The Future Composable Commerce: A Recommended Read

Scanning through LinkedIn the other day, I came across Mike Lowndes’ compelling post about his recent research at Gartner on the emergence and value of composable commerce. In his brief summary, Mike and his co-author, Sandy Shen, urge application leaders to prepare for a composable approach using packaged business capabilities (PCBs) to move toward future-proof digital commerce experiences. Quite simply: it’s the way of the future. The full research report, available to Gartner subscribers, makes excellent points; namely:

“We are already seeing a shift away from monolithic digital commerce application solutions toward modular platforms built from several discrete capabilities. This shift was fundamentally hindered by the full-stack approach. The decoupled nature of modern front ends has become an enabler for the acceleration of a composable application approach — as back-end capabilities can be developed and even launched independently of the front end. Organizations are embracing this approach to increase agility and flexibility, and so are vendors.”

I couldn’t agree more. His research continues with a description of cloud-native modular architecture that provides an incremental transition to modular capabilities and resulting "strangling" of the monolith. It's like I was reading our founding principals for viax.io.

This post, and the full report, shares with others what the researchers and the viax team have concluded—that the future of applications centers around an API-centric, composable approach, and PCBs, such as the one viax engineered. We intentionally set out to change things, to enable clients to completely customize the API at runtime, with zero downtime.

Kudos for this insightful research. If you haven’t checked it out, you’ll want to do so