The Next Generation of Digital Transformation: Composable Architectures

The term ‘digital transformation’ is frequently used to describe large technology shifts over time, but it’s a bit of a misnomer. The only true digital transformation since the 1990s was when the web became widely available to the public and transformed our lives from analog to digital.

Fast-forward a few decades, and we now widely accept the term to mean periods that last a decade or so in which new technologies become available to enable the complete transformation of an industry—which is where we are today with e-commerce.

Monolithic Solutions and the Modern Consumer

Understanding how e-commerce got here requires a look back to a not-so-distant past in the early 2010s when the most recent digital transformation in e-commerce was the introduction of solution stacks from enterprise vendors that are now commonly referred to as monolithic solutions.

These unified, multi-dimensional platforms were (and are) sold and maintained by single vendors. These vendors quickly endeared themselves to brands that needed to catch up to the needs of modern consumers, who were increasingly buying more online. Therefore, the typical monolith stack can do a little bit of everything just well enough, but decision-makers must also contend with their pros-and-cons as they are not all perfect.

The same era was also marked by robust M&A activity which began pointing to the downsides of monoliths

• Buying, installing, maintaining, and upgrading enterprise systems is costly and time-consuming because each component added to the acquiring company’s monolith has a separate architecture and upgrade/maintenance schedule. While a customer thinks they are buying into a ‘suite’ of products that work well together, that is not the case in practice.
• Plenty of the acquisitions didn’t pan out in terms of technology fit and were harder to fully integrate than expected, which dragged out that timeline even further and limited the expected value to customers to “just good enough”.
• Some of these acquisitions were simply completed to acquire human capital and intellectual property. The acquiring company had little intention to integrate the technology into their stack, which hurt the industry’s pace of innovation.

These all inflict a resource cost on brands that they don’t typically have much of to spare: time.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Leslie Marshall, Chief Marketing Officer at Mesmerise

Differentiate, Don’t Assimilate

Monolithic solutions have been a part of e-commerce for some time. But what has changed that is making the landscape ripe for disruption?

As the saying in IT goes, ‘no one ever got fired for buying IBM.’ At the same time, aggressive and forward-looking brands quickly grew frustrated by the limits of those all-in-one stacks. They couldn’t do quite as much as they wanted. They couldn’t execute on bold campaigns because their tech stack wouldn’t allow them to. And bringing in new vendors to fix a monolithic weakness wasn’t easy in such a walled garden.

As e-commerce IT leaders hunted for a way to differentiate, not assimilate, they found away to take full control of their customer engagement and relationships. They found it was time to make a generational shift in technology strategy.

Stand Out With MACH

The arrival of MACH composable architecture exemplifies a seismic shift in the way brands think about doing business. The MACH approach is understood as a movement to work exclusively with technology vendors that are:

• Microservices-based – Individual pieces of business functionality that are independently developed, deployed, and managed
• Application programming interfaces (API)-first – All functionality is exposed through an API.
• Cloud-native software-as-a-service (SaaS) – SaaS that leverages the cloud beyond storage and hosting, including elastic scaling and automatic updating.
• Headless – Front-end presentation is decoupled from back-end logic and channel, programming language, and is framework-agnostic.

In a nutshell, all this means is that instead of dealing with rigid barriers, just-good-enough feature sets, and going through lengthy and costly installation and upgrade processes, brands can now mix and match components while avoiding vendor lock in. Take the case of a visual media layer: brands can replace an existing solution with an automated one and reduce the amount of manual labor required to create, optimize and deliver images and videos. With relatively low effort, sites load faster because of the now-optimized media, and experiences are customized to every device, screen, and operating system.

Marketing Technology News: How can Companies Stretch Their Digital Marketing Budgets?

Monolithic Stacks Are the Past

The ability for brands to move at the speed of their own decision making and not the speed of a single vendor’s innovation capability represents a nearly overwhelming opportunity in e-commerce. At the scale of modern commerce, brands can’t simply wait for their tech partners to roll out new features – nor should they be ok with shutting down their systems for weeks on end to make critical upgrades. They need the ability to define bold plans and pursue them full tilt, at MACH speed.

It might be easy to look at automation, AI and machine learning, or any other individual technology breakthrough and call it revolutionary. Those things on their own absolutely have and will continue to make a major impact on customer engagement strategies. But the newfound ability to identify, deploy and integrate those features seamlessly from any vendor at any time, and to execute at scale, is why MACH architecture holds the promise of true digital transformation.