The battle on the (Composable) frontline

It is generally agreed that the Composable SaaS structure is the right direction for your Marketing Technology (MarTech) and I am amongst the many that are great advocates and fans of this way of constructing your technology stack. However, there is one area which has become a bit of an arms race. It is what the MACH alliance has started calling the ‘DXC’ or Digital Experience Composition layer.

So, what is it?

The core of the wonderful Composable SaaS architecture is the separation of Content from Context. For example, if you’re writing a news article you create the content - the headline, the abstract, the body text, date, author, etc. without needing to understand where or how this content will be used. This is then ‘pushed’ to a webpage, or a teaser, or a news app, or the social channel in the right format or ‘context’. Ideal: create once, use many times.

Oftentimes the front-end is’dumb’. In other words it has been created by designers and built by developers, and grabs the content from the source and presents it. The advantage of this set-up is that it's automatic, and pretty much always looks great, because only a designer has had a hand on it.

While solid, the ‘dumb’ front end is not flexible. Marketers want to control the context as well as the content, especially on the website. In other words they want tools that allow them to edit both the content and the layout of the content. These tools are often referred to as inline or WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editors.

Historically, the more ‘all-in-one’ players like Adobe Experience and Sitecore XP had integrated inline editors, usually referred to as “Experience Editors” and because the content and context were more ‘locked’, i.e. the content was directly related to a page or item on the website, this was an easy relationship to manage.

However, in the wonderful world of Composable content is created ‘in a vacuum’ - i.e. separated from context. So how are marketers going to manage the context? What is required is a tool that pulls the content from the repositories and allows the marketer to ‘play’ with that content within a controlled framework that respects the Corporate Visual Identity (CVI) and the design ‘laws’ for the website.

This is where the DXC comes in.

What solutions are there?

To address this challenge, vendors in this sector either have already, or are launching these DXC tools. Rather roughly they fall into two categories; those that manage content from their own source, and those that manage content from multiple sources.

For example, Contentful recently announced the launch of their Contentful Studio. This product is aimed at users that have a fairly simple MarTech stack where the front end is ‘connected’ to Contentful only. If content comes from other sources it is integrated at the Contentful layer, and not at the Studio layer (more about orchestration later). BigCommerce has their Stencil which operates in a similar way.

Some vendors offer more ‘pure-play’ DXC products. Three that were ‘born’ as DXC’s are Uniform, Occtoo and Stackbit (which has been acquired by Netlify and is now ‘Netlify Create’). These products are interesting as they are capable of integrating content from different sources: For example they can pull content from your CMS, pull product information from your PIM (Product Information Management System) or images and videos from your DAM (Digital Assets Management). So, a marketer can create a page that has part marketing content, part product content and part digital asset content which is very exciting and offers huge benefits in terms of the flexibility of constructing pages.

What about Orchestration?

One of the core benefits of Composable SaaS is the ability to integrate multiple systems with well-documented APIs / pulling information from DAMs, PIMs, CMS, CRM etc. with ease. The process of bringing data or content from these different systems is sometimes referred to as orchestration. The question arises ‘where do you orchestrate?’. This is one of the areas of Composable SaaS that can be done well or badly and will affect performance, accuracy, and overall architectural flexibility.

Going back to Netlify Create , Occtoo and Uniform, this would be considered ‘Orchestration at the DXC’. In other words the integration of content from various sources is happening at the front end. This creates some really interesting opportunities to run personalisation, A/B/n testing and localisation all managed by the DXC and the marketer.

Orchestration at the content layer is a slightly different approach where effectively you use one of the roles such as the Commerce or CMS to act as the ‘central hub’ to assimilate data which is then presented with a dedicated DXC (like Studio or Stencil) or a dumb front-end. In a high content volume situation, this might make more sense and is definitely where Contentful, for example, is strong.

Note: Sitecore’s XM Cloud inherits a great deal from the XP product in terms of the way the editor and content are very closely integrated, in other words Cloud XM has the DXC built in. SItecore’s roadmap indicates the ability to orchestrate at either the DXC or content layer.

The third orchestration technique almost goes back full loop to the days of the Service Bus. The term Data as a Service or DaaS has been thrown around recently and it refers to the idea of all content or data sources connecting with central service to which requests can be made from any of the connected services. Players to watch in this space are probably Netlify and Vercel. Netlify, with its acquisition of Gatsby and Stackbit is definitely looking strong, and in the composable universe implementing Netlify for the Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) and Netlify Create at the DXC certainly makes a great deal of sense for Developer and Marketer alike.

Ultimately the orchestration may happen in a number of different levels, depending on the actual requirement.

Making the right choices

This is still a new-ish category within the Composable universe, and there is some jostling for dominance. This DXC layer enables vendors to add interesting, differentiating features that may help selection. However, it does come with a price tag.

As with all vendor selections, the right choice is what works for your company and its digital ambitions. There was a time when Composable SaaS solutions were sold as a ‘cheaper’ alternative to the eye-watering monolithic pricing of, for example, Adobe and SAP. Companies are now realising that pulling all the right components together has a comparable cost, and the addition of a DXC role will add to this annual burden. However, the avoidance of vendor lock-in and the availability of regular, automatic upgrades in the cloud still trumps monoliths, even if the annual licence fees are starting to line up.

If you’re considering the move to a Composable SaaS Marketing Architecture, or you’d like to understand how this might help your business then please give me a shout. I’ve been working in the digital space for 25 years, and have helped many clients successfully implement better solutions that create real results.