Composable DXP Anyone?
“A digital experience platform (DXP) is an integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences”
So you want a Digital Experience Platform?
It never ceases to amaze us how the Martech and Adtech industries reinvent the wheel on a cycle that would put the Marvel Universe to shame.
Towards the end of the last decade we saw a lot of excitement around Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), and now it’s DXPs, and a shift away from mononlithic tech stacks to a ‘composable’ world-view that has started to get smart marketers excited.
We’ll probably make some errors in our references here but I think you will get the gist if you are at all interested in a better approach to delivering a great customer experience ecosystem, read on.
Let’s plaguerise Gartner’s definition as it is a solid one for our purposes:
“A digital experience platform (DXP) is an integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences”
In practical terms what does a DXP do? This is a question with a lot of answers but for simplicity of this article let’s keep it simple and assume that we want our DXP to:
- Aggregate and curate user and event data.
- Make that data available to activate against in multiple platforms.
- Provide a personalised experience across mobile, tablet and desktop environments.
- Send Email, SMS and Push Messaging.
- Systematically test & optimise across all channels.
- Orchestrate an omnichannel experience.
There are many products that call themselves DXPs, and to be fair one of the ‘old hands’ in the business were using this terminilogy a long time ago, Adobe (Experience Manager), but the acronym has now taken on a life of its own, and is no longer just about ‘monolithic’ system stacks like Adobe or Salesforce but increasingly it is being used to describe a composable architecture integrating multiple independent software vendors, and in this case potentially creating a composable DXP.
Being locked into a monolithic stack, cost aside, the business frustrations are often with the compromises and lack of agility…which is where the concept of “composable architecture” comes in, and the concept of a ‘Composable DXP”.
Let’s tackle the composable bit first. The concept is not new, its being used in relation to various technologies, not least in the context of ‘composable CDPs’.
A simple definition of a composable architecture is “an ecosystem that contains independent systems and components that communicate with each other with the help of APIs.”
So..there are a few things to unpack in that definition:
- ‘independent’ – in a composable architecture the individual ‘systems and components’ don’t have to come from the same vendor, you can stitch together dedicated service offerings.
- ‘systems & components’ – a composable architecture promotes a more granular level of architecture. You are no longer reliant on a single system to do everything, and a system may be composed of different components.
- APIs – (application programming interface) the pipes that link one system to another allow systems or components from different vendors to talk to each other and integrate so as to operate as one system.
The MACH Alliance is a NFP industry body that has defined a tech standard to describe and certify tech that is ‘best of breed’ for building composable infrastructure.
Their ‘mantra’ is “Microservices – APIs – Cloud Native SaaS – Headless”
Some of the SVs in this alliance are marketing what are still essentially systems rather than microservices so don’t get too hung-up on insisting that every part of your ecosystem is composed of ‘microservice’ when actually in some instances a best of breed system could be the most effective option.
The agility and freedom of choice that this composable approach enables is exciting in itself, and the shift towards native, no-code integration with flexible and scalable tech will mean both marketers and developers are equally excited.
Where to start?
So back to the concept of a ‘Composable DXP’ and what you need to consider. The fundamentals haven’t changed whether you are ready for a ‘composable’ future or not.
Requirements. Requirements. Requirements. What do you customers need? What does your org need to be able to deliver what your customers need? What are the different ways of delivering those requirements? You will need to take your time planning!
That is easier said than done, for most organisations. It requires an omnichannel view of their world, and of their customers. It requires people to think in a cross-disciplinary manner, rather than just totting up the requirements from each departmental silo. It means being able to pivot between technology architecture and marketing strategy whilst never losing site of the customer experience that needs to be at the centre of it all. It also helps enourmously if you have experience in the individual strategies that underpin the components that form this new composable world.
Once upon a time ‘composable’ meant development heavy, with the marketers pretty much on the outside of everything, fingers crossed, hoping that their brief was good enough to give them what they needed. APIs are not new, the cloud is not new, SaaS is not new, headless is almost not new but we’ll nod our head to that one for now.
However today the products that you are likely to be considering when stitching together your composable ecosystem, will have been conceived with that very role in mind, combining the needs of developers and marketers, often in a no-code environment.
It’s taken me several paragraphs to get to it but data is going to be the critical fuel for this ecosystem. More specifically your ability to ingest data from multiple sources, manage, view, transform, extract and push it into your key destinations. The good news is that there are now a myriad of tools, some that might now be considered microservices, that offer native integration between systems.
So what components do you need?
Let’s go back to the jobs to do. If you consider the seven jobs we want our DXP to do to enable our customer experience, then think about the core ‘components’ that you are going to need and note that in some instances there may be more than one component involved in each. I’ve linked a few examples for you to get a flavour in each.
- Ingest, aggregate and curate user and event data.
- Make data available to activate against in multiple platforms.
- Provide a personalised experience across mobile, tablet and desktop environments.
- Send Email, SMS and Push Messaging.
- Analyse and report on the product/customer analytics.
- Systematically test & optimise across all channels.
- Orchestrate an omnichannel experience.
You will need a data warehouse to enable your ecosystem, whether that’s Google Cloud, AWS or Snowflake to name some leading players.
Your CMS will be another key component of your experience. The move towards Headless CMS is inexorable but the new generation of CMS are designed specifically to plug into a composable ecosystem.
You can also start the planning process knowing that you will need tools to manage the ingestion (ETL, Extract, Transform, Load) from your key sources, and to manage the Reverse ETL, so understanding the role and capability of these tools is important to keep in the back of your mind. It may be you could compose an entire composable ecosystem based on native integrations provided by these tools. Happy days!
The more challenging areas for most marketers is a unified view of the customer and the disambiguation, transformation and unification of customer data so that it can create genuinely ‘joined-up’ omnichannel experiences for customers. There are solutions designed specifically to help with this identity resolution.
Some final thoughts…
The opportunity for organisations to truly control their data and their marketing technology stack is better than ever. The fact that best of breed technology no longer means being locked into, or locked out of, high price inflexible monolithic models is a good step forward. The biggest benefit here is for marketers who can start to truly unlock their customer data and journey.
