Video: 10 Minute IT Jams — Sitecore VP on composable digital experience

Composable digital experience platforms (DXPs) are changing the way organisations think about their technology stack. As digital channels proliferate, the days of the 'one-size-fits-all' system may now be numbered. Nick Kendall, Vice President for Solution Engineering APJ at Sitecore, recently discussed the forces driving this trend and what it means for businesses striving to keep pace in a rapidly shifting digital landscape.

Kendall began by unpacking what composable actually means for Sitecore. "It's a good question," he said. "Sitecore has been in the business of digital experience platforms for a long time and the composable part is really the story around making sure we can deliver solutions that fit into a customer's architecture, really around all the solutions that they use." This approach, he explained, recognises that "there is not a one product fits all solution", prompting vendors to make sure the solutions they offer "fit into that full architecture stack that a customer needs these days."

He added, "It's not a one product solution, it's not a two product solution anymore - it's probably a five to ten product solution and the composable bit is really making sure that the solutions that we offer play nice with all the other products that are out there."

The era where businesses could settle for a single, all-encompassing suite seems to be over. Instead, composability now means "you can go in and deliver one, two, three, five solutions in that composable space, but they are all playing nice with, of course, the Sitecore solutions but also with the other marketing solutions that a customer would be looking for," Kendall said.

The rise in interest toward composable DXPs has been accelerating. When asked about what was driving this move, Kendall credited both market appetite and technological progress. "The biggest move is probably the move to SaaS," he explained. Many companies have already migrated some functions - such as email marketing or CRM - to cloud platforms, but digital experience platforms have lagged behind. "Including Sitecore," he admitted, "so the composable move is first to make sure that the solutions that a company chooses are preferably SaaS-based."

He pointed to the rise of 'headless' architectures as a crucial technical enabler. "Headless has become such a technical solution approach to how to deliver experiences across channels and that's become possible in the last five years, let's say." Historically, web content management was "all done server side," but the explosion of digital channels made this approach limiting. Headless technology, Kendall said, means "you can now start to atomise those solutions and that's why the composable DXP really is a game changer because it can all be delivered SaaS; the customer can then compose and merge all those products together into the experience that they want across all the channels that are relevant for them."

Many organisations, however, have already invested heavily in traditional, monolithic systems. Kendall's advice to these businesses is both pragmatic and nuanced. "The first thing I say is first just verify whether or not it might actually be the right solution that you're in. I don't think the monolithic systems, and certainly the Sitecore ones, are going away and there are benefits to the monolith in the sense that the whole idea was a solution that does a lot across different technologies," he explained. These could include everything from content management to analytics, email marketing and A/B testing.

He encouraged companies to be candid about what the monolith is really delivering. "Has it just been delivering the web experience from a website perspective? Are you really using the analytics that comes with the platform? Are you using the email marketing platform, and so on and so forth?" If the answer is yes, and the monolith remains effective, there may be little sense in moving. But for those who are considering a change, Kendall urged a careful breakdown of needs: "Break those down from a composable perspective to say, okay, well the first thing we should probably look at is a new solution to host our content, and actually take that fully away from the channels that we needed on and then just look at potentially a headless CMS or from a Sitecore perspective, a content hub perspective and say now we create content detached from the channels."

He stressed an iterative, requirements-driven approach. "Instead of going out and finding another monolith, it's really breaking down the jobs that that monolith has been doing and then start to look again at those best of breed point solutions to make sure that we then can go out from a business perspective and say, well these are the requirements very isolated to this specific function what we want to achieve and then go out and find that solution."

When asked how enterprise end users should engage with Sitecore, Kendall acknowledged the difficulties often faced by prospective customers. "It's always been interesting, the whole process of how do customers get across a solution or how do they get to experience a vendor and what they do, and the barrier of entry I think is actually pretty high in software, be that both enterprise and non-enterprise," he said. He pointed out that most vendor sites offer just two options: "One is request a demo and the other one is potentially to create a free-ish account, but there's still pretty high barriers of entry."

To address this, Kendall has launched an initiative called 'Sitecore in 300 Seconds', offering simple, digestible video overviews of the company's products. "If people are interested, they can search for it and it is basically the concept of taking our product and make it very digestible in video format - to say we can give you a quick intro, the 300 seconds, basically five minutes, an overview of part of the product… an easy digestible version and then a longer version where we dig into the actual features and functions from a demo perspective and actually showcasing the product."

He believes providing prospective customers with low-barrier, accessible information is vital. "That early research is something that I'm spending a lot of time on to make sure that we can cater for that because there's a lot of vendors out there, there's a lot of pre-work that happens within a business before you get to the stage of actually going out to vendors and talking about, well, we've got these problems, how can you solve them?" Kendall said.

He concluded, "Thank you very much, I really enjoyed it."