.svg){kind=icon}
Uniform blog/The hidden costs of composable: Integration debt
The hidden costs of composable: Integration debt
The hidden costs of composable: Integration debt
A troubling pattern is emerging where vendors across the martech landscape promise that composable architectures will solve everything, when the truth is that many brands face a different reality.
The promise sounds compelling: connect best-of-breed technologies, maintain flexibility, and avoid vendor lock-in. They neglect to mention the hidden costs that pile up faster than expected.
When "API-first" becomes "developer-last"
Many brands discover too late that their "composable" stack requires an army of developers to keep running. Each new integration demands custom code, and every system update risks breaking three others. What started as a modern, agile architecture quickly became a maintenance headache.
Here's the typical progression: connect a headless CMS to the commerce platform. Success. Then add a digital asset management system. More custom code. A customer data platform follows, requiring additional mapping logic. Before long, the development team spent most of their time maintaining integrations instead of building features that mattered to the business.
For example, an enterprise calculates that they are spending $400,000 annually maintaining a slim five-system composable stack. This doesn't include:
- Opportunity cost of delayed feature releases
- Developer burnout from constant firefighting
- Lost revenue from broken integrations during updates
- Training costs as team members leave due to frustration
The orchestration problem
Many composable platforms excel at their individual capabilities but miss the orchestration piece entirely. They will show polished demos of the CMS or commerce engine but stop short of demonstrating how marketing teams actually manage experiences when content lives in four different systems.
A marketing team shouldn't need developer tickets to update a hero banner that pulls CMS content, DAM images, and CDP customer data. Yet, this is precisely what happens when composable systems lack proper orchestration.
Marketing teams wait weeks for simple content updates because each change requires custom development work. The promised agility disappears under technical complexity.
Integration debt compounds
Integration debt works differently from traditional technical debt. Each custom connection becomes a liability that grows over time. When a CMS vendor releases an API update, the change to its system could potentially impact every custom integration that touches it.
Watch the domino effect: a simple schema change in the product information management system cascades through the commerce platform, affects the search functionality, and hinders the personalization engine. A straightforward update becomes a multi-week engineering project.
This debt compounds. The more integrations built, the more complex future changes become. Teams become gun-shy about adopting new technologies or upgrading existing ones because the integration overhead feels overwhelming.
A different approach
Solving integration debt requires rethinking the composable architecture entirely. Instead of connecting systems through custom code, successful brands use platforms explicitly built for composable orchestration.
Look for solutions that eliminate custom integration work through visual mapping tools. The right orchestration platform should provide:
- Visual content mapping without code
- Automatic handling of schema changes across connected systems
- Real-time preview of how content changes affect all touchpoints
- Built-in rollback capabilities when updates go wrong
- Marketing team autonomy for routine content operations
A marketing team should connect content from any source to any component without developer involvement. Changes to underlying systems shouldn't require rebuilding every integration.
The trick is separating presentation from data sources through an orchestration layer. When the CMS schema changes, the orchestration platform handles the mapping updates, not the development team.
Making composable work
Composable architecture can deliver on its promises only when the approach is realistic and uses proper tooling. Brands succeeding with composable strategies don't simply connect APIs; they invest in platforms that manage the complexity.
A composable stack should empower teams, not create bottlenecks. Marketing teams should gain independence, not lose it to developer backlogs. Development teams should focus on innovation, not maintenance.
The question isn't whether to go composable–it's how to do it without drowning in integration debt. Choose platforms designed for orchestration from day one, not vendors trying to retrofit composability onto existing architectures.
Integration debt is real, but it's not inevitable. The brands that face this challenge head-on build composable architectures that scale.
Schedule time with our experts now to learn more about the hidden costs–and the future-proof solution to eliminating them.
Uniform Recognized as a Visionary in 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Experience Platforms
Download
