DXC, FaaS and Experience Orchestration

As organizations move from monolithic systems to composable architectures, there are lots of terms popping up in relation to orchestrating experiences in a composable tech stack. As some of you know, I have personally advocated for the term ‘Experience Orchestration’ for some time now.? The reason for this lack of alignment in terminology is that this category is still emerging and the analyst community is still trying to determine its boundaries.? One thing that is for certain is that vendors in this category enable organizations to assemble their own best-of-breed DXP instead of buying one from an all-in-one (monolithic) vendor.

What is Digital Experience Composition?

The category, Digital Experience Composition, was first coined by Gartner to describe ‘low-code developer and no-code business user tooling for the creation, development and maintenance of digital experience’.? This is quite a broad set of capabilities when you consider creation, development and maintenance of digital experiences. Although I agree with the spirit of this category name, I personally feel that when we use the term 'composition' to describe this concept of experience orchestration, it feels like we are limiting the discussion to WYSWYG interface to create an experience. Most digital practitioners will agree that there is so much more to orchestrating an experience than simply defining the layout, styling, HTML and visual aspects of the presentation.??

In fact, the DXC platforms that are currently available in the market do tie themselves to specific visual front end frameworks, which means they’re not truly supporting an omnichannel experience.? I would like to call out the distinction between supporting multiple frontends and being frontend agnostic.? There is nothing wrong with offering SDKs for specific frontend frameworks to facilitate frontend development.? The problem is when you don’t offer APIs that expose all of your orchestration capabilities for ALL frontends to connect to - in other words, they’re not headless or composable!

How is FaaS different from DXC?

Frontend-as-a-Service platforms (FaaS) are another emerging category designed to give marketing users a WYSIWYG interface that they could use to create visual experiences.? FaaS platforms connect with multiple systems of record via APIs and offer pre-built connections that can be used by marketing teams as data sources as they visually build an experience, most commonly for a web frontend.? The primary difference between FaaS platforms and DXCs is that they are usually limited to specific frontend framework(s), most commonly web frontend frameworks such as Next.js or Vue.js.? Large enterprises traditionally want control over their own frontends and build unique, bespoke experiences, so the FaaS solution is really targeted towards midmarket and smaller organizations.? There are always exceptions - I’m just speaking generally.

Orchestration and Integration are two different things

Some FaaS vendors will argue that they do ‘orchestration’ as well because they can connect to various APIs.? In my opinion, integration and orchestration are two different things.? Connecting a frontend to the backend through APIs is not a new concept.? We’ve been doing that for years, ever since APIs were invented.? Orchestration goes beyond integration and coordinates data and logic between systems (in real-time).? For example, orchestration between a CDP and a CMS is required to contextual content experiences for specific customer segments.? Scott Brinker beautifully described the difference between integration and orchestration in his article, 'Tech Stacks are still large, but Orchestration can make all the difference'.

The Importance of Intelligent Orchestration

In order to perform intelligent orchestration, you need to be able to understand how the customers are reacting to these experiences. And since these experiences are composable in nature, and are coming from multiple content sources, it is important for the analytics and insights to be just as granular so that marketers can have a much more fine grained control over what micro experiences should be displayed to the customer on every channel. You want to know how this specific content item from your CMS is performing on various channels and in different contexts and you want to use those insights to guide your marketing teams to create optimized experiences.

The shift from traditional DXPs is complex because a lot of capability that was assumed and provided by a single vendor previously such as analytics, optimization, journey orchestration, personalization, etc now needs to be figured out in the composable ecosystem.? All of these capabilities can be categorized under the intelligence layer of the overall composable stack. We need to add the brain to the composable stack, which has the ability to orchestrate experiences across multiple channels and frontends, offer intelligence around what is working and what is not, and connect the dots between all of the other backend composable pieces. Call it whatever you want, but that is, in my opinion, how we should be thinking about orchestrating experiences.