#Executive Summary 

The customer of the 2020s isn’t as forgiving as they might have been in years gone by when it comes to their digital expectations. With an assortment of channels providing an easy outlet for instant gratification, seamless navigation, and intuitive interactions between their favorite platforms, creating a frictionless journey is a priority for almost every business. If it isn’t, the writing may already be on the wall. 

Customers today expect businesses to cater to their demands for speed and convenience, personalization, and a quality user experience. This holds true whether interactions happen on mobile devices, websites, social media apps, or somewhere else entirely. 

However, building a cohesive digital experience that meets those demands isn’t always an easy task, particularly for B2B publishing platforms as technology requirements continue to change and new channels are being unlocked faster than ever. 

Whether it's news platforms, information & data services, or research & analytics services, they always need to deliver a high volume of data, content, and asset types. In addition to managing and processing all of those information, there's the challenge of putting them in the right place and catering to the interests of readers. According to Accenture, the reality is that 67% of users expect companies to understand and be able to address their changing needs during disruptive times. 

As your organization seeks to stand out against the competition while remaining adaptable and innovative in harsh macroeconomic conditions, the traditional approach to selecting software solutions and building an enterprise technology stack falls short. That’s why 88% of executives suffer from a crisis of relevance as customer demands and employee resources change faster than their businesses can adapt. 

Therefore, organizations need to adopt the composable enterprise approach to respond dynamically to changes and provide the digital experiences that customers expect. The ebook focuses on the challenges B2B publishing platforms face in the composable era, since it is increasingly challenging for them to remain domain expertise while delivering immediate information and maintaining subscribers' interest.

We’ll explain what being a composable enterprise is all about and show how you can adapt your business to achieve composability and reach customer expectations. 

#Composable Enterprise 101

A composable enterprise is an organization that can innovate and adapt to changing business needs. These changes can be in response to variations in customer requirements or market conditions. 

How do composable enterprises work?

Composable enterprises rely on the concept of composability, a software design principle where systems are built by assembling smaller independent components into different arrangements. 

These independent components are also known as packaged businesses capabilities (PBCs). 

Think of PBCs like applications that serve a specific business purpose. For example, organizations might have a PBC that handles content management and another that handles shopping cart checkout. Depending on the business’s requirements, PBCs can be very granular or very large.

By adopting composability, businesses can become more agile instead of relying on monolithic legacy systems that slow them down and prevent them from quickly responding to variable market conditions. However, for a business to be a composable enterprise, it must follow the principles of composability: discoverability, modularity, orchestration, and autonomy.

• Discoverability : Team members should be able to easily identify and access components as well as any relevant documentation on how to use them.
• Modularity: Each component should have a clear business identity. They should also be small enough to promote agility but large enough to operate independently.
• Orchestration: Components should be able to interact with each other so that organizations can effectively build what is needed to support the business. 
• Autonomy: Each component should be self-contained so that it isn’t dependent on other parts of the system, thus making each easily changeable. 

The need for composable architecture

Building a composable enterprise involves having the right people and processes in place. But, most of all, it requires companies to leverage the right technology, which in this case is composable architecture.

Composable architecture refers to a modular approach to software architecture, where loosely coupled services can be combined and arranged in different ways. For instance, MACH architecture is an example of composable architecture because organizations can incorporate best-of-breed microservices or PBCs into any arrangement that works best for them.

An increasing number of businesses are seeking to adopt composable architectures such as MACH. Rather than adopting a monolithic approach to manage their technology stack, enterprises can break the monolith into individual components. These components can operate independently of each other and offer more flexibility to organizations that need to move quickly, such as composable enterprises. 

Characteristics of a composable stack

Enterprises ready to build their own composable stack should also ensure that the components they select embody the following characteristics:

Modern portal

A composable stack should offer a modern portal that enables developers and business users to integrate components as they see fit. This means that PBCs created by developers can be easily integrated with other tools in the system, and data can be effortlessly shared between components. Business users can easily access information about the entire stack from one portal and find exactly what they’re looking for. 

Better UX 

Along with a modern portal, a composable stack should include a user-friendly interface that provides a high-quality experience. This should consist of intuitive workflows to improve productivity and enhance the overall experience. 

Flexibility to deliver content

The centerpiece of a composable stack should be a headless CMS. By leveraging headless technology, content can be delivered to any device or channel so that businesses can meet customers where they are and guarantee a high-quality user experience at all times.

Best-of-breed technologies

As a result of breaking down monolithic architecture, businesses can harness the power of composability to connect their systems with best-of-breed technologies. Instead of being forced into working with tools that aren't always up to par as they might be in a monolithic stack, organizations can choose a software solution best suited to their unique needs. 

