Discover the power of a composable approach

Highlights

You’ll learn about:

• Composable approach benefits: Modular tech stacks enhance flexibility, scalability and operational efficiency, enabling businesses to become responsive to market dynamics

• Overcoming challenges: Emphasize modular design, stringent security measures and automated testing frameworks to address integration complexity, security concerns, and resilience issues

• Future prospects: Embrace the mainstream shift towards composable architectures, leveraging AI, machine learning and blockchain advancements

Integrate the composable architecture to increase your business, drive innovation and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Keep reading to explore more!

Here’s a quick business riddle: what does a block of LEGO and the future of business have in common?

Both rely on modular or composable building blocks. Because of this, there has been an uptick over the past few years in businesses pitching their “composable approach.” But what’s encouraging companies to adopt a composable solution?

Flexibility? Innovation? Customer-centric approach?

Composable solutions offer all four benefits and much more. Like assembling Lego blocks, a composable approach lets you arrange and rearrange different components. You create an agile technology architecture that meets all your business and customer expectations.

Before moving ahead, let’s explore what a composable approach is. We'll also understand how why a composable approach is a game-changer for your business.

What is a composable approach?

The composable approach is like using building blocks for your business, allowing you to mix and match different tech stacks. For example:

• You can swap an outdated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for a newer one without disrupting other systems
• Integrate a new payment processing gateway to meet customer demands. 

By taking a modular approach and using packaged business capabilities (PBCs), you stay flexible, scalable and modular. You even adapt to new market trends, customer needs and tech breakthroughs. 

This flexible approach increases your business leader's ability to innovate and adapt, helping you manage your resources and strengthening your resilience. Embracing the modular approach helps you stay ahead of the curve, grow and deliver value to your customers.

Foundational principles of composable approach

The four principles of the composable approach are: 

Modularity

Modularity means breaking your business’s capabilities into independent, reusable components you can combine and recombine anytime. A modular approach helps you adapt to changes and encourages a culture of innovation. You do it by allowing you to experiment with new components without disrupting the entire system. Modularity provides improved agility.

Orchestration

Orchestration involves coordinating and managing these components, ensuring they work together to achieve business objectives. It helps you install appropriate processes and technologies to use your modular system.

Discoverability

Discoverability ensures you can access and discover components when needed. Providing visibility helps you make the most out of your digital assets, increasing efficiency and sparking innovation and agility.

Autonomy 

Autonomy empowers your team to make decisions within a strategic framework. In a composable setup, autonomy encourages an environment where you innovate with modular components to enhance your business’s agility and resilience. Autonomy increases business resilience. 

Advantages of composable approach

Gives you access to best-of-breed-solutions

The composable approach allows you to handpick the best-of-breed components. Rather than settling for a one-size-fits solution, you customize your tech stack to meet your business's unique demands.

For example, a company can use:

• Contentstack for a content management system
• Salesforce for customer relationship management
• AWS for cloud services
• Slack for communication

This ensures you have access to top-tier features, security and efficiency. The freedom to pick solutions is a game-changer. You can select components that excel in certain functionalities, security and performance. This makes it easier to maximize your capabilities and gives you an advantage over competitors.

Frees you from vendor lock-in

One-size-fits-all solutions might sound interesting, but they come with drawbacks—they increase your dependence on a single vendor. If you need a functionality they don’t provide, you’re stuck because you cannot change your vendor. In short, you witness a vendor lock-in. 

You undergo the rigorous process of migrating to a platform offering the functionality or live without it. That’s where a composable approach comes in. It builds your tech stack piece by piece, meaning if one vendor doesn’t offer functionality, you choose another. 

All these functionalities communicate using application programming interfaces (APIs). You pay only for the functionalities you use, helping you reduce your cost. 

Increases security

The composable approach is a game-changer because it makes your business more secure. Connected components make your business susceptible to security breaches. As it’s monolithic, security risks on one component can crash your entire system. 

But when you go composable, you address every security risk without risking your entire system. Why?

Each component operates separately, meaning security issues on one will never impact the others, offering you more security. Instead of quarantining all your components, you separate the affected component and replace it with a more secure component. 

Improves your website speed and performance

A composable approach enhances your website’s speed and performance. Selecting the best-of-breed components ensures each component is as efficient and fast as possible. 

Adopting a composable architecture ensures a smoother customer experience. Your customers don’t wait too long for your website to load. 

With 47% of customers not waiting more than 2 seconds for your website to load, a composable architecture helps you overcome these issues. Implementing a modular architecture resolves website sluggishness and poor performance issues, improving customer satisfaction and higher conversion rates.

Lowers your total cost

The initial investment in a composable architecture is more costly than monolithic systems. But long-term savings on maintenance and upgrades offset the higher initial cost. 

When you choose only the components you need, you save a lot of money. You can replace and upgrade them without worrying about other unnecessary features in your tech stack. 

