Bed Bath & Beyond is moving toward an open, interchangeable technology infrastructure.
Chain Store Age recently spoke with Ronak Shah, director of architecture, Bed Bath & Beyond, about how the home furnishings giant is shifting from its legacy IT environment to a best-of-breed technology model known as “MACH.” Shah also advocates for MACH outside of Bed, Bath & Beyond as an ambassador for the MACH Alliance.
Can you explain the MACH technology ecosystem?
MACH is an enterprise architectural approach that stands for Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS, and Headless. It's a modern software strategy that's composable and defined by working with smaller solutions that seamlessly integrate with one another. These best-of-breed solutions work together and function as a single unit, yet each part is interchangeable.
For example, as a web engineer back in the 1990s and early 2000s, I worked with one big commerce package, one big code repository, and my full team had a clear understanding of what was happening across the entire system at all times. Our web needs could be met within the capacity of a single platform.
But with the e-commerce boom arising, we needed systems to work in new, more adaptable ways, especially with buyers "consuming" commerce across channels, including on mobile and social media.
Businesses started to realize that in order to continuously deliver new experiences, frequent enhancements to the IT system were going to be the norm. That meant a new approach to enterprise architecture was needed. And thus, the appetite for MACH took hold.
What specific advantages does a MACH IT strategy offer retailers?
A MACH architecture enables retailers to build continually evolving digital experiences with remarkable speed and scale. With the pandemic continuing on, this has never been more critical, as people are shopping more online and through different devices and channels.
In order to give customers the optionality they demand for when and how they shop, a technology stack rooted in true SaaS is needed to deliver best customer experiences and accelerate time to value. A MACH architecture lets retailers quickly deliver omnichannel experiences to customers, and sets them up for future adaptation. It also allows systems to work together seamlessly and for updates to happen without affecting the entire ecosystem.
What made Bed Bath & Beyond decide to pursue a MACH strategy?
The introduction of the many mobile touchpoints for shopping completely changed how commerce was conducted. This fueled the disruption of enterprise architecture. Plus, the need to continuously deliver new experiences required frequent enhancements to the system.
That single commerce platform we'd previously used, which at one point in time made life incredibly simple, was no longer meeting our evolving needs - or the consumers'. We were running into challenges at the people, process and technology levels.
In the people area, all teams working on one large codebase with a single deployment was inconvenient, slow, and risky. In the process area, different teams weren’t able to make their own choices around development and deployment. And in regard to technology, commerce was unable to scale, and it was too hard to experiment with newer frameworks to support business capabilities.
We realized we needed a new approach and started our journey to MACH in 2017.
How did Bed Bath & Beyond implement MACH, and what have the results been?
Our first step in breaking away from our legacy monolith was to create a headless front-end (the “H” in MACH). This would allow us to frequently develop and deploy changes to the front-end experience. To support this, we used Catalog / Search API and an API gateway (the “A” in MACH) to aggregate data from the monolith and other back-end systems that we could feed to our agile front end. The process of going from a monolithic commerce platform to a headless front end with an API gateway took us roughly six months.
Overall, our journey from monolithic to MACH is ongoing. By breaking off our front-end early, creating key APIs and leveraging multiple single-page applications (SPAs), we have been able to improve our customer-facing experience quickly and have gradually been composing our back end into services where it makes business sense to do so.
We continue to move towards serverless, low code, low ops as we make choices for future services.
What advice would you offer other retailers considering a MACH rollout?
You don't have to tackle the transition from monolith to MACH at once. In fact, it's best to make it a multi-step process that you gradually undertake overtime. Which services to create first and what should be data store separation is something you decide based on the size of the catalog and site. While the desire is to create everything at web scale, in all practicality this answer will depend on many other factors for the organization such as operational complexity, cost and skills needed.
Other considerations I would prioritize are around what sets your company apart and what you want to build. You should also think about what you want to leverage as a SaaS vendor product. For example, we started with a headless content management system (CMS) by customizing open source Drupal in 2017. If I am making that decision today, I would consider cloud-native SaaS solutions, which provide better headless CMS capabilities. That enables a business to create better experiences and capabilities for its customers.
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April 24, 2021 at 12:07AM
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CSA Q&A: Bed Bath & Beyond adopts best-of-breed IT strategy - Chain Store Age
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