#4 signs that your current systems are holding you back

It might be hard to tell for companies considering a composable architecture whether things are fine as they are. However, both the marketing team and engineering team might already be frustrated with their existing technology stacks. There are signs that business leaders can look out for. 

This chapter discusses the signs the current systems are holding a business back. 

Rigid presentation format

A content management system is often the centerpiece of any technology stack, whether a legacy system or a composable stack. However, the traditional CMS approach typically has a rigid presentation format. 

The old-fashioned way of content upload requires companies to build solutions statically, then upload it through PDF or CSV to the CMS. This not only slows down the time to market, but also means that developers are spending more time supporting the updates rather than focusing on the innovation of the product.

The static content upload restricts the presentation layer, limiting companies the ability to deliver content to different channels like mobile apps and digital kiosks the way they want. In turn, this can cause publishing platforms to lose customers to their competitors, who can provide their customers with better UX across multiple channels.

Another challenge is that information gets stuck in silos, leading to difficulty finding the correct information and the risk of duplication, redundancy, and limited content reusability. These issues handicap growth as it becomes difficult for companies to generate first-party data, track user behavior and leverage those insights to improve the user experience. 

Having a platform that can serve as a single source of truth, for example, a headless CMS like Hygraph, can solve many of these challenges and enable content to be delivered to any platform. Hygraph also offers components feature and structured content to eliminate reusability issues. Instead of a rigid content structure, components allow teams to build schemas with reusable templates that can be used across content models. 

Systems incapabilities

Legacy systems fall short for the stack maintaintence, therefore hadicaps developers retantion. The development team might frustrate with their pipeline being occupied with system maintainance tasks rather then spending time on technical innovation.

Integration capability is critical for any system. Legacy solutions often offer en-suite softwares that forces companies to integrate instead of using their technology of choice. In the composable era, not being able to use best-of-breed systems can mean lack of ability to deliver the best digital experience to customers. 

Information is the core value for any kind of publishing platforms. Nonetheless, there are a handful number of B2B publishers operate by sharing high-confidentiality information including financial, biotechnology, political, and scientific data. They can’t afford security vulnerabilities as any data leak can be detrimental for their business. If you are not using features like granular permission, it might be time to add on one more lock making sure that only relevant stakeholders ike content editors have access to edit the information.

Low team efficiency

A key sign that your current technology stack might not be up to scratch is its negative effect on your team’s efficiency. Increasing productivity is essential for companies that want to move fast and be innovative. 

As mentioned above, challenges like not able to present content the way marketing teams wants, and requiring excessive time from the engineering team to maintain a system can result in difficult and time-consuming operation . This results in a slower time to market and every minute late to push out campaigns means high chance to losing customers. 

Keeping technical debt to a minimum is a crucial aspect of building a future-proof business. When businesses fail to fix problems that will affect them in the future, they may incur higher costs. The accumulation of technical debt makes existing problems worse over time. The longer debt builds up, the more expensive it becomes. Due to maintenance and bugs that need fixing, engineering teams face technical debt, which is detrimental to productivity.

Cost

Any technology stack will likely cost more money to maintain as time goes on. However, when the total cost of ownership swells exponentially due to the number of inefficiencies, then it is a cause for concern. More frequent upgrades, needing to call the vendor or a system integrator annually instead of every 2 or 3 years, and other issues cropping up more regularly are a cause for concern and a sign that it’s time to move to a composable solution.

#Getting ready for a composable enterprise

Building a composable enterprise isn’t as easy as flipping a switch. However, there are some things you can do to start getting ready. 

Assessing your current situation

The first step to building a composable enterprise is understanding the current state. Assess the systems in your tech stack, both for what you can accomplish with it and for how your team uses them. 

Take your CMS, for instance. Does the content live in one CMS, or is it scattered across multiple content management systems, a customer data platform, and another storage database? Also, can you easily orchestrate and integrate the various systems in your technology stack using APIs, or is it held together by a ton of glue code that requires an enormous amount of effort every time you think about adding another tool?

You also need to consult your stakeholders to understand how ready they are to migrate to a modern stack. Since a key part of a composable enterprise is the people and processes involved, and it often requires enterprises to undergo at least a partial digital transformation, everyone needs to be on board for it to succeed. Otherwise, simply adopting a shiny new tool will see similar problems creeping up sooner rather than later. 

Conquering the blockers

The next step you want to consider is breaking up the existing monolithic setup and replacing it with a modern approach. In spite of their rich features and functionality, monolithic platforms tend to hinder business innovation rather than enable it. Becoming a composable enterprise means adopting a modular approach to building the tech stack. Every module or component should be a standalone business function, but what will those business functions look like? 

