What’s the real story about digital experience composition?

By Janus Boye

Janus Boye in action at the closing debate at the Boye Aarhus 22 conference. Photo: Ib Sørensen

You might have noticed that there’s a new buzzword in town: Digital Experience Composition, also known as DXC. Several niche vendors are getting together around the term, sharing their somewhat similar definitions and also their messaging on how DXC can help you solve your digital problems. Or actually, for some of them only your web problems. 

If you follow the wider digital experience industry or like me have worked with CMS for decades, and sometimes try to decipher vendor marketing, you might think that Digital Experience Composition (DXC) is the new big thing. Perhaps even the new trend after headless? 

In this post, I’ll share our take based on conversations in our peer groups and briefings with vendors, analysts, agencies and most importantly the customers. 

In brief:

  • Customers are not asking for DXC, but they do have a problem 

  • DXC is not a new software category and is unlikely to ever get its own analyst quadrant, wave or similar

  • There’s an experience challenge looking for better solutions. Kudos to the innovative vendors who are trailblazing to address a real pain which customers do have

Most of our members are on the customer side, so let’s start there.

Customers are not asking for digital experience composition

Not a single customer in any of our digital strategy groups, customer experience groups or even the CMS Expert groups, have brought up DXC and asked about it so far. I would go as far as saying that if you can find an industry analyst that receives customer requests about DXC, then you’ve found the needle in the haystack. I actually don’t think there’s a needle, but good luck searching. 

To be fair, perhaps it’s because customers don’t know what DXC means. More on that in the next chapter. And, smart customers know there is a problem with how experiences are built. I’ll also cover that later.

So where’s the attention? Digital commerce, CMS or WCM is where it is. The evergreen question that still gets asked, already a few times here in 2023 is: 

“Which CMS should I choose?”

or

“Which commerce platform is best for my needs?

After many years of analysts pushing digital experience platform (DXP) as a category, it was only last year, in 2022, that the large, complex and global organisations in larger numbers started asking for a DXP. As you might know from having followed DXP, vendors, customers and analysts still argue about what a DXP really is. Perhaps a DXP is really something you put together yourself and not something you buy, but that’s for another post.

Some customers are also asking about headless. How to take the first steps, what it takes to make it work and even “what’s the head for headless”. Finally, some are also asking about MACH and how that impacts their technology decisions, but we’re not seeing anyone but a few vendors talking about DXC. 

DXC is not a category

Despite what you might hear: There’s no such thing as a DXC category of vendors. 

Here’s some of the categories that industry analyst firm Gartner has that you might be thinking about:

  • Digital Commerce

  • Digital Experience Platforms

  • Web Content Management Software

Similarly, other analysts have their way of categorising the market and there’s not a single analyst firm, which has created a DXC category. It’s also quite unlikely that this will happen. Even if the customers start asking (see previous chapter). As far as I can tell, to Forrester this thing, the problem that these vendors are trying to solve, is a part of DXP.

Page builders, low code or no code application development is also adjacent to this and we might see something like DXC in those categories as well.

So what have analysts said so far when it comes to DXC? When Gartner released their Hype Cycle for Digital Commerce, 2022 by Sandy Shen in July, they did mention DXC and defined it like this:

“Digital experience composition (DXC) is a step toward complete composability, providing a packaged business capability (PBC) for composable experience.”

Also, in Gartner’s Innovation Insight for Digital Experience Composition also from July they opened by saying:

“Digital experience composition is an emerging market focused on digital multiexperience orchestration in an API-first “headless,” decoupled composable world”

Headless to the left versus orchestrating (DXC) to the right. Illustration provided via Conscia

As you can probably tell, without dwelling too much on how DXC is defined, a DXC requires many tools to come together. That’s another reason why it’s not getting its own magic quadrant or wave or similar in the future. Also, a pretty safe prediction is that many vendors in this emerging space are likely to get gobbled up via acquisition by other vendors in commerce or DXP.

There’s experience challenge is real

Alright, let’s move on to something that really interests us. Smart customers know that there is a problem today with how experiences are built and several vendors are building a software business around solving that.

As Bart Omlo, CEO at Kontent.ai asked at the CMS Kickoff 23 conference, there’s a paradigm shift needed in the industry. To quote from his session abstract:

“One of the reasons why many organisations are replatforming to hybrid and composable CMS’s is the fact that every update of their existing (legacy) CMS is complex and expensive“

The two big customer problems that seems to unite most of these vendors:

  • If a customer has implemented a headless CMS, it can make the marketing department quite unhappy, left with loss of control and trying to force IT either back to a monolith or to add extra tooling, which could be one of these vendors depending on the nature of the problem

  • There’s an established notion that implementing a big CMS or DXP takes a long time and as stated by Bart, is hard to update. Many of these vendors try to address that pain. 

Zooming out from tech and tools, Forrester addressed the adjacent challenge of making it seamless and uncomplicated for customers to do business with you when they introduced Experience Architecture a year ago.

So who are the vendors trying to solve these problems?

Notable vendors working on digital experience composition

Let’s start at those focused squarely on this:

Uniform is a software vendor that we’ve followed closely. They have what they label a DXC Platform and they’ve been going through an impressive startup journey with a very experienced team. We see them innovating at the future of digital experiences. Here’s just two of the pain points that Uniform addresses phrased as a question and freshly copied from their website: 

  • Are developers stuck with outdated tech and custom code to maintain? 

  • Do marketers’ best ideas get stuck in the dev backlog?

Another vendor that’s iterating around trying to find a better solution for the customer problems is Toronto-based Conscia. They call themselves the brain of the composable stack. As CEO Sana Remekie said in a recent briefing:

“Conscia empowers marketers to control who should see what content in what context on what channel. We are completely agnostic of the front-end framework you choose to render the experience and offer a single API endpoint that any frontend (web or otherwise) can call to inform the experience.”

Stackbit is another interesting vendor. A visual authoring interface above all else, providing an intuitive way for marketers, and content operators to create experiences regardless if there are many headless sources under the hood. As an authoring tool, they push changes back to the source. Perhaps Stackbit is a marketing friendly alternative to your headless CMS. Perhaps that’s DXC, perhaps that’s really a visual experience platform? Quoting from the current DXC definition on the Stackbit site:

“Features of a DXC can include a no-code page builder experience, low-code front-end components and libraries, a template engine, and API integrations to underlying content and data providers, all in service of the development and maintenance of digital experiences.”

Without even trying to create a comprehensive list of innovative vendors with some modern approach to improving digital experience, there’s also Berlin-based Ninetailed, which recently raised €5m to “Build the Data-Driven Experience Layer of Composable Architecture”. Sounds like DXC to you? Simply put, Ninetailed is more focused on personalisation, but instant intelligent experiences is also a real problem, in particular when it comes to commerce sites. 

Among the larger vendors working with digital experiences, you’ll find DXC-like functionality in the solutions from vendors like Bloomreach, Enonic and Magnolia. If you consider the entire universe of composable vendors as elements of DXC, then a headless CMS is an important piece needed to compose experiences. For more on that, including notable headless CMS vendors, do read our recent post on Headless CMS in 2023.

Learn more about DXC

You can read more in these related posts:

Why not continue the conversation? Join us in person at the CMS Kickoff 24 conference in St. Pete, Florida on January 16 - 17. We’ll certainly talk about DXC and other market trends and the conversation continues in our peer groups in Europe and North America, in particular in the CMS Experts community.