The composable DXP story

Organisations want technology that lets them invest in new value, instead of spending their budget on keeping the technology up to date.

We wrote this article in 2021. Boxever (customer data and personalisation) and Reflektion (search) have since become part of SitecoreAI.

Traditional, monolithic solutions are development-heavy and complex, with high running and maintenance costs. They pack a lot of features that have to work together in one big platform. The result is a complex setup that reduces your flexibility when you want to launch something new.

Gartner defines a digital experience platform (DXP) as "an integrated and cohesive piece of technology designed to enable the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences across multi-experience customer journeys."

Most of the time, a DXP is built on a content management system, with modules for capturing contact data, email marketing, marketing automation and personalisation in one solution. The goal: serve content to different channels, enriched with data from other applications.

These platforms are called heavyweight for a reason: they have a wide range of features and are complex by nature. The problem is that you lose agility and flexibility, at a time when a fast cycle of idea, implementation and learning is critical.

In recent years, marketing technology vendors have moved from perpetual licenses to subscriptions, with a cloud-first and SaaS strategy. Kentico Xperience announced it, Sitecore transformed its license and product strategy, and headless CMS vendors like Kentico Kontent (now Kontent.ai), Contentful and Umbraco Heartcore have always been SaaS and subscription-based.

If you don't have to focus on keeping a solution running, you can put your development and IT resources into new solutions that add value for your audience. You can use the best and most modern frameworks: headless, JavaScript front-end frameworks, MACH and Jamstack. You need fewer vendor-specific (often certified) experts and can draw on a bigger pool of developers who know these modern frameworks. For integrations with other systems, you use cloud-first concepts.

Sitecore's recent acquisitions confirm this trend. Sitecore is heading towards what it calls a composable DXP, with SaaS best-of-breed solutions. It acquired Boxever (customer data platform), Four51 (headless commerce), Moosend (marketing automation and email) and, most recently, Reflektion (AI-powered search).

With a microservices approach, you choose the building blocks of your digital architecture: the best-of-breed services you use today, combined with the right core services. That gives you an agile architecture that supports the needs of today and those of tomorrow.

Before you talk technology, get a clear view of your strategic goals, in the short and long term. Consider your own development team and their tech stack, and your company's rules on technology and security.

Looking for guidance to define a future-proof digital architecture? Let's talk!