Brands can create independent, reusable, and scalable building blocks, mixing and matching them to fit their needs. The best part? It's fast. Brands can try new solutions, make changes, fail fast, and learn from failures quickly, making their business more agile

Adaptability is key in today's ever-changing business landscape, and many businesses struggle to keep up with rapid changes. That's where composable architecture steps in as the game-changer.

Composable architecture is like the Lego bricks of digital transformation. Brands can create independent, reusable, and scalable building blocks, mixing and matching them to fit their needs. The best part? It's fast. Brands can try new solutions, make changes, fail fast, and learn from failures quickly, making their business more agile.

Take the Netflix vs Blockbuster case. Netflix embraced change early on, initially delivering DVDs by mail and then swiftly transitioning to a streaming platform. On the contrary, Blockbuster failed to adapt promptly. Even though they understood that Netflix's approach was the future, they didn't evolve quickly enough. As a result, Blockbuster couldn't keep pace and eventually faced failure. It's a lesson that being late to adjust can lead to significant consequences.

The result? Blockbuster went bankrupt, while Netflix became a leader in online entertainment.

The lesson? Digital transformation is no longer a choice; it's a necessity.

To stay ahead, brands need a flexible and agile architecture, making composable architecture the future of digital transformation. And it comes with benefits:

Velocity

One big plus of composable systems is how quickly you can get things done. Gartner predicts that by 2024, 70% of big and medium-sized companies will focus on composability to make their apps easy to put together. Teams using composable web setups show real business benefits, like faster go-to-market time.

Agility

Composable architecture involves assembling systems through loosely coupled components, creating a modular structure with easily combinable, detachable, and reusable parts.

Furthermore, composable architecture minimizes vendor lock-in to a great extent, allowing brands to build piece by piece. If one vendor doesn't have the required technology, a brand can get it from another, creating a customized structure using best-of-breed technologies.

Security

Maintaining and updating codebases in monolithic structures affects the entire system. However, composable architectures allow alteration in each component independently, making the process far less cumbersome and risky to deploy.

Reusability

The key benefit of composable architecture is the ability to reuse components. The modular system reuses and connects standards and patterns through APIs. With reusability as a central focus, any existing modules can be reused or serve as the foundation for a new application or service. Furthermore, reusability of components lowers the development costs to a great extent.

Quicker Innovation

Legacy systems are complex to handle and need lots of time and resources to change, keep up, and improve. Besides, multiple teams have to be involved in the entire process. Composable architecture offers a more manageable IT upgrade setup, allowing seamless integration and feature launches. With composable architecture, IT can focus on developing new ideas and giving customers a better experience instead of dealing with routine tasks like marketing and maintenance.

Omnichannel capabilities

A flexible digital experience platform (DXP) combined with a headless content management system (CMS) makes creating and sharing content smooth. This allows marketers to keep a consistent presence on various digital platforms and devices, all from one central place. They can quickly and easily improve and send out campaigns to reach their target audience wherever they are.

While the many benefits of composability make it desirable for significant brands, they must first check if they have the proper framework to adopt a composable architecture. This can be done using MACH.

MACH

• M—Microservices: Independent services connected via APIs.
• A—API-First: APIs linking applications or services.
• C—Cloud-Native: Applications designed for the cloud, ensuring scalability.
• H—Headless: Decoupling front-end and back-end for flexibility.

As the business ecosystem changes, companies are figuring out that composable architecture is not only the future for business continuation but also a smart move as it makes everything work better.

Companies like Walmart, Asics, Mantel, and Shell have adopted composable architecture for efficient operations. It's not just a trend; it's the usual way of doing things now.

Digital transformation is not a one-time destination; it's an ongoing journey. The process is similar to building a stack of blocks- each piece added on-demand as your business grows.

Composable architecture is the foundation of your digital transformation journey. So adopt it now and make the transformation agile and enjoyable.

(The writer is VP of Engineering, Contentstack)