MACH Alliance Announces Executive Board Changes With Focus on Diversity of Expertise and Growth in North America

SAN FRANCISCO and NEW YORK and LONDON and AMSTERDAM and BERLIN, July 5, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- MACH Alliance, the group of independent tech companies dedicated to advocating for open, best-of-breed technology ecosystems, announced today changes to its Executive Board and leadership team.

The MACH Alliance is a vendor-neutral institution that provides resources, education and guidance through industry experts to support companies on their journey to MACH (Microservices, API-First, Cloud-Native SaaS, Headless) as composable technology adoption increases. As a movement, transparent and democratic governance is vital. Board elections take place every year with each term lasting two years. Executive Board members are permitted to serve a maximum of two terms.

The new board fulfills the Alliance's commitment to ensuring diverse representation across member categories, geographies, genders, and areas of expertise. Notably, there are now more North American representatives than European, reflecting the accelerating adoption of MACH in the U.S. and Canada. Additionally, the board has transitioned from a primarily technology focus to having more focus on business, marketing, and strategy. This shift will aid in advancing the Alliance's mission, promoting the movement, and further supporting expansion in North America within the next 12 months. The board comprises representatives from ISV, SI, and Enabler members with an almost equal split between female and male members.

The new executive board appointments are:

Kristin Naragon, Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer at Akeneo
Brian Walker, Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) at Bloomreach
Krithika Ganesamoorthi, Sr. Manager Solutions Architecture at Amazon Web Services
Jen Jones, Chief Marketing Officer at commercetools
Jasmin Guthmann, Head of Corporate Communication at Contentstack (re-elected)

They will join existing executive board members:

Casper Rasmussen, President and Global SVP Technology at Valtech
Jon Panella, Group Vice President at Publicis Sapient
Chris Bach, Co-founder and CSO at Netlify
Dom Selvon, CTO at Apply Digital

Outgoing board members include Kelly Goetsch, an important changemaker in the MACH community. Kelly has played a critical role in the development of the Alliance since inception as founding president and in furthering the industry's understanding of MACH during his two year board tenure. He will remain an enthusiastic supporter in his role at commercetools, who continue to be an active member; John Williams and Gordana Vuckovic, who have made significant contributions to the Alliance and the MACH movement during their time on the Executive Board.

The Alliance also announced today the addition of a new Education Council, which will be led by Tarek Nseir, SVP Digital EMEA, EPAM, who has been an active member of the Executive Board for the past year. With this new council the Alliance aims to turbocharge its efforts in the educational space, ensuring it remains top of the agenda. The council will play a critical role in the launch of a MACH Alliance business and technical foundation later this year.

The deeper leadership bench for the Alliance comes on the heels of several milestones, including celebrating its three-year anniversary, and reaching almost 90 members, most recently announcing PayPal among other global financial services providers, while maintaining the purity of the MACH Alliance certification. The inaugural MACH TWO event in Amsterdam June 13-14 brought together more than 600 leaders across the MACH network.

"It has been an exciting, and fun experience to strategically lead this organization for the last 12 months," said Casper Rasmussen, President of the MACH Alliance. "We are looking forward to onboarding fresh thinking, new energy, and to welcome new individuals to our executive team. With this leadership team in place from August, we have the exclusive opportunity to really propel awareness, education and the advancement of MACH to the next level. My sincere thanks to our board for having been such an essential part of all our achievements to date."

The 2023 elections also saw the appointment of new Heads of Councils:

The Growth Council will be led by Tal Ofer, Partnerships Director at Cloudinary. The Marketing Council will continue to be led by Andrew Wadsworth, Senior Director Business Development at Apply Digital, joined by Irina Boteo, VP Marketing at Uniform. Finally, the newly appointed Tech Council co-heads are, Stuart Guest-Smith, Lead Principal Architect at BigCommerce, and Roberto Carrera, Strategy Architect at Apply Digital.

Voting for the 2023 elections took place between June 28th and 30th. Candidates from member companies nominated themselves and campaigned for MACH Alliance member votes which were cast as part of a transparent, democratic process.

About the MACH Alliance

The MACH Alliance is a [501(c)(6)] non-profit organization, governed by an independent board and does not endorse specific vendors, members or otherwise. The Alliance was formed in June 2020 to help enterprise organizations navigate the complex modern technology landscape. It aims to guide and show the business advantage of open tech ecosystems that are Microservices based, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS and Headless. All MACH Alliance members meet certification principles that are published on the website.

The MACH Alliance welcomes technology companies and individual industry experts who share the same vision for the future. Learn more at machalliance.org, read here about MACH certification and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Contact: 
Megan Lampros
[email protected] 

SOURCE MACH ALLIANCE, Inc