Are you ready to become a Composable Enterprise

Hello!

Your organisation has likely faced unprecedented challenges over the past year. The pandemic forced leaders to rethink business models, innovate rapidly and discover new ways of engaging customers, all while market disruptors continued to enter their industries.

Online and app-based companies are reshaping processes and customer touchpoints that have been embedded in organisations for decades. They leverage the Cloud, APIs (tools that enable products, services and systems to connect seamlessly with a growing network of partners), data analytics and mobile devices, as well as social media.

The winners are those with technology platforms that allow them to respond instantly to market trends and disruptors, create new business partnerships, generate fresh revenue streams and deliver additional products or services while maintaining online responsiveness and performance.

The path to a Composable Enterprise

At the heart of this capability lies an IT platform that delivers versatility, flexibility and agility—core requirements of our current era. So how can this be achieved?

By adopting a modular approach, adding new components to existing legacy systems and reshaping your business into a Composable Enterprise. You will then be able to maximise your organisation’s ability to build, assemble and reassemble core business elements, quickly seize market opportunities and respond to disruptors and threats while preserving resilience.

The definition of “compose” is to “form by uniting parts”, and a modular strategy does exactly that. It enables you to connect with new ecosystems, opening your business to fresh markets and revenue streams.

Business development

Global IT research and advisory firm Gartner defines a Composable Enterprise as “an organisation that adapts to the pace of change and delivers business results. It achieves this through the assembly and integration of Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs)—application building blocks that have been purchased or developed”.

By using interchangeable building blocks (software), you can create, evolve and adapt your business operations, respond to external or internal factors and gain the agility needed to grow and mature.

Greater modularity ensures customers can interact with your business through multiple delivery channels and touchpoints using their preferred communication medium.

The first step is to re-examine your business model and embed the implementation and maintenance of PBCs (the applications) into your growth strategy. When considering business continuity, have you evaluated the risk posed by outdated business models?

Planning for disruptions to resources and processes is standard, yet how much thought has been given to external disruptors? Greater autonomy builds resilience.

As composable architecture blurs the boundaries between business and IT, delivering more powerful and tailored application experiences, it is equally important to involve all stakeholders in the architecture development process. When building a composable business you must evolve your strategy, architecture and technology in tandem.

Building blocks

Strategy – everything is composable, so apply this mindset when developing strategy. Where do you see your business in the future, and what ecosystems inside and outside your sector could you connect with?

Composable thinking, combined with modularity, autonomy, orchestration and discovery, should provide the framework and timeline for idea conceptualisation.

Architecture – by enhancing your underlying capabilities you will gain the tools to adapt and repurpose your offerings.

Technology – composable software components (typically accessed through APIs and event channels) are the tools for today and tomorrow.

These interconnected pieces can be integrated and scaled across complex digital enterprises, turning the concept into practice and driving the technology that supports your product design goals.

Monoliths and Microservices

Rather than removing legacy systems—which still hold significant business value—the focus is on introducing modular technology platforms that support the building blocks already in place.

Organisations with little need to integrate internal systems or expand their partner base often rely on monolithic architecture to power their IT platforms, where all operations relate to a single piece of software or code.

A monolithic architecture, however, cannot evolve quickly in line with business needs. Any change or update in one area is likely to affect the entire system.

While it is difficult to change and scale a monolithic application, a Microservices architecture can break this constraint.

This key component connects independent or “decoupled” elements within its design, supporting interlinked software applications. They can communicate via the Cloud and be managed, modified, tested, deployed and scaled without impacting broader operations.

Although this brings flexibility in programming languages and supporting technologies, it can create communication challenges when applications do not share the same environment—an issue often overlooked by developers.

When beginning your Composable Enterprise journey, do not discard the monolith (simply avoid adding to it). Start with the least dependent or most decoupled service, maintain a clear roadmap (rewriting a monolith is never simple) and address any network communication issues early.

APIs

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) form the foundation of any Composable Enterprise. These components share data securely across business systems, mobile applications, Cloud services and more, connecting businesses, partners and third-party providers. Yet they are more than a technology facilitator—they are strategically vital.

APIs standardise communications. While sharing benefits is essential, equal attention must be paid to how they are shared. Third parties facing slow interfaces or complex coupling processes encounter unnecessary barriers. APIs deliver a RESTful interface that enables easy onboarding, shortens development cycles and accelerates delivery to customers and partners.

They also provide security advantages: APIs manage and protect payment data, access control and authorisation/authentication—offering peace of mind to regulators, your business and customers alike.

Event-Driven Architecture

Another key component is Event-Driven Architecture (EDA). Commonly used within a Microservices architecture, it uses state or program changes (events) to trigger asynchronous communications.

An event, such as a customer completing an online purchase, is detected and automatically triggers a response without requiring validation through a request/response cycle, reducing pressure on system resources.

The focus should be on how EDA automatically responds to customer actions. Your business must react quickly to an event within the customer journey; otherwise the customer may turn elsewhere.

While other technologies may appear to offer similar capabilities, none manage and streamline communications as effectively.

The multiple systems that need to capture customer data (banks, acquirers, marketplaces, ERPs and others) add layers of complexity. In contrast, event notifications use a single mechanism to capture an action such as a purchase, notifying only the system interested in that transaction.

Once an EDA is in place, business systems can identify specific customer actions and respond accordingly—for example with a purchase confirmation or targeted offers linked to the event. This makes your business more responsive, more precise and less reliant on costly, intrusive re-marketing, while improving the customer experience and unlocking greater scalability and real business gains.

Modern integration

Integration has traditionally been handled by a central team, allowing only linear scaling and creating bottlenecks. Modern integration approaches advocate the use of ad-hoc integrators. While this enables faster scalability, it can introduce governance, consistency, security and compliance risks, as well as higher technical costs.

To mitigate these risks and costs, integration leaders should:

• Design low-code integration platforms with multiple personas and robust operational/governance models that support rapid development and time-to-value
• Reuse APIs as integration entry points rather than building new ones
• Adopt a mesh-based framework (combining Microservices and APIs) to manage communication processes, improving speed and organisational responsiveness
• Use additional Software-as-a-Service integration tools when time-to-value is moderate, thereby reducing technical and governance issues

Make the change

A Composable Enterprise does not replace a digital business; this modular approach ensures business capabilities and units become autonomous, independent and aligned to drive growth. It supports development, anticipates change and remains resilient in the face of uncertainty.

Becoming a Composable Enterprise is more achievable than it may seem. Identify opportunities within your customers’ journeys and the technology required to capture them, agree on your KPIs and ensure you have the workforce and vendors ready to innovate.

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