The Sommelier of MACHtails: Sommsation’s Danielle Diliberti Uncorks Composability

Unlike a fine wine, technology doesn’t get better with age. We call all drink to that. 

Ah… if only code matured like a Cab, maybe we wouldn’t be in a constant cycle of change. You could bottle an app once, put it on the rack, and let its tannic profile blossom into greatness. 

But alas, the soil of the digital vineyard isn’t sown as such. 

Pour another glass and ponder this: Since the pandemic, we’ve accelerated digital transformation to unthinkable speeds and expectations. In the realm of e-commerce, organizations are measuring their go-to-market strategies in days – sometimes hours. Technology is in a hyperbolic state of flux, and modern applications are under greater pressure to perform. 

And brands that stand still with their own transformation might, shall we say, die on the vine.

For the last few decades, we’ve been reliant on a particular vintage of integrated, pre-composed, and often expensive systems to power our digital solutions. For some enterprises, these platforms have stymied innovation and limited their agility. Legacy wines are good, but legacy systems? Not always.   

There’s a viticultural phrase you might be familiar with: "The grape has to struggle." It’s well-regarded wisdom about the nature of this fruit, and how some modicum of difficulty produces higher quality grapes – and thus more delectable wines. 

Building a composable technology stack presents a similar kind of struggle. But for Danielle Diliberti, the juice appears to be worth the squeeze. Launched in 2021, Sommsation – the startup she founded and leads as CEO – is more than a digital wine store. In her own words, it represents a deeper commitment to bridging the gap between tradition and innovation.

To that end, Sommsation is a one-stop that connects wine enthusiasts with unique, lesser-known producers and knowledgeable sommeliers (that’s a professional who has forgotten more about wine than most of us will ever know). Their shelves are generously stocked with unexpected varietals that can’t be found in your local grocery store or even most specialty wine shops. 

But the vino isn’t the only value. In the pantheon of modern wine experiences, consumers thirst to learn on their journey, and education is almost always missing from the equation. Sommsation fills that void, providing human expertise at venues, offices, and events – all while helping small, independent producers find both exposure and growth.

Danielle and her business partner, Bill Hagner, were initially struck by the abject complexity and inefficiency plaguing the wine industry, much of it a result of antiquated design. As seasoned consultants, they saw an opportunity to transform it with technology and mitigate the market headwinds that many independent wineries face. 

I had a chance to catch up with Danielle after the MACH THREE Conference a few months back, and we talked about the role of MACH in her approach to building a new kind of platform. Danielle is sort of “MACH royalty,” if I may be so bold – a former corporate rockstar with the heart of an entrepreneur and the one-two punch of business leader and technologist. 

Our orbits collided while serving together as judges for the MACH Impact Awards over the last few years. But she’s also an outspoken advocate for the MACH community, bringing her undeniable voice and passionate evangelism to the composable movement. 

“It’s getting harder and harder to pick winners,” I recalled her saying during one of our panel calls. It was an accurate assessment: the field of submissions for the Impact Awards is getting more difficult to judge each year as the quality, complexity, and mind-blowing outcomes reflect the potential of MACH. It’s also why many enterprises are now embracing its fundamentals.

At the same time, we’ve seen the MACH-lash mount over the last year, particularly as organizations struggled with accountability, performance, and the dreaded birth of a “MACHolith” – which stands in stark contrast to the ideological benefits of a composable architecture. Still, Gartner predicts that by 2027, at least 60% of new B2C and B2B digital commerce solutions developed for the cloud will be aligned with MACH principles.

While MACH tends to be the domain of large enterprises, Danielle has proven that the mindset can unlock architectural possibilities further downstream. I was fascinated to learn more about her personal and business journey – but also her perspective on the growth of MACH and where things are headed. 

From where she stands, it’s worth raising a glass to composability. 

“Old World” meets “New World“

As fate would have it, the day I booked a call with Danielle was an infamous one. We were slotted to chat on the morning of the massive Crowdstrike outage that roiled across the airline industry, leaving some of her sommeliers stranded.

“We had multiple team members, clients, and guests flying out of San Luis Obispo,” she said. “It was the worst place to be during an airline issue because there were only two or three flights available. We were all asking, ‘What is going on right now? This should be common sense!’ It was a disastrous day.”

Disastrous indeed. According to insurance company Parametrix, airlines suffered a combined $860 million in revenues, and the entire outage cost Fortune 500 companies a total of $5.4 billion. 

