Today, Sports Teams are becoming digitally advanced at lightning speed. Becoming fluent in “digital” is vital to their future success. Sports Teams are content creators and providers and increasingly direct-to-consumer is more than just selling a ticket. Old technologies are no longer viable for businesses that need continuous evolution to keep up with fan expectations.
Digital transformation is essential for future success and many Teams are turning to MACH architecture to accomplish it.
Fortress has long been a proponent of MACH architecture as it enables clients to find more and better ways to remain agile, nimble, fan-centric, and future-proof.
What is MACH architecture?
MACH architecture is a set of technology principles behind our, best-of-breed technology platforms. The acronym stands for Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless:
Microservices: Individual pieces of business functionality that are independently developed, deployed and managed. The Fortress platform has over 120 such microservices covering our core service areas – access, loyalty, payments & campaigns. Each microservice fulfils a component function – such as a ticket scan, a stored value payment, a campaign trigger etc. Clients can select from this library of microservices to deliver the experience you require. In this way you can construct a program targeted to season ticket holders using one set of microservices and another targeting international fans using a completely separate set of services and benefits. Using our extensive library of microservices, you’ll be able to rapidly roll-out prototypes and programs without the heavy build processes involved in large-scale implementations. It also means that you can switch on (and off) services to change up the customer journey and experience of your engagement programs.
API-first: All functionality is exposed through our API GATEWAY, making it possible to tie together two or more applications or services. Your fans interact with a whole range of unconnected systems servicing the customer journey – from ticketing, concessions, retail, social, digital, mobile apps etc… Through our API Gateway each of these endpoint systems can interface with the Fortress microservices – joining the data dots on the customer experience.
Cloud-Native SaaS: All of this used to come at the cost of some pretty hefty ICT infrastructure – today however the Fortress services are delivered as a Software-as-a-Service that leverages the full capabilities of the cloud, beyond storage and hosting, including elastic scaling of highly available resources as your program grows in terms of complexity and user base size. Functionality is updated automatically, eliminating the need for upgrade management.
Headless: The front-end user experience is completely decoupled from the back-end logic, allowing for complete design freedom in creating the user interface and for connecting to other channels and devices (i.e. existing mobile applications, Ticket Scanners, Parking Machine, sensors, etc.). This means that Teams are free to dynamically present our microservice components – be they access, loyalty, payments, or campaigns – directly into the digital/mobile applications of choice. This also means that you can couple/uncouple these components from one application and move to another without having to reinvent the wheel each time.
While it’s a relatively new term in the industry, Fortress technologies built using MACH architecture provide the building blocks necessary to not only digitally transform a business, but continuously evolve into the future. Fortress gives Sports Teams the freedom to choose from the best services for the problem they are trying to solve, and maintain a structure that makes it easy to add, replace, or remove those services in the future.