A composable digital experience platform (DXP) is an architecture where the system is composed of loosely coupled services that are deployed and managed as autonomous packaged business capabilities (PBCs). This enables companies to create a flexible and adaptable platform.
According to Gartner, by 2023, 60% of enterprise companies will list becoming composable as their objective. This results from one main factor: outpacing the competition. Research by the same firm reveals that by 2023, organizations with a composable approach to content management and enterprise resource planning will outpace the competition at the speed of new feature implementation by 80%.
These composable tools represent a new generation of DXP. They break with the traditional, prepackaged software suites like Adobe or Oracle by leveraging interconnected microservices. With them, a business can build a web of independent services with a single platform.
This article takes a deep dive into the composable architecture and compares it against the suite architecture. Then, we’ll talk about the impact of the MACH architecture on composability and show you how a composable platform works as the connective tissue that makes the DXP of your dreams a reality.
Composable DXP defined
Gartner defines a digital experience platform (DXP) as “an integrated set of technologies, based on a common platform, that provides a broad range of audiences with consistent, secure, and personalized access to information and applications across many digital touchpoints.”
A DXP, unlike your CMS, DXP doesn’t try to manage every aspect of your digital experience creation and delivery.
DXPs use APIs to create an integration tissue that allows different microservices to communicate and add more functionalities to your DXP, integrating marketing automation tools, eCommerce engines, personalization, and analytics to build a composable platform.
DXPs allow developers to build websites and apps using their favorite frameworks and tech stacks from an architectural standpoint. They remove the constraints of traditional suite DXPs that force developers to build using only that technology, stifling creativity and innovation.
The elements of a composable DXP
While individually packaged business capabilities create DXPs, this isn’t enough for a DXP to be called composable.
A composable DXP must be:
- Modular: Your DXP needs to be composed of different PCBs
- Autonomous: Each PCB needs to be self-sufficient and independent from each other
- Orchestrable: The PCBs should be consumable by APIs
- Discoverable: Designed for clarity and capable of being used by non-technical users.
Composable DXPs vs suite DXPs
Suite DXPs, or software suites, offer a set of packaged business capabilities. They give users several different functionalities housed under one roof. However, the main drawback of monolithic architecture is that they tend to be behemoths that require trained team members to wrangle them.
Product suites or suite DXPs are a collection of products bundled and orchestrated together by a single vendor.
In a suite-based product, you can buy all the products in the suite separately. Still, you can’t add products from third parties or replace any product in the suite without losing functionalities and potentially money because you’re being charged for the whole suite rather than a single product most of the time.
The composable approach presents an answer to this issue. It allows you to choose each tool separately and prevent yourself from vendor lock-in. By allowing enterprises to not put all their eggs in one basket, composable DXPs can truly deliver task-oriented capabilities.
While suite DXPs can be a good starting point for companies looking to build and distribute digital experiences, they aren’t as great as their vendors want to make them look.
The reality is that suite DXP vendors like Sitecore, Adobe, and Oracle want you to use their products, not their competitors’, which is why they sell the platform as a whole. Composability puts the decision of which tools to use in the user's hands. Now you, and not the vendor, get to choose how to build your composable solution.
A composable platform lets you choose the tools and ensures that they play well together, regardless of who built them, giving you choices, something suites don’t give you.
Benefits of the composable architecture
With a composable platform, you pick the tools you want for your DXP, without costly and risky custom development. It lets you select the tools you want to use in your DXP, and connects them for you.
This allows your tools to work together as a single system. Here are some additional benefits of the composable architecture:
Better developer experience
You can choose your own stack and have full control over how data from different headless sources flow into your application. With ease, you can use your composable DXP’s architecture SDK to retrieve, map, and apply API results to component props.
You can also take advantage of a single endpoint to your DXP without tight coupling or vendor lock-in. Other adjustable functions include mapping data as you see fit, in your codebase, as a serverless function, your own API endpoint, or with Unifrom’s CLI.
Empowered business users
As business goes headless, marketers and merchandisers can feel left behind. The composable architecture empowers developers and marketers to build, launch and iterate with no-code composition tools that leverage all content sources.
In addition, with a composable DXP, testing and personalization are built-in to improve key business metrics, all without submitting a developer ticket.
Performant digital experiences
The composable architecture enables frictionless, pre-integrated support for best-of-breed services, allowing you to launch fast without the need for extensive retooling.
You can also adopt a headless CMS without the need for an expensive migration, add or change headless sources without interrupting delivery, and enable headless to coexist with traditional architectures.
MACH architecture and composability
How does a suite DXP compare to the MACH architecture? The difference comes down to choice. With a suite, the vendor selects the products for you. With MACH, you choose the products you want from the vendors you want to buy from, devising a best-of-breed strategy.
Back when suites were popular, building a software stack yourself was just not practical for most enterprises.
These days vendors are making their products with the expectation that companies will want to integrate with other products. As cloud technology has grown, MACH-based products don’t need to worry about supporting multiple products built with different technologies.
The MACH architecture enables the digital transformation of businesses and gives users and visitors consistency throughout their journey.
With that said, people who want to build composable systems depend on infrastructure too. Although orchestration supplies the most business value, it's also complex to implement.
While the MACH architecture and modern technology make it easier to integrate, orchestration is still a challenge, and everyone needs orchestration: its infrastructure.
As with any other technology, the infrastructure must be in place before that technology can be
adopted on a large scale.
You must remember that composable systems will be widely adopted only when orchestration is readily available.
Closing thoughts
In contrast with the monolithic architecture proposed by composable DXPs, where the platform comes with a set of pre-integrated components already selected, a modern DXP enables companies to choose their favorite tool stack and choose the components themselves.
A composable approach offers more benefits and fewer disadvantages. For example, suites were once the only option. That was when integration wasn't worth the cost, but integration has steadily become more manageable and affordable. Due to this, composable systems are growing.
Composable DXPs make it easy on you and offer composability right out of the box. You get to select the components you want in your stack and handle the connections. It also handles orchestration across your stack.
The composable DXP you choose should handle complex and time-consuming integration tasks, enabling you to build a genuinely composable ecosystem. In addition, it should give you the peace of mind you need to focus on web design, personalization, and content creation, freeing your hands from the cumbersome task of integrating all the pieces of your DXP.
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