When market leaders like Crowdstrike and Microsoft spill the wine, it reveals our vulnerable dependency on big systems. This won’t be the last bug, but it was surely a wake-up call that our critical infrastructure requires more resiliency and redundancy. At the same time, it reinforces why enterprises are seeking greater control over their technology – one reason why composable has become posh.  

While the impact to Sommsation was short-lived, Danielle was familiar with the big system dilemma and how these events can spoil a vintage. She began her accounting career at Deloitte – one of the world’s largest and most revered consulting firms – focused on tax and audit functions. But she quickly began to decode the entrepreneurial track and where technology could be a force multiplier.

“My background and the ‘meandering’ I've done really influenced my philosophy,” she responded lightly. “When speaking with entrepreneurs, it's a very common path, especially those in the digital space. Very early on, I started understanding how to make technology work for them. I always joke that when I was 25, it was either ‘spend a little bit of extra time tinkering with technology’ or ‘spend a lot of late nights in an office and audit stuff.’ So that was really my first inspiration to [pursue] technology.”

“I always joked that I was kind of a believer in MACH before it even existed.”

Danielle parlayed that interest into a degree in computer science and information systems, graduating from Deloitte to a financial analyst role at Guggenheim Partners – a more traditional investment company. She spent seven years rocking performance analysis and dealing with data and reporting. She also covered the trading desks as a portfolio manager. 

“The financial services space has so much technology, and a lot of it is faster than most people understand, and that was always really interesting to me,” she opined. “I always wanted to understand what was happening behind the scenes, like why were things trading faster. There was a big movement with high-frequency trading, and that always kept me really keen on understanding the technologies.” 

Danielle’s foray into speeds and feeds started when servers were still physically located close to trading desks, and the latency of moving data was becoming a key inhibitor. But as the cloud came into play, she saw a decoupled future ahead – and this helped shape her view of a microservices, API-first world that could power applications. 

“I always joked that I was kind of a believer in MACH before it even existed,” she said with a tinge of humor. “That’s why I’ve been with the MACH Alliance from the beginning.” 

As Danielle noted, her shift from one massive server-based system to a decomposed architecture exposed her to what a successful transformation journey looks like – not only the associated cost and effort but the little milestones of success. As such, she became an early trailblazer of composability, which shaped her role as CTO at The St. James – a premier sports, wellness, and entertainment brand. This was around the time that MACH came on the scene. 

“It was only a five-year-old company, but some decisions were made early on to embrace legacy models and it really disrupted a very modern customer experience,” she said. “So we transformed the entire business by embracing MACH principles and moving into a really composable world in roughly nine months. [It was] a really fast transformation, and it significantly improved the operational model.”

Wine? Wine not?

Although she was an aficionado of the parfait, Danielle described how the influence of the health and wellness space and her experience in FinTech, insurance, and across technology prepared her for Sommsation. 

Much of that influence came from her most recent gig at Eldridge, where she focused on strategy and innovation for some large portfolio companies – as well as investments for early-stage players in FinTech, reporting and analytics, and even payment processing systems. She also worked on big innovation and transformation projects that had very large annuity and pension considerations.

At the time she began exploring the wine field, she was driving what was almost like an incubator or an accelerator within her own team – with a focus on a more lifestyle-oriented space. This, too, became part of Sommsation’s organizational ethos.

“At first, we were thinking just virtual hospitality or digitizing some of our hospitality touch points,” she chronicled. “This was all happening in 2020, when the world was a different place, and we had to get really creative and lean into technology. We saw that you could apply this to most food and beverage categories, but in the wine world, there's just a lot of fragmentation and a general lack of modern technology. So we thought, ‘This is a great opportunity. There aren’t many spaces or industries left that haven't been [replatformed].’”

One of the biggest advantages Danielle had when building a new business in an old world was her regulatory experience. Over the years, she had waded into the deep and frigid waters of governance across both the FinTech and insurance categories. The wine industry is also highly regulated, especially in the U.S. – so this provided terra firma for a nascent play.

At the same time, she assembled a cabal of founders to jettison the project from idea to operations, marshaling talent from Eldridge like Bill Hagner and Matt Hessinger, who were also very keen on AI and big data.

“It's a really interesting story, because the world of wine is about as legacy as it comes, and our technology is 100% based on MACH principles and composable,” she said. “I think we're just a really great example of showcasing how fast and transformative it is when you start to build composable, go digital-first, and apply it to a lifestyle or food and beverage business.”

Like most applications in the wild, customers don’t really understand or care about the tech behind an experience platform – until it doesn’t work (just ask Crowdstrike). But as Danielle explained, success is all about the underlying strategy and how you start the journey. It’s something the MACH Alliance has evangelized for years, and it has clearly made a difference for Sommsation. 

