What is composable DXP?
Anyone who follows marketing and content tech trends will likely have heard the term "composable DXP"—or composable digital experience platform. While tech acronyms can often seem like just more alphabet soup, this is one of the important ones.
A year ago, Gartner issued a paper titled, "Adopt a Composable DXP Strategy to Future-proof Your Tech Stack," and they're now predicting that 60% of organizations will make composable business a strategic objective by 2023.
Let’s explore what the term composable DXP concept means, why it’s important, and how it could impact your business.
Introducing composable DXP
A composable DXP is a digital experience platform that is assembled from a series of best-of-breed solutions that work together via APIs and leverage microservices architecture. It's not one product, but a system that links products together and organizes assets as editable modules that are easy to find and update.
When done correctly, a composable DXP system creates the foundation to manage all content and campaigns in a central hub. It brings an organization's entire marketing stack together, such as its content management, marketing automation, eCommerce and analytics activities. It also enables you to connect all digital aspects of your business to create a customer journey. For instance, data from the marketing and sales teams can be coordinated in real time using APIs.
How is a composable DXP different than the regular DXPs that have been trending in recent years? The newer term originates from the software development concept of composability, which is a paradigm for decoupling services and components into interdependent, modular parts. In short, a composable DXP is not that different from a "regular" one. It is a regular DXP that is purpose-built to be easy to customize and easy to use. Another key differentiator is that a composable DXP allows enterprises to adopt a cloud-and-microservices-based approach to using a DXP.
Headless CMS technology is part of what has made composable DXPs a viable option. The headless CMS acts as a content provider, allowing you to request the right content for every use case—such as by channel, device or customer profile. Since the front and back ends are decoupled, you share data but do not have to worry about presentations being different.
Benefits of composable DXP
Why has this system become so popular in recent months, and is it here to stay? There are a few key benefits for content and marketing teams that can't be overlooked.
- No rip and replace: A composable DXP comprises the best-of-breed tools that work best for your organization and that your team wants to use, including existing solutions, which can be faster and cheaper to integrate. This also means you don’t have to rip and replace everything or retrain people.
- Adjust with ease: Since composable DXP is entirely modular, you can make incremental changes and updates to composite parts. This enables organizations to experiment with ideas with less risk, and you can run experiments and adjust as you see what works and what doesn’t.
- Increased speed: According to Gartner, customers who adopt a composable DXP approach deliver new features 80% faster than customers using suites. This is because everything is connected in a more efficient way.
- Seamless personalization: Consumers are using many channels, and they expect a personalized experience on all of them. The composable DXP allows you to easily create personalized customer journeys and analyze what works since all the pieces are talking to each other.
Brightspot and composable DXP
Brightspot is always on the cutting-edge and thinking about what customers want and need. Brightspot’s extensible architecture fits hand-in-glove with everything that's intended with the term "composable DXP."
- No rip and replace: One of the most important features of a good composable DXP is interoperability, as you need a DXP that can "play nice" with the other software in your marketing stack. Brightspot meets this need as it is API-first and built for integration. Brightspot can even serve as a "second CMS" to augment existing solutions like Adobe AEM or Veeva Vault.
- Adjust with ease: Brightspot is inherently modular. The platform lets you update or repurpose elements without affecting others. Brightspot’s flexibility also makes it extensible to meet whatever your business logic requires.
- Increased speed: You can keep the parts of your marketing stack that you like and know and easily add everything from monetization, marketing and analytics. This lets your people move fast to deliver solutions for customers.
- Seamless personalization: Brightspot allows companies to take their content and strategically manage multiple content-based experiences and multiple audiences from a single offering point. Teams can personalize content across channels for audiences.
In short, Brightspot can be the center of a composable DXP or a piece of it—whatever works best for our customers' businesses.
Composable DXP next steps
One of the key benefits of a composable DXP is its flexibility, which allows you to better prepare for what comes next because you can avoid heavy commitments, pivot faster, and set up extra channels more easily. However, it is important to remember that implementing composable architecture is not a matter of just flipping a switch. It takes work and planning, and in the process, you might even discover that composable-first is not the right route for your business.
At Brightspot, we help deliver digital content environments and experiences that best suit your needs, so you can use the right tech setup to stay ahead of the curve. Schedule a demo today to find out more.
