By Janus Boye
Bart Omlo is Head of Sales at Conscia.ai
Mastering the digital transformation journey requires an updated tech stack, but as they like to say at Conscia.ai:
"Headless doesn't have to mean 'Brainless'"
In a recent member's call, we heard an update from Bart Omlo at Conscia.ai, a Toronto-based start-up focused on orchestrating personalised experiences in a composable stack.
Bart joined the fast growing tech start-up in May as the first European team member and has since then been deep in conversations about DXO (digital experience orchestration), DXC (digital experience composition) and orchestration.
For those of you who know Bart from his past decade of leading a large system integrator and later leading CMS vendors Kentico and Kontent.ai, you won't be surprised that Bart's focus remains the same: Helping customers on the digital journey while creating lasting value and competitive advantage.
As he said in the opening, IT departments are currently evaluating how to best update their tech stack and our conversation on what Bart has recently learned started with the term composable.
The future is composable
So what does composable really mean? Bart opened with a charming analogy of a field of beautiful flowers, which he said was inspired from his Swedish friends at Sitoo, a MACH-based point of sale system vendor. Quick refresher: MACH stands for Microservices, API-First, Cloud-Native SaaS, Headless.
As Bart said:
If you let people go into a field of flowers, everyone will pick different flowers and end up with a bouquet that fits their needs.
Similarly, companies are picking their flowers at the moment when they look for updating their tech stack. They want to end up with a bouquet of innovative software products that fits their needs.
In the past months, Bart has seen many clients go in this direction and at the same time, Bart is also seeing large vendors who are offering comprehensive suites, SAP and Salesforce were mentioned in the call, who are moving into this composable world of software which can be easily integrated.
To Bart, it’s not about making it into a game of who’s old hat, monolith or other less positive terms. It’s also not catering to those who have a MACH Alliance membership, it’s all about the composition of vendors that you pick as a customer. As he said, we all have a shared responsibility to make it work together.
To MACH or not to MACH
To illustrate this timely discussion, he shared a slide which also had the MACH 2023 certification stamp in the top right corner.
Back when Bart joined Conscia.ai, they weren’t a member yet, but in October they joined (read Conscia.ai Joins MACH Alliance as Certified Member). To them the Alliance is really important and also considered a stamp of approval.
We’ve followed the MACH Alliance from the beginning. Read more in our 2021 piece: What’s the MACH Alliance all about?
As Bart said, the Alliance champions software architectures that are purely MACH, but an important point to him is not to push clients into MACH-only architectures. Companies, in particular large ones, will not just go fully MACH overnight. They have an IT landscape with solutions that’s been fine-tuned over decades.
At Conscia they don’t advocate MACH only, even when it comes up in RFP’s, but rather they do their best to educate the market on what’s good architectures. It’s not one or the other, and for many clients that’s not a very relevant discussion. To Bart, it’s all about composable architecture.
Education, education, education
One more thing that Bart has reflected on in the past months, is the continued need to educate the marketplace. While today pretty much everyone knows what a CMS is, when you talk about DXO it gets more complicated. Conscia started in this niche back in 2019 and they are still doing a lot of market education.
Bart’s past couple of months has really been focused on education to make life simpler for the customers and it’s reminded him of the many explanatory conversations about a decade ago when headless CMS was introduced.
Recently, Bart has been spotting a tendency among IT departments to build their own integration. He’s seeing spaghetti-code style approaches, where performance is hurting and development work is quite high. The art of the trade at the moment, is to implement these solutions without creating too much burden on the front-end.
Looking at the other side of the table, Bart reminded us, that it’s a shared responsibility among the vendors to avoid creating too much confusion. To be blunt: DXO and DXC is whatever someone says it is. New terms keep being added, buzzwords are not always commonly understood and they carry different meanings. In addition, there’s the never-ending marketing twists used to differentiate the offerings. Making matters worse, or at least potentially more confusing, is the fact that many vendors are also busy adding features that solve other problems outside their usual market category.
Small steps towards the future
Entering a largely risk-averse marketplace with some emerging tech is never easy. Bart’s seeing that large enterprises are hesitant to do big bang approaches and it’s all about one step at a time. In his career, he has never prepared more proposals with proof-of-concepts than he has done in the recent months.
Like Bart said:
“If you are working at an established and widely known CMS vendor and trying to replace another CMS, that’s one thing. If you are the new kid on the block putting in orchestration in a composable architecture, that an entirely different challenge.”
The approach Bart takes is starting by solving a business case, almost no matter how small and then taking it step by step. The challenge remains that some products are not so easy to implement in small steps. Bart said that vendors need to keep finding good ways so that clients can start small.
In the Q&A that followed, Bart said that IT departments and leaders at the moment are asking for composable architectures and trying to take these small steps. Bart’s also experiencing an underlying drive from business units, e.g. marketing, who has digital experience requirements, like improved personalisation, and then they go to the IT department asking for a better way to meet these.
Orchestration democratized?
Right up there with composition is the term orchestration. In the past months, it seems everyone is talking about orchestration. To quote Bart:
The question remains: What is it really? What are we talking about? Is it content orchestration, data orchestration, API orchestration or something else entirely. And what might be the difference?
At Conscia they offer digital experience orchestration and they focus on accelerating time to market and future proofing the architecture. Below I’ve inserted a recent slide from Conscia that illustrates where they see DXO.
Bart is always careful to ensure that people on the business ‘get it’. What does DXO mean for the client and what’s the business value added?
Finally, why the question mark you might ask? Orchestration democratized? Bart added it because he isn’t sure if it is actually happening. Are we putting orchestration into the hands of everyone, or might it rather the marketing hitting the tipping point?
Learn more about DXO, DXC and orchestration
At the beginning of the year, I took a closer look at this emerging space. Bart called it a new category and also placed Occtoo from Sweden and Uniform in that space. Read more: What’s the real story about digital experience composition?
The conversation naturally continues at our upcoming conferences and peer group meetings. Conscia’s CEO and Founder Sana Remekie is a regular participant at our North American meetings and you can meet her at CMS Kickoff 24. Bart is a regular at our European CMS Expert group meetings.
Finally, you can also download the slides (PDF) or lean back and enjoy the recording from the call.