“I think it's really hard not to believe in MACH and composable,” she punctuated. 

Blending the right Cru for industry success

Sommsation is a sweet story – and one that has serious legs from an industry perspective. 

Since its founding in 2020, the MACH Alliance has shepherded the growth of composable through its best-of-breed membership ecosystem, which represents a range of digital experience platforms (including headless content management systems). But it leans heavily on e-commerce and retail, where founding platforms like commercetools brought significant sway to the trajectory as composable stacks battled the lock-in with monoliths like Shopify.

Sommsation is a bit of an outsider, mixing a traditional digital commerce motion with CPG, food and beverage, and even experiential dimensions. The platform offers classic storefront capabilities via its website portal, but it also connects sommeliers with customers (sometimes A-list celebrities at red carpet events) to provide one-of-a-kind experiences with wine savants like Elyse Lovenworth.

Sommsation focuses on unique wine experiences with independent wineries. Source: Sommsation Website

I asked Danielle if Sommsation and other peripheral industry applications might be the “canaries in the coal mine” for broader industry expansion – something I’ve spoken to Alliance president Casper Rasmussen about frequently.

“As a member of the Advisory Board, and having been an Ambassador since the beginning, we actually talk a lot about which industries are moving where,” she replied. “I think, specifically as it relates to the MACH Alliance, it's no secret that it started in retail. And I think retail and e-commerce are moving fast and furiously, and you can really see the success.”

As she explained, we're now starting to see both the numbers and studies that validate growth in areas like banking and financial services. But there’s still a lot of work to be done before it reaches parity – and there are several key challenges to overcome.

“I think the upfront planning and investment is scary to a lot of businesses,” Danielle surmised. “But the newer camps of people are building in a much more composable way, even if they don't realize it. Some practitioners might not be able to riff off what the definition of MACH is or what it really stands for. But when you really think about monoliths versus anything else, it starts to make a lot of sense – so I think more people are actually doing it more than they realize.”

As I’ve covered in previous articles, there’s a lot of legacy tooling and data that needs to be considered. As Danielle explained, many of these systems are going to break or support will be sunset – and the need to solve the problem will only become more urgent. MACH is presenting opportunities to weave together legacy in the right places. But it’s also providing a pathway to modernize while kicking the legacy lock-in to the curb. 

To get there, stakeholders and teams will require more knowledge and awareness of MACH, which is finally catching fire in the U.S. after driving significant adoption in Europe. But can it make gains in other sectors and bring the promise of composable to the broader stack?

“More education and more dialog needs to take place,” Danielle fired back. “There are now enough use cases out there and different applications that I think it's all very viable. And as the younger generation comes up, they won't even know the legacy way. So over time, it will change, but we still have some big blocks to move, and it's going to require investment.”

Decanting MACH with a more integrated organization

Danielle is a new-world tech pioneer with classic business leader DNA. She touted the necessity of people, processes, and technology to drive success – “The Holy Triumvirate,” if you will. It’s her framework, and in her mind, you need all three to be more integrated and win. 

“When you think about manual work, sometimes it’s just people with processes. And of course, there's technology in everything we do, but not really leveraging technology for operational effectiveness. Often, when you think about operations and processes, those are coupled, separate from business strategy, or the Office of the CEO, or marketing and sales. I think it’s all starting to shift in a very positive manner, where it's all a lot more integrated.”

This makes total sense, and tracks with many of the MACH principles as it relates to organizational alignment. Brass tacks: You don't want your IT department off in a basement doing their thing. As Danielle explained, you want technologists integrated into the business strategy – that’s where positive adoption really starts to happen.

“In a lot of organizations, there’s still a separation between the technologists and the business. But when you think about building something composable, you have to understand what the end game is and who the end users are – whether it's customers or employees.”

“In a lot of organizations, there’s still a separation between the technologists and the business. But when you think about building something composable, you have to understand what the end game is and who the end users are – whether it's customers or employees. I always talk about how the constituents have to be both, because someone has to run the back end. If you're using the front end, someone has to be talking to the customers.”

By integrating these traditionally disparate parts of an organization, Danielle sees acceleration as a key outcome. Whether you have an internal or external technology product, or you’re delivering a customer or client experience, you can intersect and really leverage great people with strong processes using best-in-class technologies – which, in her mind, is the defining posture of composable. 

“That's when you really start to see the change in adoption,” she said. “And that requires the business and the technologist really working together, which takes time and education. But once you shift that, it really becomes a lot smoother – and you don't even realize that you were in the ‘Old World’ anymore.”

