In today’s market, agility and speed are key. The necessity for businesses to quickly adapt their digital experiences has long been apparent, but the COVID-19 crisis has served to highlight how a business can differentiate from the competition with a truly agile and modular digital experience strategy to keep up with rapidly changing market demands. In Gartner’s recent report Adopt a Composable DXP Strategy to Future-Proof Your Tech Stack , it is recommended that organizations “Future-proof (their) digital experience stack by implementing granular, task-oriented packaged business capabilities, which are key for faster time to market and better adoption of a DXP”.

Gartner recommends that organizations achieve this modernization of their DXP stack by adopting a composable DXP strategy. According to Gartner:

Even though it has become increasingly clear that organizations must move towards a composable or best-of-breed DXP strategy to keep up with the pace of the market, as the Gartner report says, “most existing products marketed as digital experience platforms (DXPs) are monolithic in architecture and slow to react to market changes.”

We have come to a turning point in the market where most of the top vendors in the category are not compatible with the needs of their customers. To understand why the composable DXP strategy is the only way forward, we can break it down into several key aspects including delivery, personalization, and future-proofing.

One of the most obvious drivers toward the composable DXP strategy is delivery speed. As we know, implementation of a traditional monolithic DXP can take nine months to a year. During this time, a competitor who has switched to a composable DXP strategy may have introduced multiple new digital experiences. As highlighted in the report, “Lack of maturity in continuous integration and continuous deployment is another example where monolithic DXPs are holding application leaders back from innovating and being able to quickly launch new experiences and digital properties.”

Another important factor in the move towards a composable DXP strategy is personalization. With the monolithic vendors, companies must make their digital strategy fit to the vendor’s capabilities – while with a composable, modular DXP they are free to rapidly change and adapt at the speed of the ever-changing market and the needs of their customers. From Gartner: “This is why organizations need to move toward being composable businesses, and ensure their DXPs are driving digital experiences that are based on packaged business capabilities that can be quickly assembled to deliver that personalized digital experience.”

Finally, as we have learned over the past year, there is really no way to predict exactly what changes are to come in the market. But with a composable DXP, organizations can be sure that their digital experiences will be future-proofed no matter what. When a business has committed to a monolithic DXP vendor, “technical debt and vendor lock-in inhibit application leaders from adopting more modern, modular, composable DXPs, due to the cost and risk of replacing existing technologies, resulting in lost ability to innovate and respond to digital rush.”

It is clear that the only way forward is to choose a composable DXP strategy. Organizations stuck with a monolithic DXP vendor will find themselves falling behind their competitors as they are unable to match the innovative digital experiences possible with a composable DXP, or are spending months on upgrades or new implementations, or are wasting time moving from legacy technology to meet the needs of the market.

Gartner clearly states that “application leaders are charged with mandates to meet customers’ rapid and increasing demand for integrated, personalized, continuous and frictionless digital experiences, as part of the overall CX. This is possible only with a DXP that is modular, whereby digital experiences can be rapidly assembled and reassembled, and recomposed as business, customer and market needs shift.”

Crownpeak has a unique cloud-native, decoupled architecture – meaning that we are an enterprise-grade DXP with the composability and flexibility required for a truly future-proofed and differentiated digital experience.

Gartner, Adopt a Composable DXP Strategy to Future-Proof Your Tech Stack, Irina Guseva , Yefim Natis , Mick MacComascaigh , Mike Lowndes , Gene Phifer , 16th December 2020.

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