MACHtales: Voices from 'The Composable Conference' with Andrew Kumar of Uniform

If there's one thing the MACH Alliance's annual conference can boast, it's a plethora of tales. 

Composable is a wiry web of complexity, and this community gathering is an opportunity to share stories about the good, the bad, and yes… even the not-so-attractive challenges of taking the MACH road. 

I talked to a lot of amazing people at “The Composable Conference” in Chicago last week, and you can catch more of the granular tidbits and tasty toppings in my “deep dish” of the conference. 

One of the smartest things the event coordinators designed for this year's content was the use of tracks, where sessions were mapped to an attendee's MACH maturity. This provided clarity for early-stage “MACH Curious” to full-fledged professional practitioners – and the feedback around this format was largely positive.

I wanted to get a diverse range of perspectives, and some of that was reflected in my overview. But I was also able to sit down with a few attendees to capture some video, and our team has assembled these into "MACHtales" – stories from the voices across the MACH community.

In this segment, we riff with Andrew Kumar, the Global VP of Agencies, ISVs, Ecosystem, and Customer Solutions at Uniform – a composable DXP. Full transparency: Andrew is also an occasional CMS Critic contributor with a deep heritage in CMS. As Uniform has evolved its position in the thick fabric of the digital ecosystem, the company has found success as a vital translation layer for experiences, notching a Visionary spot on the recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for DXPs.

In five minutes, Andrew gives us the hot take on Uniform's evolution as an interoperability bridge and how agentic AI is changing the game from an experience perspective. He touches on the need for incremental steps, and how aligning tech, build, and ops – and how AI weaves across each of these stories – is key. This is where humans need to be in the loop. 

Along the way, he gets into Uniform's strategy of adding their own CMS, and how it acts as an acceleration springboard while avoiding any vendor lock-in, opening up the headless frontier based on a customer's needs. He also shares what stood out at "The Composable Conference" and how the community's value will benefit ISV members like Uniform in 2025 and beyond.

I love how he touches on the emergence of new roles in the ecosystem, from web producers to visual architects. It codifies how change is constant – and why standards are critical for creating architectural guardrails. 

Roll the footage:

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