With 93% of the employees across organizations globally affirming that they need digital tools to augment their performance, the need for flexible, scalable software systems has never been this acute. As businesses strive to empower their workforce with flexible and scalable software systems, they also gain the ability to respond swiftly to market shifts, changing customer needs, and emerging opportunities.
In this blog, we explore how composable platforms drive business agility, along with key trends, benefits, and real-world use cases.
What Are Composable Platforms?
Composable platforms are a contemporary method of developing enterprise applications emphasizing reusability, adaptability, and modularity. Composable platforms enable companies to rapidly create, modify, and scale applications in response to shifting requirements by disassembling complicated systems into separate, interchangeable modules. In addition to enabling a quicker time-to-market and seamless connection with legacy/existing systems, this design philosophy speeds up development, lowers costs, and improves agility—all while enabling teams to innovate and customize solutions quickly.
Importance of Composable Platforms for Business Leaders
Composable platforms mark a shift from rigid, monolithic applications to flexible, modular solutions that can quickly adapt to evolving business needs. This strategy speeds up digital transformation for business leaders by facilitating scalability, smooth integration, and quick development, providing personalized customer experiences at a lower cost and reduced complexity.
Characteristics of Composable Platforms
In this section, we’ll explore the core characteristics that make composable platforms a game-changer for businesses looking to stay agile and competitive:
Modularity and Flexibility
Modularity is the foundation of composable platforms, enabling companies to construct distinct, reusable components to develop flexible, adaptive systems. These modular components can be swapped, updated, or reassembled per business tasks (such as client administration, payment processing, vendor onboarding, etc). Without requiring a complete platform redesign, this flexibility enables businesses to swiftly add new features, modify workflows, and scale to a more extensive user base.
API-First Approach
An API-first strategy is a key component of composable platforms, guaranteeing that all components are constructed with interoperability in mind. To provide smooth communication across different systems, services, and third-party apps, APIs act as the connectors. Composable platforms prioritize APIs, making integrating new technologies or external tools easier without requiring complicated code or major system redesigns. As a result, organizations can always ensure their application systems are backed by high-performing, flexible, and agile software architecture.
Cloud-Native and Microservices Architecture
Composable platforms are typically designed with a cloud-native architecture that utilizes microservices to build scalable, efficient, and resilient applications. Microservices divide large systems into discrete, autonomous services that manage particular functions and have their deployment cycles. Microservices also increase system resilience because the platform as a whole is not affected if one component fails.
Low-Code/No-Code Development
Combining low-code and no-code development options is one of the most notable aspects of composable systems. These platforms allow non-technical individuals, including business process professionals or citizen developers, to create, test, and implement applications with little to no coding experience. For their business function-specific use cases, users may easily create new features, modify workflows, and test new concepts using graphic interfaces and drag-and-drop tools.
Automation and Orchestration
Automation and orchestration are essential for optimizing business procedures, minimizing manual involvement in composable platforms, and freeing up valuable resources for more strategic endeavors. By integrating several workflows across diverse services and applications, orchestration ensures that they cooperate to meet organizational goals by handling monotonous operations like data recording and report creation.
Key Benefits of Composable Platforms for Business Agility
Accelerated Time-to-Market
Utilizing pre-built components and composable platforms allows organizations to quickly create and implement solutions, cutting down on the time typically spent on custom development. With this strategy, companies can launch new products, services, or features very quickly. Organizations can avoid drawn-out development cycles and maintain their competitive edge by using reusable modular software components.
Enhanced Customization and Personalization
One of the core advantages of composable platforms is that they allow us to build solutions swiftly to unique business needs. Applications that represent specific business functions – customer service, accounting, procurement, etc., can be created by combining various components that cater to specific needs. Due to this adaptability, businesses can stay current and competitive and easily adjust to the business dynamics.
Cost Efficiency
By enabling companies to reuse pre-existing components and services instead of creating unique applications from the ground up, composable platforms significantly promote cost efficiency. This lowers long-term IT maintenance expenditures as well as original development costs. To reduce the need for expensive development work, a business may, for instance, incorporate pre-built modules for inventory management, customer service, or payment processing into its application ecosystem.
Scalability and Resilience
Composable platforms are excellent at scaling both vertically and horizontally to accommodate evolving needs and business expansions. Businesses can grow specific components like reporting dashboards, chat modules, and others, as needed, rather than completely redesigning the systems and handling the business process demands efficiently.
Improved Collaboration
Composable platforms foster a collaborative environment by enabling IT and business units to work together seamlessly. The modularity of composable applications empowers non-technical teams, such as marketing, sales, and customer success, to engage directly in the development process, making technical solutions align with business objectives in a broader fashion.