For example, in your existing monolith, a CMS could have built-in analytics and personalization features. Breaking this up might warrant three separate components to handle each business function. Understanding where the boundaries of these business functions lie and how they will need to be connected in a composable setup is essential. 

Choosing your migration strategy

Next is the start of the migration process, which begins by selecting the best strategy to accomplish a successful migration for your business. Enterprises can opt for a big bang migration where they seek to move all content and data assets to a composable platform in one go and then retire their previous system. While this offers the benefits of not having to continue maintaining your legacy system, it can be a cost-intensive option fraught with risks, including significant downtime and disruption to business operations.

On the other hand, with an incremental migration, you can replace the entire tech stack with composable-ready solutions piece by piece, prioritizing the essential solutions first and reducing the risks of disrupting the whole system. The costs associated with an incremental migration are also likely to be lower or can be spread out over time. However, it can also mean that engineering teams maintain multiple environments and find ways to get data from the monolithic system to the composable solution when needed.

Hygraph provides the solution to some of the hiccups of incremental migration via Content Federation. Data can be pulled from multiple sources and backends using one single API; without having to migrate everything all at once and avoiding other issues like multiple versions of the same assets.

Assessing the cost of migration

Organizations will need to assess the cost of migrating to a new technology stack. You will need to evaluate your team to understand if they are capable of getting the most out of the new stack or if you will need to perform additional training and hiring to ensure you can maximize the benefits of composability. 

Additionally, you will need to know the cost of the new systems, both the licensing and implementation fees, and the hidden costs that can sometimes surprise you. Finally, enterprises will need to have a timeline of the entire migration process to understand how long it will take and how much current operations will likely be disrupted.   

#Assemble your stack

After completing the initial preparation work for building a composable enterprise, it’s time to start assembling your composable stack.

Choosing the components you need

Start by selecting the components that will make up your stack. In a composable martech stack, you would typically find components such as a headless CMS, customer relationship management (CRM) system, customer data platform (CDP), digital asset management (DAM), and email marketing software. 

It could also include analytics and reporting tools, personalization engines, A/B testing and optimization tools, search and merchandising software, and marketing analytics and attribution platforms. 

These components collectively enable marketers to efficiently manage content, customer relationships, data, campaigns, analytics, and optimization in a modular and flexible manner, adapting to the evolving needs of marketing strategies. Yet that only covers the marketing technology components. API gateways, cloud service providers (CSPs), containerization and orchestration tooling, DevOps, and CI/CD tools all comprise the technology stack and must be accounted for.  

Plus, odds are, if you’re moving from a legacy stack, you might need to maintain a legacy or monolithic version of one of these tools for a while longer. In a technology stack like this, Hygraph can fit seamlessly into place. Not only can Hygraph act as the headless CMS that powers digital experiences across different channels, but it can also integrate with the other solutions and even pull data from legacy systems using content federation. 

Build with MACH architecture

You should also opt for solutions built using composable architecture when building a composable stack. One way of doing this is to select software tools with the MACH Alliance approval seal. 

With MACH certification, enterprises can be confident that the software they select not only meets the criteria for composability but will effortlessly integrate with the other solutions they choose. It also ensures:

• Composable connectivity so that applications can easily connect through APIs. This gives enterprises the confidence that integrating new software or services into the existing architecture will be a smooth process.

• Infinite scalability is achieved through cloud-native infrastructure, enabling seamless rolling upgrades without requiring manual intervention. This scalability ensures the system can adapt to increasing demands and handle growing workloads effectively.

• The ultimate swap-ability characteristic allows companies to add, replace, or modify software components without disrupting the front-end user experience or interface. This flexibility empowers organizations to respond to evolving business needs quickly.

• The software’s adaptability allows it to be used with multiple frontend interfaces or platforms. This versatility enables companies to provide services across various devices and touchpoints, catering to the preferences and needs of diverse users.

• Flexibility and transparency prevent vendor lock-in. This allows companies to maintain control over their technology stack and efficiently respond to any situation. They are not dependent on a single vendor and can make strategic technology decisions based on their specific requirements and objectives.

#Composable enterprise: A look into the real-world architecturre

Composable enterprises come in all shapes and sizes and vary from organization to organization. There are, however, a few examples of what a composable approach can achieve for B2B publishing platforms.

Federating accurate data and increasing content engagement

Biotechnology publisher, BioCentury, produces deep analysis and business intelligence reports to help biotech executives and investors understand the latest industry trends.

With a pre-existing infrastructure that made it difficult to accomplish the modernization goals, they had set out. This was primarily because their monolithic setup was damaging as their CMS and CRM couldn’t be properly integrated. Also, a rigid, templated publishing process meant that providing the high-quality user experience their subscribers needed was difficult. 

