Vtex CEO: E-Commerce Needs A New Pragmatism
Monoliths mushroomed. As we worked through the pre-cloud age of networking prior to the millennium, the desire to build bigger IT systems on the shoulders of the mainframe era that could handle massive computing tasks was widely lauded as a positive. Gargantuan is good, they said.
But with great power comes great responsibility for maintenance, security and management. Plus of course there's a commensurate trade-off in terms of nimble and agile flexibility, something which cloud was inherently designed to address, whether it ever really delivered on that promise or not.
As we started to realize the 'bigger they are, the harder they fall' reality in monolithic platforms, the IT industry championed the rise of microservices, application programming interface driven technologies capable of interconnecting like Lego, cloud-native composability and the use of so-called 'headless' architectures.
For completeness here, let's remind ourselves that headless software engineering principles decouple the front-end graphical user interface from the back-end business logic and data that an application lives on so that back-end components can be developed and changed more easily and front-end delivery of the application can be shared over a wider number of form factors and endpoints.
Listing those key factors again, that was microservices (M), application programming interfaces (APIs), cloud-native (C) and headless (H), which gives us MACH.
Formalized into a codified movement by the MACH Alliance, this body has a special focus on ecommerce applications and exists to promote the development of flexible enterprise tech stacks. That flexibility comes from the fact that each component is modular, scalable and easily replaceable. According to its founders, this allows for continuous improvement through agile development, ensuring the technology can adapt to evolving business needs.
But not everyone is sold on MACH principles for all perpetuity. Aiming to plant an opinionated stake in this space is Mariano Gomide de Faria in his role as founder of Vtex, a composable commerce platform that aims to buck some of the notions put forward by MACH advocates. Calling out the 'sea of APIs' that he suggests some software engineers are drowning in as a result of previous approaches to composable structures, Gomide de Faria says that developers are struggling to maintain data consistency across an ever-expanding ecosystem.
As a result of all this complex coding and integration, the Vtex leader says the average retailer's IT team can start to look like a stodgy software firm. Given that many retailers exist on single-digit margins, they cannot afford massive code teams. In today's world of persistent inflation and relentless competition. According to Gomide de Faria and team, what initially seemed cost-effective has revealed itself as a financial black hole, with multiplying expenses across development, maintenance and operations across a labyrinth of disconnected tools.
The Vtex leader says that the principles laid down thus far by MACH devotees can lead to live production environments with data replication issues, which could allow multiple ecommerce and/or retail organizations to access sensitive customer information. Without loosely coupled but well-secured integrations, the suggestion here is that the promise of AI-driven innovation remains elusive.
Gomide de Faria reminds us that today, retailing and social selling move way too fast for complex architectures. Agility matters when a typical e-commerce platform has to cope with everything from legacy data feeds to incorporating the latest in-app social selling on TikTok, Instagram and so on.
Although he's calling out MACH for what he thinks is its proclivity for bloated clunkiness, Gomide de Faria isn't wholly negative about the shape of this technology methodology, but he is resoundingly direct.
'Here's the inconvenient truth: MACH principles are no longer special; they're table stakes for modern web application development. The future lies in MACH-based architectures that are pragmatic," he said. To his mind, these architectures need to be ones when there's a clear and measurable return on investment; where they are outcomes-oriented with clear key performance indicators and business objectives; human-centic for end users, developers, digital marketers and merchandisers; and also flexible but practical with modularity where it matters and standardization where it simplifies.
In terms of recent affirmation for its technology proposition, Amazon Web Services has noted that Vtex has earned the AWS Consumer Goods Competency designation. This recognizes its expertise in delivering validated solutions to help consumer goods brands overcome operational challenges within the industry. In terms of usefulness, AWS Specializations & Competencies are designed to help customers find a short list of trusted cloud technology partners with expertise whose knowledge, services and solutions have been validated by AWS.
The company was named 'challenger' in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce report. CEO Gomide de Faria said the time that, 'We're not just a growth partner for brands thriving in the most demanding markets; we're setting the standard as the commerce platform for grownups. Our journey from navigating some of the world's most complex markets to powering the U.S. digital commerce for brands like Colgate, Stanley Black & Decker, U.S. Electrical Services Inc., Hearst and more have shaped our approach.'
There's a buzzphrase circulating around the Vtex team and its one that the software engineers behind Vtex appear to be quite passionate about: OOTB connection, which stands for out-of-the-box connectivity and it means technology that works a this level as a connections backbone that provides for sustainable business-driven ecommerce solutions.
Gomide de Faria's no holds barred commentary is underlined by his insistance that, 'The most elegant [information technology] architecture is the one that delivers results." He is averse to any architecture that adheres blindly to what he calls 'ideological purity' for the sake of it.
While we may not all have been sat around wondering when and how ecommerice platform backbones were about to be reinvented so that we truly shrug off the age of monolithic systems, we have all for sure been frustrated by online shopping applications that appear clunky and disconnected. It's time to head for the sales.
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