The Composable Future of Digital Experience

As asian markets start to adopt DXPs, we are starting to see more integration of the usual digital marketing capabilities within those tools. These sophisticated integrated offerings can provide real value for smaller burgeoning marketing teams, particularly in emerging markets here in Asia. However as DXP evolves from earlier technology, there tend to be legacy issues to consider. An alternative approach —?the composable DXP —?is designed specifically with this in mind and has increasingly become the focus of the industry. Let's take a look at what a composable DXP is and the benefits and/or downsides it may have.

What Is a Composable DXP?

The composable digital experience platform (DXP) is a relatively new concept and term. A “composable DXP” essentially describes?a DXP assembled from a series of best-of-breed solutions. These solutions work together via APIs or connectors to deliver content and digital experiences to customers in a more agile and flexible way than a single, integrated and essentially monolithic platform. Ultimately it brings more of a microservices approach to the DXP space.

Industry mainstays have started using the term in recent months. In December 2020, advisory firm Gartner issued a paper called “Adopt a composable DXP strategy to future-proof your tech stack” and has discussed the virtues of composable businesses in more general terms. Some DXP providers are also discussing the virtue of composability.

What Are the Advantages of a Composable DXP?

A composable DXP offers multiple advantages, most of which revolve around increased flexibility and agility. Here the merits of composable DXPs are being compared to traditional or monolithic DXPs in a debate which echoes the integrated platform vs. best-of-breed conversations many of us have had in the past.

It is Flexible and Scalable

A central tenet of the composable DXP is that it can provide a more lightweight approach to creating new sites and apps as there are fewer dependencies or legacies to consider when putting together marketing capabilities for your desired experience. Planning and deployments are less risky and require less resourcing. The decoupling of the back-end CMS from the front-end experience started the ball rolling years ago. Because of this, the increased support for headless publishing from major CMSs and DXPs is one of the trends making composable DXPs a viable option, as well as the increasing availability of capabilities available as a Software-as-a-Service.?

Omnichannel made easier

In this increasingly complex and demanding omnichannel world, the ability to publish content across multiple experiences, platforms and languages also establishes the power of a composable and headless approach. The agility to add new channels and formats such as voice and to have them immediately deployed across your customer touch-points wasn’t always an easy option in a more traditional and monolithic approach.

Select the Best Tools for the Job

One of the advantages of a composable DXP is it can comprise the best-of-breed tools your team wants to use, either because they are the best available, the team loves them, or because the team already uses them and the license doesn’t expire for a few months. Because you can use existing solutions that you already subscribe to, it can also lower the barrier of entry to implementing the DXP, meaning it’s faster and cheaper to implement than a fully integrated suite of tools. You can also evolve at your own pace, swapping out capabilities and products within the composable DXP.

Future-Proofed

As the pandemic has shown us, you never really know what is going to happen. Arguably the flexibility of a composable DXP allows you to better prepare for every eventuality because you avoid the heavy commitments and vendor lock-in of a traditional monolithic approach, and can pivot much faster if you need to change your customer experience focus. You can also set up and support extra channels more easily.

Are You Ready for Composable DXP?

Whether a composable DXP is right for you really depends on your current needs,?your immediate business priorities, and the availability of the resources and capabilities required to switch. Perhaps you should be looking at an upgrade path starting with a more integrated platform and moving forward from there. If all you need now is just a simple CMS, maybe composable DXP can wait.?

All signs point to composable DXP becoming the future of digital experience, but it is a powerful approach that may require some planning particularly if your business is still at the early stages of working with digital experience platforms. If you would like to know more about DXPs and how to better leverage its power, you can reach out to us at Progress Asia.