Your key to innovating, experimenting, and optimizing digital initiatives

It is no surprise that brands and retailers need to tap into the growing consumer demands coming from the digitally savvy generation of today. To do this, it is essential that they ship more digital initiatives faster to stay relevant with the audience and capture their ever-fleeting attention. The problem usually boils down to the delivery of those digital projects: too much time and money are wasted on integrations rather than on activities that improve the end customer experience. This slows everyone down, but it doesn't have to!

What is Composable Architecture?

MACH is a composable approach to your tech stack, allowing you to combine best-of-breed solutions. Jumping into a future tech state with a MACH approach (Microservices, API-first, Cloud, Headless), you eliminate the risk of ending up with a big black box (aka a Monolith). With such a black box or a hurdle, all kinds of ideation get stopped because, with every new idea or innovation, everything must be rebuilt from the ground up. Although, over the past few years, we have witnessed a seismic shift in modern web architecture. Headless services and platforms such as content management systems (CMSs), e-commerce platforms, customer relationship management systems (CRMs), and other solutions are now being built to be integrated with each other so launching and scaling digital initiatives does not become a mammoth task involving high budgets and lengthy timelines. This new state of supporting headless development is called a Composable approach: because it is composed of individual systems exposing their data through APIs, which makes the development of such applications faster and easier. In other words, vendors offer the best parts of their systems and allow you to put them together as per your needs to build your own digital initiatives.

What does adopting a low-code MACH approach mean?

MACH is an acronym for a technology that is Microservices based, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS, and Headless. MACH supports a composable enterprise architecture in which every component is pluggable, scalable, replaceable, and can be continuously improved through agile development to meet evolving business requirements. This new, composable structure means that back-end developers and individual system suppliers can focus on making their data available through APIs, which until now has been very tech/developer-heavy and has been available only to very tech-savvy organizations. This approach is now moving into a groundbreaking low-code state, making it available to less technically mature organizations.  

Occtoo is an Experience Data Platform (XDP) that takes MACH/Composable into a low code state, being able to be operated by business-oriented digital teams. An Experience Data Platform (XDP) unifies data and content assets from CRM, PIM, DAM, ERP, and other backend systems with behavioral and contextual data from digital destinations into a no-code studio. This data is instantly available for digital teams to connect and combine as they wish into new real-time APIs without any coding skills: meaning they can build new digital experiences for any channel at lightning speed and lower cost. This reduces risk significantly because the scope of your digital projects becomes more predictable, and you can test and try new concepts without it costing a fortune.

How do composable technologies work together?

Composable Architecture allows you to get rid of any complex integration issues and vendor lock-ins by using APIs and other flexible tooling that enable you to scale your entire development stack more easily. In other words, flexibility and efficiency are direct outputs to expect when you go composable. Occtoo is a key component in a MACH architecture, being the unifying place for your data but, more importantly, the one interface to fuel data in real-time to your frontends, creating relevant experiences in no time. All data from Occtoo Studio can be fully operated by digital teams themselves without the need to execute tons of integrations. For instance, Axel Arigato, a leading retail apparel brand, had the ambition to move to Composable and fuel data to the Brink Commerce platform. They needed to unlock data from their PIM system, their ERP, and their CMS and deliver all relevant data to Brink Commerce - their E-commerce platform. Occtoo's Experience Data Platform was used to access and unify this data, and a unique API was created to deliver all the data that the Brink Commerce platform required. With all data now connected in Occtoo's platform and fueled into Brink Commerce's E-commerce platform, Axel Arigato can launch future digital experiences easier and faster than ever before!

If you want to discuss Composable and MACH, get in touch with Jimmy.

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