The benefits of a composable DXP built with microservices
Over the past two decades, businesses have invested heavily in Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) to create engaging, contextual and relevant digital experiences. The Covid-19 pandemic encouraged business to continue and even increase these investments. But the businesses that invested in monolithic DXPs in their digital transformation are now struggling to keep up. DXPs built with microservices — what we call composable DXP — offer a new way forward.
The suite approach
Monolithic DXPs, often called suites, have dominated the options available to most businesses looking to adopt DXPs. These suites evolved as CMS vendors added capabilities to their core products to try to meet all of the needs of all of their customers.Â
Many of these businesses discovered the unfortunate aspects of suites:Â
System complexity can be greater than expected
Niche skill sets are required to build and maintain the suite
Specific functionality is not always sufficient while many functionalities go unused
Requirements for building digital experience change faster than the suite can evolve
Organizations must deliver digital experiences faster than ever. Implementations of DXP suites struggle to meet these demands — something else is necessary.
With a product-centric approach, your online presence becomes a digital experience with content at the heart. Read The Modern Website Strategy guide.
The composable DXP approach
Instead of using a single product, teams can craft their own DXP by bringing together industry-leading tools. Connected by easy-to-use APIs, these tools form a composable DXP. According to Gartner, customers who adopt a composable DXP approach deliver new features 80% faster than customers using suites. This enables organizations to experiment with ideas with less risk.
New approach, new solution
A composable DXP is an attractive solution, but it’s not a silver bullet. A composable DXP provides connectivity, but integration is left to the customer. Connectivity enables data to move between systems while integrations allow multiple systems to work together as one. But connectivity and integration between tools is not enough. Orchestration takes this concept of integration and applies it across multiple systems.
Take a marketing website, for example. Your composable DXP currently consists of a content management system, a content delivery network, front-end presentation layer, static site generator and analytics. Now, you need to add a tool for ecommerce. You’ll not only need to connect this new tool to the system of tools, but you also need to accomplish tasks like incorporating personalized content into the catalog and check-out process and capturing analytics during the shopping process. This requires orchestration.
Uniform.dev is a Contentful technology partner that provides this orchestration layer. With Uniform, you can build your DXP using the technologies you love without having to integrate all the parts yourself. Because Uniform uses a Jamstack approach, you can create lightning-fast digital shopping experiences.
If you are interested in learning more, watch the webinar recording.
You can also learn more about the benefits of assembling your digital experience platform in our white paper Sustaining the drive to digital.
