****Please note that the following content was sourced and repurposed from our CEO, Sana Remekie’s LinkedIn post.****
In a composable DXP, data and content driving the experience come from a multitude of sources such as a CMS, Commerce Engine, DAM, Promotions Engine, etc. In order to allow Marketing and Digital teams to control the experience powered by all of these individual best of breed applications, you need
Experience Orchestration. In other words, to assemble a composable DXP (Digital Experience Platform), you need to ‘compose’ or orchestrate.
Two Approaches to Doing Experience Orchestration
1. Pull the content out of each of the individual platforms, stage it in a centralized data hub and slap a bunch of APIs on top of it so you have one point of access to all your data.
If you do that, here is what you lose:
a) You can no longer take advantage of the APIs offered by each of the individual ISVs. These APIs don’t just offer the ability to access content. They often provide business logic as well. For instance, Cloudinary, one of our partners offers powerful APIs to transform the images in real-time based on the real-time parameters passed to it. If you simply pulled the media out of their API first DAM and placed it into a hub, you miss out on the power of the platform all together.
b) Many of the individual ISVs offer optimized scalability and performance for real-time access of the content. If we pull content out to be delivered by another data infrastructure, we no longer benefit from the delivery infrastructure that you are paying for in the first place.
2. Connect to each of the backend systems in real-time, take full advantage of their APIs and don’t try to manipulate the content coming out of these systems into its own proprietary data model (unless it’s an explicit requirement for the front-end).
After all, if we were going to copy and paste all the content from individual backend systems into a single index, we could do that with a Search platform. We can do better.This composer or orchestrator has a big role to play in a Composable DXP and there are two fundamentally different ways to do this job:
