Composable Architecture How to Unite Old Legacy Systems With New Modular Components

Modular, composable technology allows for operational independence, faster go-to-market, cost savings and a competitive edge. And, it doesn’t have to come at the cost of everything your digital technology team has implemented over the years.

Decoupling Legacy Tech: Composable Architecture Is the New Path for Regulated Industries

Large organizations in regulated industries tend to depend on monolithic, legacy technologies for every digital touchpoint. This approach increasingly fails to meet customer experience expectations, which are evolving faster than what IT can deliver using legacy platforms. Over-reliance on big software vendors to manage these integrated, digital experience technology stacks is a big obstacle preventing effective market engagement. When we talk about decoupling, we’re talking about breaking those all-in-one monoliths or DXPs into modules and then using composable architecture to put them back together in a meaningful way.

Revolutionizing Engagement: Breaking Monolithic Barriers

This process of decoupling helps businesses respond, evolve and meet the timely needs of the market, even as the underlying foundation remains solid. Next gen composable architecture inherently leads to a more effective operating model where IT shares digital experience with digital business teams. The flexibility in the front-end allows business units to get products to market faster and deploy improvements at speed, instead of waiting on an overloaded IT department, and — what I’d like to really highlight here — do so without having to “rip and replace” existing legacy technology investments. When done right, composable architecture, also known as MACH [microservices, API-first, cloud-native, headless] allows for next gen technologies and monoliths to work together.

Composable Tech: Merging Old & New for Efficient Digital Experience

Composable architecture technology and legacy investments are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but rather complementary. As you build your next gen composable stack, you can start sunsetting or turning off the legacy elements that gradually become obsolete, too expensive or vulnerable. By working with a complementary digital experience architecture, composable and monolithic platforms can coexist in a way that saves time and budget.

A composable system that directly engages at the digital experience layer can pull content out of the legacy systems, and, over time, you can just start turning things off and terminating contracts with those legacy digital experience platforms that burden a lot of organizations.

Related Article: The Benefits — and Challenges — of Composable Digital Experience Platforms

Next Gen & Legacy Unite: A Composable Route to Digital Engagement

Next gen digital experience platforms (DXPs) plus updated operating models are great illustrations of how composable can complement legacy to improve digital engagement. DXPs allow customer journeys to continue across multiple channels and experiences. Because of a lack of interdepartmental alignment on priorities and requirements, many businesses find themselves invested in multiple DXPs — a chaotic, expensive situation.

While solving for this redundancy, there’s a temptation to see platforms in competition. Luckily, composable can create new efficiencies by abstracting to a new layer, allowing the old and the new to coexist. While legacy systems store content, the new composable layer enables an inexpensive and efficient way of accessing content, managing content and granting permissions. It’s scalable, reliable and “on the edge;” you know what performance to expect.

Think of your legacy system as being yet another content repository — perhaps temporarily. And next gen composable tech is the best way to get the content you need out of those sources and in front of users so that you can stay current and competitive in the market.