What is a Composable Enterprise and Why You Need It?

What is a Composable Enterprise and Why You Need It?

Before we explore Composable Enterprise, consider this scenario. Have you ever come across a situation where you realize your colleague is working on the same thing that you are? Perhaps, it is a quarterly revenue report if you are looking at the business’s health. And my friends in technology, you may be writing the exact piece of software that your fellow mate across the aisle may be spending time on. It happens all the time.

Given a developer writes about 100 lines of code a day, and roughly about 2.8 trillion lines of code have been written in the last 20 years, it is no surprise there is a lot of overlap in everything we do inside or outside the organization’s boundaries.

Now think of this. What if you can wrap capabilities that others in the organizations have already built and use them to solve a specific problem you are solving? What if everyone in the organization actively contributes to a registry of modules that others can access? What can this framework do to your productivity? How responsive will you be in solving complex challenges your organization faces?

What is Composable Enterprise?

Welcome to the world of Composable Enterprise—an architecture where you can take a modular approach to build loosely coupled application capabilities and bundle them to solve any new business need that arises. You can create new products and services, onboard customers or suppliers, and get to market faster by simply composing apps using your existing competencies.

The concept of reusing components to solve new challenges is not new. You may have learned to build Java applications in early years like me when many emphases were on writing modular objects and functions that we can reuse. However, we now live in a world where we have more purpose-built applications than ever before. There is an app for everything. However, the good news is, many of these apps offer APIs that are always on. Now, we can further decompose our tech stack into modular components that will give us greater flexibility and agility.

Things to Consider

Although a novel idea, building Composable Enterprise is not an easy task. Here are a few key factors to consider.

Services and modules you want to use come from different vendors, as well as the components built-in-house
Modularity may not have the exact, consistent definition across vendor solutions, which means you will face interoperability challenges
Lack of user-friendly, low-code integration tools that help you manage various components
If the individual components are not well-integrated, building integration and maintaining it may turn out to be a significant effort
To ensure success, you need strong integration and API orchestration skills in house

Composable Enterprise will provide significant benefits to companies of all sizes. It offers a more flexible architecture that allows them to move quickly to respond to changing business demands. This approach will also enable agility by enabling teams to work together and deploy individual components without impacting others. You will also be less beholden to single vendors and avoid the problems arising from extensive version upgrades for monolithic platforms. You can swap out capabilities when new vendors emerge, expand to new channels more quickly, and develop more innovative solutions. However, take caution with this as the adoption is at the very early stages.

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