Retail Industry Is Leading the Way in MACH Adoption: Study

The group surveyed over 560 IT leaders who work in organizations with at least 5,000 employees and $500 million in annual revenue.

Almost 38% of retail organizations have been using microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native SaaS and headless (MACH) technology for more than seven years, according to the MACH Alliance’s 2025 Global Annual Research. 

The MACH Alliance is a not-for-profit industry association that provides standards, certification, and education for companies that want to use composable commerce technologies enabled by MACH architecture (microservices, API-first, cloud-native, and headless).  

The group surveyed over 560 IT leaders who work in organizations with at least 5,000 employees and $500 million in annual revenue. Ninety-one percent of organizations have increased their MACH infrastructure in the past year, with retailers leading the pack. Adaptation is expected to continue to increase, with surveyed organizations predicting they’ll be using MACH for 61% of their technology stack by 2026.

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Older CPG companies have been slower to adopt the technology because they are concerned about the disruption to their business processes, where large teams must work together to ensure smooth operations through managing inventory, analyzing sales, and predicting demand. MACH Alliance managing director Holly Hall says the first step to making institutional changes is building confidence in the new technology’s ability to remove the constraints of dated solutions.

“It’s important to understand that adopting a composable approach can be incremental,” Hall tells CGT. “Companies can implement a crawl, walk, run approach, implementing MACH technology in strategic parts of their tech stack while still leveraging their legacy systems in others, and slowly transforming over time.”