Consider a composable architecture as an a-la-carte approach to building business systems. It helps you make judicious spending decisions on technology and operations. Plus, it's easy to integrate and adjust to any market changes. This means you can make changes without spending much, saving money in the long haul.

Makes your business more flexible and scalable

With changing market dynamics and increasing demand, you may need to change your technology stack and that’s where a composable approach comes in. Using independent components makes it much easier to adapt and add new features. Why?

You don't develop your system from scratch.

The flexible and scalable nature of the composable approach ensures faster response time to market demands. For instance, if you're running an e-commerce platform and there's a surge in online shopping, a composable approach helps you:

• Integrate a new payment gateway
• Upgrade your inventory management system
• Provide faster website loading speed

This way, you can meet market demands and enhance your customer experience.

How did Freelectics achieve flexibility with Contentstack?

Freeletics used a traditional CMS that offered limited functionality. To move to a flexible and scalable option, they migrated to Contentstack. Using Contentstack, Freeletics migrated over 6,000 pages to Contentstack in about three weeks. 

This transition improved efficiency, reduced publication and translation times, increased developer productivity by 58% and saved costs by 60%. Contentstack's responsive support and integration capabilities strengthened Freeletics’ operations and content management systems.

After using Contentstack, Christie L. Cleveland-Callanan, Senior Product Manager at Freeletics, said, 

“Contentstack features and flexibility allow us to grow the way we believe we need to grow. Contentstack gives us the freedom to try things we previously hadn’t considered.”

Read the complete case study here. 

Streamlines your business operations

Composable software streamlines business operations by making communication easy for different software components. This allows you to exchange data and functionalities across diverse environments, giving you more business agility. 

These API-driven integrations provide a smoother workflow, reducing the complexities and costs associated with traditional IT systems. As a result, you encourage innovation and respond to market changes and customer demands.

How can businesses start their journey towards a composable approach?

1. Assess your current capabilities

Begin by assessing your existing system and its capabilities, technology stack and business processes. Identify which areas of existing systems are rigid and siloed and could enjoy modularity and flexibility.

2. Set clear objectives

Define what you hope to achieve by adopting a composable commerce approach. Whether you want to increase business agility, improve customer experience, innovate or reduce cost, having clear goals guides your composable commerce strategy.

3. Encourage a modular mindset

Encourage your team to prefer modular components and services. They must transition from traditional to monolithic thinking.

4. Use the right technologies

Investing in Contentstack supports modularity and integration, which is the backbone of your composable business.

5. Focus on governance and compliance

Use governance frameworks to manage your data privacy and security. Also, ensure compliance with relevant regulations.

6. Iterate and scale step-by-step

Adopt a phased approach to implementing your composable strategy. Start small with pilot projects or specific business functions. Learn from these experiences and then scale up, adjusting your strategy as needed.

Overcoming the challenges of composable commerce

Integration complexity

Adding and combining different software components is time-consuming. To overcome this issue, choose a modular design and standardized interface.

Security concerns

Going composable often leads to security problems, which exposes your business to a threat. You can protect your business from security threats by using:

• Stringent access controls
• Encryption protocols,
• Periodic security audits 

Resilience issues

Another challenge is maintaining resilience and ensuring continuous changes and developments. Invest in automated testing frameworks and disaster recovery plans to reduce downtime and keep business operations moving.

Future of composable approach

You may have heard that the future of business is composable. But why do industry experts think so?

Companies consider the composable business beneficial. Composable infrastructure makes businesses agile, enhances innovation and delivers personalized customer experiences. Composable business architecture is becoming more popular because of its packaged business capabilities and high adoption rate. It's no longer a trend; it's becoming mainstream.

New technologies such as AI, machine learning and blockchain can enhance business operations. They also provide valuable insights into your customers' preferences and behaviors. 

Moreover, sustainability and social responsibility within the composable framework will trend upward. Businesses will align their modular and digital growth strategies with environmental and ethical standards. You will choose partners that reflect their commitment to making a positive impact.

FAQs

What is composable technology?

Composable technology involves building systems or applications with interchangeable, reusable modules. This approach makes your business more flexible, helping you fulfill new demands and opportunities without significant overhauls. Modules in a composable system work together, allowing for quick adaptation and scaling. Composable technology promotes agility, innovation and resilience.

What are composable principles? 

Composable principles include modularity, orchestration, discoverability and autonomy. These principles guide the design and implementation of composable systems.

What is composable thinking? 

Composable thinking is a mindset that uses flexibility and innovation. This thinking emphasizes modular components to build adaptable solutions.

What is a composable architecture?

A composable architecture helps you build software systems using modular and reusable components. You combine and recombine components based on your requirements.

What is the difference between composable and microservices?

Composable and microservices focus on modularity. The latter decomposes your applications into smaller services. Composable includes a broader strategy that affects the entire business operations.

Learn more

The composable approach brings a much-needed change to your business' technology strategy. Businesses using composable architecture can survive the market while gaining a competitive advantage. Request a free demo to understand how a composable approach can transform your business and make it modular and agile.