The use of Hygraph enabled them to develop a composable tech stack and leverage several benefits of a headless CMS. Their composable stack featured Angular, NodeJS, ZoneJS, Express, HammerJS, Stripe, and Hygraph at the center of it all. 

This provided them with Content Federation capabilities to ensure all data was up to date and flexible content modeling to give more power to the business users like content editors. Plus, Hygraph is effortlessly embedded into the existing workflow to limit disruption and ensure a smooth migration process. 

Managing statistical data for hundreds of users 

As the statistics arm of the Finnish government, Statistics Finland provides up-to-date information regarding populations, housing prices, and critical monetary indicators. They wanted to leverage structured content to expedite workflows and upgrade their approach to metadata management. To accomplish this, they needed a new composable solution to replace the homebrew system that would help them organize and query structured content and publish content to multiple channels.

Statistics Finland also wanted to leverage cloud-native SaaS solutions so they wouldn’t have to worry about maintenance and upgrades. They also needed their new platform to integrate seamlessly with other software tools to create a fully composable stack. Hygraph emerged as an ideal solution, allowing them to build a stack with PxWeb, PxGraph, Hygraph, AWS, and Azure Cloud. 

This blend of internal systems, cloud providers, and additional software collaborate with Hygraph. Within this framework, the CMS manages all metadata and relationships, enabling content management and creation focused on statistical data. Microservices, hosted on Microsoft Azure, facilitate access to this content, while website-specific caching enhances the retrieval of information sourced from external third-party systems.

Hygraph contains all the metadata and relations of the content. Publishing is controlled within the CMS and synchronized with our other systems, and then accessed through microservices in Azure.

Delivering over 150 edtech offerings to 300,000 students

Global educational technology company 2U supplies educational institutions with a SaaS platform to power online degree programs, boot camps, and more. The high-volume Learning Management System (LMS) empowers students worldwide and allows them to access education.

Initially they used a custom homebrew headless CMS to manage data and ensure that all metadata shared with partners was accurately reflected in the LMS. However, outside of that specific use case, the system became unsustainable as 2U expanded and added more partners.

To alleviate these challenges, 2U migrated to Hygraph to take advantage of GraphQL, omnichannel publishing, and an interactive UI and help them improve cross-platform user experience. 

Hygraph has made it really easy to scale up our content needs when our business model gets more demanding. We planned our migration to be complete within 6 months, but we’ll have them done within half that time.

#Success metrics to measure

After migrating to a composable stack, you need to ensure you’re getting the most out of it. Here are some of the things to measure to track success: 

Publishing time

Information sharing is at the core of any information service providers. With a headless CMS powering your composable tech stack, publishing time should be greatly improved. Content teams should be able to create and launch omnichannel campaigns much faster, reducing time to market exponentially. 

Content engagement

Along with omnichannel publishing bringing content to where your customers are, content engagement should also see improvements. For example, providing a better quality mobile experience should lead to increased traffic from mobile devices and more conversions as customers get the same high-quality experience on every channel.

Developer experience

Instead of the negative sentiment that can sometimes plague teams operating with a legacy or homebrew CMS, a headless CMS should improve the developer experience tenfold. With the ability to leverage robust APIs as well as choose the frameworks and technologies that fit their specific needs, developers should be much happier. Also, since they will have to spend less time catering to the needs of the marketing team, content editors will have more flexibility to operate independently.

Total cost of ownership

One of the clearest indicators of success with a composable technology stack will be a lower total cost of ownership. While initial migration and implementation costs for new systems need to be considered, expect lower maintenance and security costs impacting the bottom line and robbing engineering teams of their valuable time. 

#Adopt business composability at scale

Composable architecture can yield the results that global enterprises are looking for when it comes to driving revenue, improving the total cost of ownership, and increasing employee satisfaction. 

Hygraph enables true composability so that organizations can ditch their legacy and homebrew systems and embrace a modular approach that helps them remain adaptable, no matter their challenges.

Realistically for me, success is when there’s a content idea, and I can easily see my toolkit and know, yes, it can work. And Hygraph gives me that because the content modeling gives me unlimited possibilities of what we can connect and build based on what we’re looking for.

#About Hygraph

Hygraph is the first GraphQL-native Headless Content Platform, enabling teams across the world to rapidly build and deliver tomorrow’s multi-channel digital experiences at scale.

It was designed for removing traditional content management pain points by using the power of GraphQL, and take the idea of a Headless CMS to the next level. Hygraph integrates with any frontend technology, such as React, Vue and Svelte.

Get started with Hygraph by creating a free account, learn how our customers are solving real-world problems, gather information about next-generation CMS from our resources or academy, or learn more about the applications of Hygraph.

To discuss how Hygraph can help you transform your digital projects, reach out to us.