MACH Alliance Event Offers Community, New Questions, And An Elephant 🐘
Yesterday as chair of the MACH Impact awards, I copresented at the MACH Alliance event with Miya Knights to a packed room. There were many deserving winners, and I thank all the entrants. Great to see good friends like Gireesh ⛁ ⛁ Sahukar at the event, along with many others.
Thanks to organizers for having me.
What Were the Main Topics Discussed?
How to change and why to change was on the mind of a lot of attendees. Burning 🔥 platforms were on display. Several presentations showed 2-4 year journeys with multi-billion dollar retailers.
Brain surgery required.
Overall, the level of technology discussion at the MACH Alliance event are second to none. You might expect that from this group -- and this is a boutique event, however the difference from a standard Shoptalk or other event is night and day.
Who Attended the MACH Alliance Event?
While there were many enterprises in the room, there were also a lot of vendors in the room - both agencies and ISVs. As the MACH Alliance itself grows, the organizers will definitely need to watch this ratio.
Which Platforms Were Represented at the Event?
The event continues to be a multi-platform affair -- the ones I personally saw at the event included commercetools, BigCommerce, VTEX and Commerce Layer. I'm sure others were there as well. Nice to see Thom Armstrong back in the platform game.
What Role Does Shopify Play in the Current Market?
The elephant in the room in a lot of discussions from vendors etc is "What about Shopify?" -- I fielded several questions from some (vendor/agency) who had traditionally focused more up-market but now were looking to understand how to penetrate the Shopify universe.
At RMW Commerce we travel in all the rooms; it's interesting to see this shift. In the past, the feeling was always: "If a MACH vendor and Shopify were in the same room, one of us is in the wrong room."
The time feels like a distant memory now.
The feeling on the floor is that Shopify is being pushed from the Board room (witness what just happened at Overstock - seriously whatever the F$%! is going on there, I can't figure it out generally), and that the IT teams understand the reality of a composable approach.
How Are Enterprises Adapting to the New Reality?
In this new reality where it's the CFO's world and we are all just living in it, it seems to me that "pre-composed" solutions have the upper hand, and custom-built anything feels like a distant memory as well -- perhaps up to $1B in overall revenue at least. Above $1B, the technical complexity and legacy is often dizzying.
What Are the Challenges and Questions for Shopify?
The question remains on my mind - what is Shopify's role in an Enterprise with a sea of vendors and Shopify is just "one of" the many solutions required to power eCommerce. Just witness: No PIM, no OMS, no CMS, questions about payments, and a POS which is not yet at the level for this segment. You can argue "you ain't gonna need it" but Shopify does not seem to be taking that approach. As they partner more and more, obviously they play no role in the MACH Alliance but you will see some of these MACH vendors playing in the Shopify world.
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