Uncorking what’s next

The future. It’s something we talk a lot about in tech and business, from predicting it to preparing for it. Sometimes we’re right, sometimes… not so much. 

Along those lines, I invite you to check out a few of our Guest Critic Andrew Kumar’s predictions for CMS in 2024. He nailed a few, but there were some swings and misses. Still, his analysis is worthy of Montepulciano.

One of the most fascinating revelations in Danielle’s story is how her deliberate and methodical planning – all underscored by MACH thinking – is setting up Sommsation for long-term success. Timing was a big part of her calculus; you might say that she saw when everything was “ripe” and the technology mature enough to harvest.

“Ten years ago, Sommsation probably couldn't have existed,” she proclaimed. “Our tech stack is primarily proprietary, but it's not something that isn't in Shopify or Squarespace. There are a lot of commonalities within certain platforms, but then we have a lot of other partners to make it a more robust, multi-faceted platform and marketplace to really serve our industry.”

What is that stack composed of? Sunlight, trapped in water, perhaps? Yes, it’s a SaaS platform, but it also includes both lifestyle and e-commerce business components embedded into it. Like most composable projects, the business model can get very complicated very quickly – hence why they’re so prone to failure. That MACH-lashing I mentioned is a real phenomenon.

But Danielle and her team saw the vision early on and have invested significantly. They were also accustomed to long-term plays at Eldridge and were willing to stick it out – even if it was a five or ten-year endeavor. More than anything, they saw the amount of green space the opportunity presented, and that powered their conviction.

Source: Sommsation Website

“We’ve been building not just for 2025, but for 2030 to 2040, and really trying to focus on being a category creator,” she countered. “In studying so many of these businesses, I know that the shift is going to take a little bit longer, because some of the bigger players are on legacy technology tools and using outdated processes and systems, and they're not ready for the next phase. So that's really what we spend a lot of our time doing with wineries all over the place, using the MACH principles and the partners we have, many of which are now part of the MACH Alliance, like Stripe and AWS.”

For Danielle, being a fixture within the MACH Alliance is a natural fit. After navigating a rich and diverse career across the right blend of industries and technologies, she has become one of the leading voices in the composable chorus. I asked her what the Alliance means to the market, and how it all plays into a more composable future. 

“I think the Alliance is doing a really great job of not being a governing body, but being a very trusted source,” she remarked. “Just the adoption over the last three years, I think it’s wonderful. And having really large entities, enterprise-level services, and some of the newer players in the space, I think it’s all setting a tone.”

While the MACH Alliance is focused on evangelizing the tenets of MACH, it has also been developing more digestible content and even certifications – something we’ve covered extensively. As Danielle noted, there’s a broader ecosystem of people who can carry the water. Or in this case, the wine.

“It makes sense to start with technologists, but I think there are practitioners that might not be engineers that also need to understand this stuff, especially as leaders and decision-makers. So I think we continue to do what we're doing, but also evolve the conversation to more audiences to help accelerate not only the adoption of MACH, but also of composable – and get us further along the journey faster.”

One last sip

As a member of the MACH Alliance Executive Advisory Board, part of my charter is to provide objectivity and outside perspective. There are times when I’ve openly challenged the lack of transparency regarding the admissions process, and I’ve been an advocate of more diversity and representation within the member community. I’ve also listened to feedback from vendors with an open mind and highlighted the efforts of the Women in MACH program.

At the same time, as both an analyst and a market watcher, I believe that composed DXPs (the “monoliths,” n'est-ce pas?) have received steady growth signals from the MACH camp, as well as customers seeking greater flexibility. As such, they’ve made significant headway in architecting and telegraphing their own decomposition. 

In the end, we can all agree that more choice and transparency are good things. Yet, amid the confusion, we need trusted authorities that can help buyers evaluate technology with greater confidence. This is where industry NPOs like the MACH Alliance can continue to prove their value. 

One theme that surfaced repeatedly during my conversation with Danielle was the holistic impact of composability. Yes, it was a novel approach to assembling technology and future-proofing a business strategy – and one she saw well before the birth of MACH. But composable thinking, what we might now call a “MACH mindset,” allowed her to see things differently. Like a fine wine, it “opened up” new possibilities. 

Cultivating a composable strategy takes tremendous effort. In many ways, it’s like working in a vineyard. You need to get your hands in the soil to really understand the connected ecology. The vines need to be tied off in just the right way, the irrigation properly tuned. Above all, you need to understand the end game – and how every decision you make now will affect the glass your customer pours.

The best grapes need to struggle. But the juice might be worth the squeeze. 

Cheers.

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