What is Composable Software?
Composable software is an approach to building system infrastructure through modules. By deploying a composable architecture, companies can repurpose existing code to streamline toolsets with agility. Composable software components can be swapped easily when needed. This allows code to be written once and reused across multiple instances by breaking core applications into specialized microservices.
Microservices make applications easier to scale and faster to develop, which can help to improve innovation and speed up time-to-market. They typically communicate through APIs.
What is the Difference Between Composable Software and CDP Platform Software?
Composable systems are different from platform architectures because every component can be replaced. Unlike platform systems, no individual component is required for the entire system to function. In platform architecture, replaceable modules depend on a shared core system that cannot be moved.
CDPs and Composability
A customer data platform can be looked at as a composable module of the larger marketing technology (MarTech) stack. It is something that can be easily replaced with new software when needed.
Since CDPs are built from the ground up with built-in connectors or APIs, they can help companies make their technology stack easier to integrate and interconnect with other sources or systems in the tech stack.
A CDP makes it easier to collect and share data between different platforms, making it more practical for companies to use multiple best-of-breed MarTech platforms. This allows brands to reduce dependency on a single vendor when building an ideal tech stack.
What is a Composable CDP?
According to the CDP Institute, composable CDP meaning “refers to an architecture where customer profiles are built in a company’s enterprise data warehouse, rather than a separate CDP database. It implies that the tools used to develop and access the profiles are components provided by different vendors, all working directly against the data warehouse files. This contrasts with a conventional CDP, where a single vendor provides all the tools to build and access the profiles in the CDP database. Composable CDP advocates argue their approach avoids creating a new copy of customer data, leverages existing data warehouse resources, and gives the company greater control over its data. While most products to support a composable CDP are provided by vendors who specialize in a particular function, such as reverse ETL, some conventional CDP vendors have unbundled parts of their system to support a warehouse-based approach.
The composable approach is ultimately one method for building a CDP system rather than buying a conventional CDP package. Other options for building a CDP include building the tools internally or using a mix of built and bought tools. The actual advantage of creating a CDP depends mainly on the extent of changes required for the existing data warehouse to support CDP requirements. If many new capabilities are needed, it is often more effective to use a conventional CDP instead.”
Composable CDP, Integrated CDP, or Hybrid?
The idea of composable software is making waves in the customer data platform market. Today, while some companies are gravitating toward integrated, purpose-built platforms, including real-time identity resolution, activation, personalization, decisioning, and governance, without the operational headaches of a fragmented tech stack, the conversation around composable vs. packaged CDPs has created a false binary in the market. In fact, today, enterprises don’t necessarily need to choose between a complete build or a complete buy.
For many companies, a hybrid approach that delivers flexibility without the burden of custom engineering is going to be the right fit. Forward-looking companies may choose to deploy an innovative hybrid strategy that leans into the strengths of a packaged CDP, with composability layered in.
