure you, it’s as real as it gets as there’s a fast-growing community of MACH practitioners who swear by it. It’s also important to know that MACH Alliance is a non-profit organization that promotes MACH values, champions programmes such as “Women in MACH”, and develops best practice standards for integrating micro-services.

Q: What exactly does MACH stand for? And do we really need another acronym in marketing?

A: To answer your first question, it stands for:

• Microservices based: Individual pieces of business functionality that are independently developed, deployed, and managed
• API-first: All functionality is exposed through an API
• Cloud-native SaaS: SaaS that leverages the cloud, beyond storage and hosting, including elastic scaling and automatically updating
• Headless: Front-end presentation is decoupled from back-end logic and channel, programming language, and is framework agnostic

To answer your second question, we do need another acronym. Most typically describe their service or capability category, i.e., CMS, DXP, OMS, CDP. With so many technology vendors out there, there’s a need to differentiate technology that’s not built on so-called “Monolith” infrastructure. Having a MACH classification gives technology buyers (that are building their ideal stack based on principles of composable architecture) a peace of mind that the vendors have been pre-vetted for their needs, rather than wasting time sifting through vendors that aren’t fit for purpose.

Q: That’s interesting, but do all technology vendors not have microservices and provide APIs?

A: You’d be surprised! Yes, most vendors do have microservices and provide APIs – only they’re built as an extension to the core product, while only covering very basic use cases. For example, a vendor may allow you to retrieve reports or Analysis via API. However, that analysis query can only be built via a user interface and the ID that needs to be queried must be copied from the URL path. That’s simply not a workable solution when you’re trying to build a project by using MACH principles. Mapp Intelligence’s API, as an example, allows creating an analysis query for a time series or a single KPI report and then retrieves it in real-time.

MACH is so much more than just Microservices and APIs. It also stands for scalability, against maintenance downtimes and manual upgrade cycles. In an ecosystem that requires constant innovation and iterative improvements, there’s no place for waiting for the next upgrade cycle or estimating hardware capacity requirements for the next 12 months. I guess you can say those days are gone.

Q: Got it! With such a diverse portfolio in the MACH alliance membership space, what exactly is Mapp bringing to the Alliance?

A: We’re bringing Marketing Automation, CDP, and Analytics domains of expertise. Members and the wider practitioner community will be able to take advantage of the Headless Analytics, Real-time CDP, and Email marketing microservices.

Typical MACH projects rely heavily on testing and iterative development. Mapp Cloud provides instant insights into what does and doesn’t work, but most importantly surfaces thousands of improvement opportunities over and over again. We believe this is where the biggest opportunity for growth lies for any organization.

Q: What does this whole membership mean to our existing customers?

A: One of our main strategies is to bring marketing and development teams closer together. There’ll be no changes in the way our customers work with us, but we’ll be providing significantly more resources and content for the development teams. This includes guiding marketers on how to interact with their development teams and providing the development teams with more content, explaining the priorities and objectives of the marketing team.

Overall, Mapp Cloud MACH Alliance certification provides our customers a peace of mind that they are working with a future-proof vendor that will help them scale in 2023 and beyond.

Our customers we’ve spoken with are absolutely thrilled about Mapp joining the MACH Alliance and were overwhelmed by the number of customers already asking to become Ambassadors for the MACH Alliance.

Q: And what expertise will yourself, Esther, and David bring to the councils? Briefly speaking of course.

Growth Council – Ricardas Montvila, VP Global Strategy
Ricardas is primarily responsible for designing and driving the Go-To-Market and Product Strategy at Mapp, but his impact can be felt throughout the whole business. He has a passion for helping companies unlock the value of their data, and challenges marketers to fuel all their decisions with insights rather than gut feel.

Marketing and Community Council – Esther Lago Mendez, Partner Marketing Manager
Esther is an expert in launching complex cross-country partner campaigns. She also has extensive experience working on 360-marketing programs to build brand awareness and drive social engagement. As an active member of the Women in MACH Community, she is part of the Mentoring Program Committee. A brand-new project the Alliance is planning on launching at the Mach Two event this year.

Tech Council – David Westwood, Strategy Director
David is responsible for spearheading Strategic Technology Partner Projects at Mapp. Besides being able to map out integration requirements, he has a gift of cutting through the complexity to focus on use cases that add the most value to the end client. David also has an exceptional ability to explain, present, and demonstrate complicated solutions in a digestible way that can be understood by a 5-year-old.

Can anyone get involved?

Absolutely! The best place to start is by joining one of many MACH events and by getting your company to sign the Women in MACH Manifesto for Gender Equality.

If you’re working for a brand and have implemented MACH project in your organization, you can apply to become a MACH Ambassador.

Alternatively, if you’re a technology vendor and you adhere to MACH Alliance principles and can prove it, you can also sign-up for the MACH Alliance certification. It’s a fairly rigorous and lengthy process and in 2022 only 36% of applicants have been approved. But it’s worth being a part of!

Feel free to reach out to me if you would like to become a member!