Composability Now: The Critical Role of Orchestration

In 2019, VShift Managing Director, Technology Dan Anderson published “Conscious Decoupling: The Future of Web Development,” an article describing the composable business benefits of a headless CMS and a decoupled approach – relatively new concepts at the time. Now seems like a good moment to catch up on what has transpired in the intervening years – and what we might expect in the near future.

Q: Dan, in 2019, you predicted increased enterprise adoption of composable technology such as the headless CMS. Were you right? 

Dan: Of course! Seriously, I would say things are turning out as I expected in the sense that change happens … slowly. Organizations are moving to the composable approach, but it’s not like flipping a switch and suddenly everyone is doing this. What has grown dramatically and matured is the provider market. It used to be pre-IPO niche ventures, very open source. Now, you have nearly all the big so-called “monolithic” software giants either promoting their future plans or actually delivering real, high-value composable technology.

Luis: Two or three years ago, we talked about a headless CMS almost as though it were a standalone thing. Today of course, we understand composability to be an approach that involves multiple microservices, APIs, cloud-based platforms and more. Which brings us to something else comparatively new in this discussion: orchestration. 

Q: Orchestration, meaning how all these decoupled technologies get put together?

Dan: Yes. To do this headless stuff, to bring all the pieces together, you need orchestration. But it’s bigger than that. You also need a bunch of other capabilities. And there are extremely robust, flexible tools available. But that’s a blessing and a curse – broad feature-set versus something that’s more single-minded. In other words, you can do anything – but it takes skill to set it up. Conceptually, organizations may be bought into the idea of decoupling. But practically, they’re not necessarily ready to confidently implement a decoupled approach. 

Q: Two years ago, we weren’t really talking about orchestration or an orchestration layer. What happened?

Luis: Well, the need for orchestration is what happened. The composable approach is powerful but it’s also, I don’t know … scary. Because someone has to do the composing.

Dan: The monolith is comforting.

Luis: Right. With a monolithic platform, everything is there for you. Whereas with composable, you need orchestration. Orchestration is what makes composability work.

Even the traditionally monolithic companies are bought into composable and are adding value through options like ‘hybrid-headless.’

Q: When you say composable is “scary” … Do you mean people don’t really understand it yet?

Dan: Well, our clients understand composable conceptually, but they definitely benefit from training in the approach. Some need a total introduction. Some are at a more intermediate stage where they need help setting up their tech stack, designing their content model and so on. And a few are beyond that point, so we work with them in more of a co-development capacity. There’s plenty to learn, and new solutions coming online every day.

Q: Is it fair to say that another recent development in this space is how we think about the monolith? We’ve talked about those all-in-one players as though they’re the bad guys. But it’s not quite that simple, right? 

Luis: Right. Even the traditionally monolithic companies are bought into composable and are adding value through options like “hybrid-headless.” The idea is to provide the advantages of both all-in-one and composable approaches. It’s interesting, but early days – stay tuned to see where that goes.

Dan: It certainly does give companies that have invested in monolithic technologies a way to get more ROI from their existing tech platforms. 

Q: So, who is doing composable well?

Luis: Broadly speaking, I would say organizations that compete on speed-to-market for product rollouts and campaign launches – that’s who’s leading the pack. Composable technology enables greater autonomy and operational independence for business change agents like CMOs or chief digital officers who are using digital to open new markets and drive new business.

Q: And why would that be?

Luis: Well, marketing has some very clear unmet needs and as a result, marketing has much to gain. And marketing is very willing and able to adapt how they work in order to get the benefits of decoupled. They just want to get their content online. And they recognize that this is a way for them to do it.

Dan: True, and marketing by its nature is multichannel and multi-touchpoint. Campaigns need websites, emails, social, maybe an app, whatever. So by organizing their content logically and making it accessible on many devices, many endpoints, marketing knows they can reuse that content multiple times, multiple ways, all over the place. It’s a great fit.

Luis: We have a project with a marketing client who was struggling with how to get content from the CMS that feeds the website and use that content in another system. And we said, well, actually, you don’t need to move anything. You just need this API for your other system to access that content.

Dan: Marketing inherently understands the advantages of composable business even if they aren’t immediately familiar with more abstract ideas like Jamstack (JavaScript, API and Markup).

With a monolithic platform, everything is there for you. With composable, you need orchestration. Orchestration is what makes composability work.

Q: This approach reminds me of the Freddie Mac Client Resource Center (CRC) case study Dan wrote about in that prior article.

Dan: Great example. Yes, CRC was a critical new product. However, there was literally no new content, just new requirements, new use cases, governing which customers would see which content under various circumstances. A textbook case of the advantages of the decoupled approach. We took existing content and recomposed it.

Luis: If that content had not been isolated from the back end, it would have been a much heavier lift to build the new product.

Q: Are there other examples you can share?

Dan: We recently used decoupled technology for a large insurance company to launch hundreds of local websites to drive growth in saturated markets across the U.S. Because of the speed and flexibility of this approach, our client was able win an unprecedented volume of new business within the first month of the launch.

Q: And to wrap up … What will we be talking about two years from now?

Luis: We’ll be talking about more tangible and compelling case studies demonstrating the speed-to-market and cost advantages of the decoupled, composable approach.

Dan: We’ll be talking about something else, because in two years, composable will no longer be an alternative approach – it will be the default way of doing business, at least for forward-leaning organizations.