Beyond the Acronym: How MACH Is Evolving for a Hybrid, AI-Powered Future
The MACH Alliance has always been grounded in principles.
But in the early days, those core principles were often overshadowed by the acronym itself: a shorthand that, while useful, sometimes gave the impression that the Alliance was bound to a rigidly-defined, four-letter doctrine. Over time, that limited interpretation led to the misconception that MACH was only for purists, or that adopting composability required an all-or-nothing approach.
That was never the intent.
“There is a false understanding out in the market, and partly that's our fault,” notes Casper Rasmussen, MACH Alliance President. “Because we know that awareness and communication require frequency and consistency.” What’s changed now isn’t the Alliance’s core beliefs, but how clearly and consistently they’re being communicated.
“We've moved away from the acronym officially and into principles,” Rasmussen said, “which by definition starts to create a more technology and business-centric conversation.” The Alliance’s emphasis today is on flexibility, incremental progress, and fit-for-purpose solutions— values that were always embedded in the MACH vision, but didn’t get the spotlight they deserved.
This renewed focus isn’t about relaxing standards. It’s about reflecting the real-world challenges businesses face and providing a path forward that aligns with how they actually operate.
The New MACH Mindset: Principles, Not Prescriptions
The MACH Alliance’s transformation isn’t just semantic. It reflects a deeper repositioning around how composable solutions are adopted, evaluated, and applied. Rasmussen explains that the Alliance, contrary to belief, is not about “best of breed” but rather “best of need”.
That nuance is key. MACH isn't about chasing the smallest, most niche services. It’s about choosing what fits, based on where a business is and where it's heading— a crucial distinction that as Rasmussen says, “is a reflection of the maturity of an organization.” That includes embracing hybrid architectures, where legacy systems and modern services coexist by design. As economic conditions have shifted, the push toward greenfield builds has given way to more brownfield decompositions. MACH is meeting that reality with intent.
“When the market is in a growth mode... companies build for greenfield,” Rasmussen says, referring to the period 5 or 6 years ago when the Alliance was still establishing itself as an industry authority. “When we are in a market that demands operational optimization... decomposition and increasing the degree of composability in an existing stack becomes the need of the buyer.”
That shift has driven internal changes, too. The Alliance has reworked its admissions playbook to assess applicants based on principles, not architectural purity, and now conducts reviews at the brand level rather than across entire companies. The goal: keep MACH membership meaningful, but flexible enough to support real-world adoption paths.
This mindset isn’t about lowering the bar. It’s about recognizing that composability must align with business context. If a solution is fit for purpose, swappable, and composable in principle, then it has a place within the MACH ecosystem, even if it doesn’t check every technical box out of the gate.
What Good Looks Like: Realizing Outcomes Through Hybrid
As hybrid architectures become the dominant pattern, at least for the time being, that doesn’t mean enterprises always get it right.
“I think the mindset around how to actually structure or set up the work is where this sometimes goes wrong—clients saying ‘shift us from this to this’ instead of aiming for a roadmap how to do things in smaller chunks that unlock value along the way—and that’s where the expertise of how to execute composable really comes in,” Rasmussen observes.
Too often, leaders still equate modern architecture with massive overhauls. That mindset creates risk, and it often leads to the wrong outcomes. Teams might build something correctly from a technical standpoint but fail to solve the business problem that actually matters. Worse, they may bolt a SaaS solution onto a legacy system and call it modern, without improving composability at all.
“If you're simply building SaaS onto legacy and you don't get the data and integration connectivity architecture right, you haven't increased the degree of composability. You've simply expanded the legacy,” Rasmussen warns.
Doing it well means getting specific. Hybrid doesn’t have to be a compromise. It can be the ideal approach, if it delivers measurable value, moves incrementally, and uses proven patterns like throttling or strangler fig deployments. When replacing the order management system that sits at the heart of a retailer’s ERP, for instance, thoughtful rollout isn’t optional. It’s essential.
“It’s not about just a number of releases,” Rasmussen said. “You can release as much as you want, but if it drives no impact, then why are you doing it?”
A hybrid architecture, when done right, offers a way to move forward with confidence, not fear. It’s not about perfection on day one. It’s about controlled progress, measurable results, and composability that grows as the business evolves.
MACH, AI, and the Demand for Composable Readiness
The rise of AI hasn’t changed the rules or shifted composability to also-ran status. It's made those things matter more. Closed systems, brittle integrations, and siloed data architectures aren’t just inconvenient now, they’re barriers to progress.
“The rise of AI will only demand a higher degree of composability across your architecture,” Rasmussen says. “It’s shedding an even harder light on some of these very structural, very foundational architectural weaknesses.”
The organizations best positioned to leverage AI meaningfully are the ones that have already invested in composable thinking. MACH maturity and AI readiness, Rasmussen notes, are directly correlated.
The Alliance is doubling down on this with the MACH AI Exchange, a platform built to help members and enterprise users bring AI into production, not just experimentation. “We want to create the first agentic ecosystem that works in the real world,” Rasmussen explains. “Taking the hype and the confusion out of AI and making it more accessible and usable for the end user.”
That effort is already underway. The Exchange’s first cohort includes brands like VF Corp, Mars, and Abbott, working alongside Alliance member ISVs, SIs and Enablers to develop use cases ranging from conversational B2B self-service to multimodal product discovery. These aren’t theoretical showcases. They’re active builds with working proofs-of-concept expected to launch at MACH X in London this fall.
At the center of it all is the same incremental, slice-the-problem mindset that MACH has championed from the beginning. AI efforts don’t require an overbuilt data foundation. They require focus.
“If you think you need to modernize the entire data foundation before you start, you're wrong,” Rasmussen says bluntly. “You've been sold something you shouldn't buy.”
From Movement to Mechanism
The MACH Alliance isn’t abandoning its founding ideals. It is applying them more wisely.
Composability still matters. But now, so does context. For some parts of the enterprise—like finance or HR—hybrid architectures may persist indefinitely. For others, especially those demanding speed and agility, the goal may still be full decoupling over time. As Rasmussen put it, “Hybrid will always be the case because finance applications will move at a slower speed than, for instance, a digital marketing or digital commerce application needs to.”
By focusing on principles instead of prescriptions, the Alliance is equipping businesses to make these calls deliberately, not reactively. That clarity is especially critical as AI takes center stage. Composable readiness is foundational to this next era of digital experience and MACH, more than ever, is positioned to help businesses make it real.
Leigh Bryant
Editorial Director, Composable.com
Leigh Bryant is a seasoned content and brand strategist with over a decade of experience in digital storytelling. Starting in retail before shifting to the technology space, she has spent the past ten years crafting compelling narratives as a writer, editor, and strategist.