Editorial
In today’s digital world, the ability to deliver engaging, personalized immersive and performant experiences is make-or-break for brands. Meeting that goal once isn’t enough either. To stay ahead of the rapidly evolving digital experience landscape, brands must constantly innovate and pivot to meet ever-changing consumer demands.
The result is a paradigm shift: monolithic to a composable architecture. Nonetheless, even though composable architecture offers a better way to build, deliver and manage digital experiences, challenges — notably integration — are the norm. To smooth things out, digital experience composition (DXC) is now the key to taking composable architecture mainstream.
The Era of MACH: Promise vs. Reality
For the business and IT teams building modern digital experiences, the old, monolithic legacy systems aren’t cutting it. Instead, companies are opting for a flexible, scalable, and collaborative workflow through a decoupled, best-of-breed, and best-of-need approach, spurring the rise of MACH architecture (technologies that are microservices, API-first, cloud-native and headless) and the embrace of a composable martech stack.
The benefits are many. At the outset, tools built on MACH architecture are nimble, agile and scalable, enabling companies to address rapidly changing business requirements by quickly and effectively building, delivering and managing digital experiences.
The MACH world is imperfect, however. Among its drawbacks are the following:
- Timing: Since MACH technologies are time-consuming to implement and integrate with existing tools, most companies must maintain their existing stack while re-platforming to a composable scenario, thus creating an expensive and hard-to-manage “double stack.” As a workaround, many companies re-platform some of their tech stack, which means that legacy and composable tools must continue to work together. That’s easier said than done.
- Compatibility: The complexity of marketing and ecommerce sites often requires that brands leverage numerous tools from multiple vendors. Adopting a MACH stack can make it difficult to ensure that those tools work together seamlessly.
- Cost: It can be costly to switch MACH-based solutions down the line. All too often, companies fall into the “MACH monolith” trap, whereby they use MACH solutions in the same way as they do their legacy suites. As a result, those companies again find themselves in a bind with vendor lock-in and an inability to adapt.
- Maturity: MACH is slated for mature companies with extensive tech resources, which is not a given for new or medium-sized businesses.
Related Article: The Business Case for MACH Architecture
DXC to the Rescue
The need for brands to connect, orchestrate and accelerate composable architectures for seamless digital delivery has sparked a new tech category: digital experience composition (DXC). Officially coined by Gartner this year, DXC solutions orchestrate digital experiences by connecting through APIs to headless services, such as CMS, search, media and commerce.
Hence a game changer: With DXC, developers can build and set up experiences and simply hand them off to marketers or other business users to manage in a no-code environment.
Learning Opportunities
Webinar
May
30
ChatGPT and the Future of Conversational AI
This discussion explores various aspects of AI implementation, ethical considerations, and challenges for your organization.
Webinar
May
31
The Evolution of Employee Listening - 2023 Trends & Best Practices
Learn proven effective methods and solutions to supporting an inspirational future of Employee Voice
Webinar
Jun
1
How organizations can design, build and run Generative AI into the Customer Experience
Discover how to drive enhanced CX through Generative AI
Webinar
Jun
6
The Future of Social Media: Emerging Trends and How to Stay Ahead of the Curve
The impact of emerging technologies like AI on social media
Webinar
Jun
7
The Building Blocks of Personalization
This webinar will explore how personalization can create powerful ecommerce shopping experience.
Webinar
Jun
13
The Future of Contact Centers with AI at the Helm
Learn how to balance human intuition and interaction with the potential uses of AI to create delightful and lasting CX
Webinar
May
30
ChatGPT and the Future of Conversational AI
This discussion explores various aspects of AI implementation, ethical considerations, and challenges for your organization.
Webinar
May
31
The Evolution of Employee Listening - 2023 Trends & Best Practices
Learn proven effective methods and solutions to supporting an inspirational future of Employee Voice
Accordingly, companies can simultaneously leverage MACH and legacy tech, or switch from monolith to composable, as follows:
- Integration: With DXC, companies can combine old and new technologies, migrating and de-platforming in whatever methodology and time frame they desire. The time savings in integration leads to much faster transition.
- Ongoing management: DXC connects legacy and headless tools to one another as content sources and orchestrates all that content for a smooth workflow. Plus, with DXC’s no-code building tools, developers can focus on the back end while business teams concurrently create, manage and optimize digital experiences.
Related Article: What Digital Leaders Want in MACH-Based Architectures
A Platform-Agnostic Tool That Boosts Flexibility and Performance
Adding DXC to a composable, a MACH-based tech stack yields a slew of benefits:
- Not only can brands build and manage digital experiences at optimum speed, developers and business teams can also collaborate fast and effectively.
- Since DXC is platform agnostic, brands can connect to other vendor systems and channels, reaping a modern, future-ready stack for powering innovative experiences.
- Shorter time to market for new experiences and higher performance overall are a given. In the case of legacy-to-composable re-platforming projects, DXC can shave time off the schedule, delivering business continuity and migration at your own pace.
In a nutshell, companies that adopt DXC can readily keep up with the constant adaptations required in today’s digital landscape.
The Holy Grail of Digital Experience
Why pay attention to DXC? Because it can help companies deliver the holy grail of digital experience: lightning-fast omnichannel experiences built with best-of-breed technologies.
As martech continues to evolve, the demand for DXC — and its remarkable features for integration, orchestration and a no-code environment that facilitates developers and business teams alike — will be ongoing. Brands would be wise to manage a future-ready stack for composable commerce with DXC — a win-win by all accounts.
Learn how you can join our contributor community.
