Recognising the potential of a composable DXP strategy

Those in the know are aware that the MarTech landscape is exploding as the digital economy scales faster and faster. The pressure on delivering better customer experiences is ever present and choosing the right mix of technology to deliver on this is becoming more a more challenging.

Today, application leaders and marketers need to do away with monolithic digital experience platforms and make use of solutions that give them the option to choose the bits and pieces that suit them best. Composable DXP is leading the way.

At the end of 2020, research and consulting firm Gartner published a study titled: “Adopt a Composable DXP Strategy to Future-proof Your Tech Stack”. Gartner noted that adopting a composable DXP will help businesses outpace the competition and suggested that application leaders must do away with monolithic digital experience platforms and update their tech stacks if they want to cater to modern market needs and meet business objectives.

What is a composable DXP you ask?

Composability is a system design principle that provides different components that can be selected and brought together in various combinations to meet the specific requirements of a user. A composable digital experience platform (cDXP) is entirely modular and is made up of a series of best-of-breed solutions that fill the gaps in a digital experience. Made possible via APIs and leveraging microservices architecture and cloud, a cDXP is not a single product but it does bring your entire marketing stack together so that you can manage all content and campaigns in a central hub. With a cDXP, marketers can deliver digital experiences as and when their audiences need them and connect with customers in a smarter way.

Where more traditional, monolithic DXPs offer a set of pre-packaged capabilities – often called product suites and providing several different functionalities included as part of a single software solution – composable DXPs are flexible, customisable and are designed to be easy to use and simple to implement. They should also complement and enhance the company’s existing tech stack. According to the Gartner research mentioned above, around 60% of mainstream businesses will list composable business as a strategic objective by 2023 and those that have adopted an intelligent composable approach will outpace competition by 80% when implementing new features.

Building the perfect platform to meet your needs

If I gave you the option to create the car of your dreams – and I mean the car of your wildest dreams – would every single detail be from the same manufacturer? I’m guessing not. Sure, you may be a big fan of a particular automotive brand but if you had the chance to choose absolutely anything from anyone you might decide to combine the luxury of a Rolls Royce with the performance of a BMW, the class of a Mercedes, the safety of a Volvo and the reliability of a Toyota. This ability to pick the best bits from different brands is exactly what composable DXP offers. It gives you the opportunity to create incredibly tailored experiences that offer exactly what your customers need.

I’ve unpacked some of the main benefits of composable DXP below. It provides the best of the best: Make the most of the best technology on the market by tailoring your DXP to your business; enabling you to choose the right applications to fill any gaps that you may have in your digital experiences. It’s customer-centric: When you’re using the best of the best you can offer customers the slickest experiences, at every customer touch point and we know that providing positive experiences promotes loyalty, boosts retention and encourages brand advocacy.

It’s omnichannel-ready: As part of providing positive customer experiences, you need to embrace an omnichannel approach. A cDXP gives you a more comprehensive and cohesive view of your customers at every step of the customer journey and allows you to manage all of these interactions in one place. It’s faster to implement: Marketers often rely on IT teams to turn their ideas into campaigns that deliver desired outcomes. But this process can be time-consuming and when the implementation process is slow, so are the results. With a composable DXP marketers can build web experiences, repurpose content, personalise and test how well your digital content does far quicker because they can do it themselves.

So what CMS for your composable DXP strategy?

Content management still remains at the center of any DXP solution. There are many new and traditional CMS solutions that now offer a “headless” cloud-based solutions, making itself available as a choice in your DXP make-up. Optimizely and Contentful are popular choices in the enterprise space, while open-source options like Umbraco (their headless offering is called Heartcore) and WordPress are also options. We have worked with all of these platforms as part of a componentised microservices architecture.

Umbraco as a CMS for your cDXP solution?

Umbraco is putting alot of focus into their cDXP stratgey and is a solid CMS suitor for composable DXP; offering the freedom that we need to design the digital experience platform we want and need. Umbraco makes it easy for us to build apps and websites using the solutions best suited to the job. As a framework, it makes it easy to choose the right supporting applications you really want for your DXP solution.

At Bluegrass, we have been moving away from relying on a large software platforms offered by single vendors as we embrace microservices architecture in our solutions. And so, unsurprisingly, we’re also embracing composable DXP. In fact, we see Umbraco as a key part of our strategy in our platform offering mix for our customers. With over 15 years’ experience in delivering over 350 Umbraco solutions, we have recently invested further in our partnership becoming a Gold Partner. We are now one of a few global Gold Partners and the only Umbraco Gold Partner in Africa.