Making technology decisions for enterprises can be difficult, confusing, and stressful, especially as your company will have to live with them for years. Buying technologies generally requires accepting the reality of being locked into products that cannot keep up with your organization’s changing needs or, worse, products that were not a good fit in the first place. This is why, when an architecture emerges that promises to reduce that risk, people pay attention.
One such architecture that’s gaining popularity is composable, comprising decoupled, modular, self-contained, and independent components that work together as a single system. Together, these components promise to reduce the risk of product lock-in and enable enterprises to adopt technologies that best meet their needs in a timely manner, including today’s scramble for control of a brand’s presence in AI search results.
In response to the monolithic architectures that have long dominated enterprise applications, composability addresses the limitations of legacy technologies while remaining flexible enough to adapt to change.
Harnessing composability requires understanding its approach to integrations, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of its monolithic predecessor.
Composability stems from the evolution of a monolithic, tightly coupled system that encompasses all its functionality in a single, interdependent package.
Monoliths make the case that they offer convenience as all elements are from a single vendor and are thus likely to work well together. Additionally, because monolithic vendors tend to be well-established market players, they are likely to provide the key features your team needs to build and maintain digital experiences, though not all of them are guaranteed to be market leaders. As expensive as monolithic stacks tend to be, they provide peace of mind. In case of unexpected issues, you have one vendor to turn to for help.
In contrast, each stack element in a composable approach serves one function extremely well. These services tend to come with robust APIs to facilitate data movement among services and to end-users. Frequently called a “best-of-breed” stack, the composable model ensures that, with good planning, all stakeholders have the best tools for their tasks without compromising delivery or incurring unnecessary expenses. By creating a composable stack, organizations become more flexible because they no longer depend on a single company’s roadmap for new channels or technologies.
Nonetheless, the composable approach comes with its own challenges. The array of vendors and tools can make it difficult to evaluate all options and make the right decisions. As each system is from a different vendor, an unwieldy user experience may result for business teams who now must juggle several tools to accomplish what a monolith can do in one. Moreover, for large implementations, integrating the services might take months of custom coding.
The challenges of maintaining monoliths
The primary challenges with monoliths are their complexity and interdependencies, as changes can cause downstream failures. Regular updates, such as system upgrades, require comprehensive testing that can take months to complete to ensure they don’t break something.
This is a long time for a monolith to stay dormant. Avoiding updates means missing out on new features and being exposed to potential security risks. Neither is a good option. This same scenario applies to new features, hence why developers may need an entire month to add a page to a site.
Such sluggishness raises the question: Could a monolith be designed to eliminate these complications? In theory, the answer is yes. The problem is that monoliths evolve over time, becoming unsustainable and incapable of adapting to changing needs, no matter how critical the needs are.
Defining a software suite
Not to be confused with a monolith, a software suite like Microsoft Office is comprised of products built or acquired and then maintained by a single vendor. In the case of Office, Microsoft developed Word and Excel in-house but acquired PowerPoint from another software company.
To distinguish between a suite and a monolith, bear in mind that a suite is a product for purchase, whereas a monolith is an architecture for designing and developing products.
Suites often use a monolithic architecture, though not always. Upgrading and maintaining suites is challenging:
- Customizing a suite to accommodate your company’s specific requirements further complicates the situation, leading to additional potential pitfalls during upgrades and maintenance.
- Implementation cost is high because a suite rarely meets an organization’s needs out of the box. In fact, the cost of adopting a suite sometimes exceeds its purchase price due to the extensive customizations that are required.
- As a suite ages and becomes a legacy platform, developers tend to shy away from it. As the number of legacy platforms dwindles, experienced and skilled developers move on to other technologies, creating brain drain. Businesses end up paying more for less.
Suites versus composability
For a suite, the vendor selects the products for you. With composability, you select the products you need from the vendors you prefer.
Suites gained popularity during a time when building a tech stack was simply not practical for most organizations.
Today, vendors are building products with the expectation that companies will integrate them with existing systems. Moreover, delivering these products through a cloud-based infrastructure means organizations need not support multiple products built with different technologies. This is a world enabled by composability and the
MACH Alliance.
For an organization that wants to build a technology stack comprised of products that meet its unique requirements, composability provides the foundational architecture. For example, if you buy a CMS, a personalization tool, and an enterprise ecommerce platform built on composable principles, you can seamlessly and easily connect them all.
The meaning of composability
Composability is the freedom to build a stack by selecting products that suit your needs and goals and integrating them together to serve the greater purpose of delivering excellent digital experiences.
Since composable architectures focus on API-first and now MCP integrations, applications in your stack work together regardless of their language and can communicate with one another using a
digital experience platform (DXP).
As a result, you gain flexibility and agility in the composition, management, and delivery of contextualized digital experiences.
Even though a composable architecture offers major benefits, if a monolith platform is working well, there’s often no immediate need to switch. DXPs are ideal in this situation, as they provide a smooth, incremental transition aligned with your timeline and budget.
However, there are scenarios where a monolith reaches the end of its useful life, and those are the perfect times to consider an entirely new approach.
A few examples:
- You can no longer integrate or repurpose black-box technologies that were once turnkey and convenient, blocking your ability to innovate.
- Your company’s platform has become incompatible with its business requirements due to the constantly changing business conditions.
- Your monolith provider’s latest update is so substantial that it effectively amounts to a replatforming project and will require significant resources.
- Your customers are active in new technology that your platform doesn’t fully support, limiting your ability to reach them.
- The age of your platform makes hiring developers adept at it increasingly difficult and expensive.
- Older platforms tend to receive less support from vendors, increasing the risk of outages and security vulnerabilities.
Transitioning to composable architectures enables you to build, deliver, and manage digital experiences more efficiently. Also, composable architecture supports digital experience orchestration via a DXP, which acts as the nexus of systems old and new.
Integration, which enables separate systems or products to communicate or work together, is key to all tech stacks, whether monolithic or decoupled, and whether preintegrated or composable.
Beyond this, the definition of “integrated” can vary. When a system is described as integrated, the details of exactly how it is integrated are crucial.
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