Use Cases and Applications of Composable Platforms
Here is how composable platforms are transforming various industries by offering flexibility, speed, and customization in building solutions:
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
With the help of composable platforms, companies can design highly customizable CRM systems that easily interface with a range of data sources, touchpoints, and third-party apps. A CRM, for instance, can be set up to integrate customer service, marketing, and sales features, giving users a customized and unified view of customer information, enabling personalized engagement and enhanced customer retention.
E-commerce and Order Management Systems
Composable platforms enable companies to swiftly modify their e-commerce channels to meet dynamic inventory management and personalized checkout experiences. Composable design, for instance, enables businesses to quickly modify prices or promotions in reaction to market or seasonal patterns, resulting in a more agile approach to e-commerce success.
Financial Services
In the financial services sector, composable platforms provide flexibility in building adaptive solutions for vital areas like payment processing, risk management, and regulatory compliance. For instance, modular banking applications allow banks to integrate AI-driven tools for credit scoring based on customer data, helping financial institutions sell instant loan products cautiously. Additionally, composable architectures enable micro-investing platforms to achieve faster rollouts of innovative financial products like bespoke insurance offerings and digital wallets.
Supply Chain Management
Composable platforms allow companies to quickly implement and modify supply chain management systems to optimize transportation, reduce inventory costs, and streamline vendor relations. As a most recent case, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses relied on modular systems to swiftly modify their supply chain workflows to improve their ability to respond to interruptions and shifting consumer needs.
Considerations for Adopting Composable Platforms
Adopting composable platforms requires careful planning and consideration across various business operations. Some include:
Strategic Alignment
To realize the true potential and better ROI out of composable platforms, businesses must assess the relevance and scope of these platforms in their broader business goals and digital transformation plan.
Integration with Existing Systems
Businesses must evaluate their current infrastructure to ensure modular solutions can integrate without interfering with ongoing business processes or necessitating expensive system redesigns. In certain scenarios, integrating composable platforms with legacy systems can be complex, where robust APIs and integration frameworks help bridge the gap seamlessly.
Security and Data Privacy
As composable platforms often involve multiple stakeholders who are likely less familiar with development, addressing security and data privacy is even more critical. Best practices like enforcing stringent access controls and utilizing encrypted communication systems must be followed to safeguard sensitive data and uphold regulatory compliance.
Vendor Selection and Ecosystem
Choosing the appropriate vendor for a modular platform is essential to ensure the platform satisfies scalability and business demands. Assessing the vendor’s API ecosystem, integration capabilities, innovation history, and support offerings is quintessential to providing the platform’s alignment with long-term strategic goals.
Governance and Quality Assurance
Effective governance mechanisms are required for a modular, composable platform to ensure consistent quality, security, and performance. Clearly defining procedures for handling numerous parts, suppliers, and integrations guarantees operational effectiveness and reduces uncalled platform complexity hazards.
Emerging Trends in Composable Platforms
As composable platforms continue to evolve, several emerging trends are reshaping how businesses develop and scale solutions. Some of the trends include:
Increased Adoption of Low-Code/No-Code Solutions
Low-code/no-code platforms are spurring creativity and reducing dependency on IT teams by enabling business users to quickly develop and modify modular applications. For the behest of agile and customized solutions, this trend significantly promotes collaboration between business and IT teams, speeding up the development cycles.
Artificial Intelligence and Automation
Composable systems progressively incorporate AI and automation to boost productivity, optimize workflows, and improve decision-making. With AI integrations, intelligent composable platforms have been on the rise, with relatively new opportunities like automated service discovery, advanced API orchestration, and much more.
Edge Computing and IoT Integration
Composable platforms are becoming more capable of handling real-time data processing use cases with edge computing and IoT integrations. For instance, warehouse automation can be made more streamlined and efficient with such integrations, where IoT sensors can provide composable tools with real-time updates on inventory availability so that respective inventory orders will be automated.
Composable Business Ecosystems
Businesses can now share modular services and work together on innovations thanks to the emergence of cross-organization composable ecosystems. With the presence of pooled resources and group creativity, businesses can scale and adapt more quickly in a dynamic and interconnected business environment.
We have seen how organizations can enhance agility, reduce time to market, and seamlessly adapt to shifting business demands with modular, scalable solutions. To effectively utilize such platforms, companies must assess their specific needs, choose the right vendors, and facilitate cross-functional enablement to drive innovation.
At SRM Tech, we’re committed to helping businesses navigate their business transformation and modernization with thoughtful technology, tools, and strategies. We ensure they unlock the full potential of their digital initiatives for sustained success!
