Sumit Kapoor
Ever increasing pace of evolution seems to be the new normal for the businesses and technologies that drive those businesses forward. The majority of SMBs and enterprises are facing the challenge of external market pressures, technology innovations, and ever-changing business needs. Increased speed and agility with minimal investment and dependency are some of the top executive priorities for major growing businesses. Composable (flexible) architecture is the answer to achieving a high level of agility in products, services, and business operations. It brings high-end innovation and personalization while building a whole system from individual and independent modular technologies.
From established consumer-focused companies to growing startups, organizations of all sizes are always looking to gain user attention, traction, trust, and engagement. Composable architecture not only makes the development process faster and more scalable but also contributes to content distribution and management to amplify the effectiveness of your digital initiatives.
This article explores the concept of composable architecture, its benefits, along its role in enhancing customer experiences and digital transformation.
Composable Architecture: What Is It?
Composable architecture consists of various modular components like headless applications, microservices, and more configured together to cater to specific business requirements. Simply put, composability in the software design approach is the trend emphasizing building complex business systems with smaller and interoperable units. The architecture brings the best technologies together offering a high degree of flexibility and scalability, making it an ideal solution for modern-day enterprises.
Composable architecture brings with it the flexibility to add or remove individual components, the entire process becomes effortless with less chance of error or failure. Consider it similar to playing Lego blocks, where you can combine each block in different ways to create an unlimited number of patterns. The API-led architecture brings the evolutionary solution to integrate CMS, PIM, eCommerce, and other tools together to empower organizations with agility and dynamic content distribution.
Composable Architecture Is A Great Deal For Customer Experience
As per Gartner, by 2023, organizations with composable architecture are likely to roll out new features at least 80% faster than the other competition.
Nowadays, customer experience is one of the vital differentiators that can help an organization stand out in the market. Regardless of the niche or domain, customers are expecting next-level user experience management from the leading eCommerce stores or general businesses. It is one of the compelling reasons why businesses can’t ignore investing in the omnichannel experience. Composability in the digital experience is what can make this omnichannel digital experience relatively easy for the brand addressing global or local user base.
Composable DXP applications are a kind of packaged business capabilities including task orientation, independent units, facility deployment, and more. This emerging trend is responsible for quick response to the ever-changing market conditions. Simply put, the organization’s DXP architecture allows handy third-party solution integration while enhancing the platform’s native capabilities. Whether the business needs personalization, voice search, analytics, chatbot, or more, composable architecture lets you do it without much hassle or dependency on IT teams.
A composable digital experience strategy empowers marketing professionals to design and launch tailored web pages and mobile apps with minimal dependency on the technical teams. Leveraging a centralized headless content management approach, with graphical no-code interfaces, the futuristic trend allows the usage of reusable components, content, templates, and more. Stay ahead in the brand competitiveness with early adoption of a new and improved digital experience platform. From content management, and personalization to presentation, the composable DXPs include all three major components of customer experience benchmarks.
Other Benefits Of Adopting Composable Architectures
Among the countless advantages of composable architecture, here are a few major ones to consider for small businesses to large-size enterprises.
Ease of Use & Better Up-time
While monolithic application architecture necessitated an overhaul of the entire system, for even minor updates, leading to extended efforts and potential downtimes, composable architecture does the exact opposite. The decentralized approach maintains the existing application functionality even during the new update. Thus, it curbs the problem of application downtime altogether with typically 99.99% uptime in most cases.
Unlike a few years back, the marketing and content teams don’t need to rely on developers to modify user interfaces or fulfill digital transformation requests. Composable architecture removes the dependency on coding or technical expertise to amplify the capabilities of your marketing teams to create unique digital experiences for your customers that can continuously evolve with the latest trends. A single central hub is responsible for maintaining workflow governance for multiple sites and channels, making it easier to customize the user controls and approve content before rollout.
Enhanced Speed & Agility While Managing Costs
One of the major problems with the monolithic system was the centralization and rigidness, as they didn’t have the chance to scale the architecture capacity. It was a major issue holding back evolution while increasing costs for the leading businesses, as they needed to forecast and then maximize the hardware capacity with growing demand. It caused an unnecessary financial burden on the business, making it less ready for sustainable long-time growth.
Composable architecture, hosted on cloud and orchestration platforms, are great solutions with auto-scaling capabilities. For both startups and growing businesses, this revolutionary architecture remains linked with application usage and resource demands, maximizing application performance with no additional investments. Additionally, it comes with modular tools and microservices that can be independent components with zero impacts on other tools, services, or channels.
Businesses adopting composable architectures are more likely to achieve next-level agility with empowerment to IT and marketing teams for matching pace with changing customer expectations. Rich and up-to-date customer experience means more business and success for organizations.
Improved Application Security & Flexibility
Since composable architectures focus on individual components, it is a highly flexible system to meet new business requirements and technological innovations. In other words, the architecture breaks down the applications into small services running according to independent functionalities. Further, the ability to reuse and repurpose the existing components makes this architecture highly adaptable for businesses.
Each component/unit in the composable architecture acts as an individual piece with its security factors without affecting the overall system. By breaking down the systems into composable units, the architecture makes it easier to identify and isolate any potential risks and make updates, and enhancements without affecting the rest of the system. The organization relying on composable architectures can ensure smooth and secure system functioning over time.
Rapid Upgrades & Innovations
Unlike monolithic platforms, which used to require hundreds of development hours and heavy resources, composable architecture emerges as a breath of fresh air. It makes the development, launch, upgrades, maintenance, and innovation easier with independent units dependency. Organizations can keep on releasing and upgrading new features without huge time, effort, and financial investment.
Wrap Up
Achieving a sustainable digital transformation requires frequent, stable, and continuous modernization via underlying technologies. The interdependency among the monolithic systems often leads to several hindrances in launch, upgradation, and scalability expectations. However, Composable architecture involves low-code or no-code platforms that eliminate manual and mundane operations. Overall, it is much-needed innovation for businesses to achieve better automation, deployment, and scale in comparison to traditional approaches.
Composable architecture is said to be the future of digital transformation and business innovations. With the ease of managing different composable units, the front-end developers and technical team can handle the upgrades with almost zero dependencies on the specialists every single time. You can simply use the robust and scalable applications in the enterprise business ecosystem seamlessly with proper digital transformation with 20x speed and enhanced agility.
For more information on Composable Architectures or a roadmap to elevate digital transformation for your business, contact our experts at Zorang today. We can also share how our integration pedigree uniquely allows us to be at the forefront of this new technological revolution taking place.