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Monolithic, headless, MACH, composable, oh my! The past couple of years have seen a resurgence of spending by brands in digital-experience technologies. From the impact of COVID to the uncertainty in markets, brands have been seeking to raise the value of their digital properties, specifically in agility, flexibility, and performance, and overcome the slow time to market caused by the brands’ existing technologies. Plus, brands must pay attention to retaining customers rather than just acquiring them.Many are the approaches that take advantage of new technologies. This article unpacks the options and their relative strengths and weaknesses in building the foundation on which you can scale or unchain your brand. As a start, the following are the key terms that apply to digital-experience architectures:<ul><li>Monolithic, which refers to single-vendor-based architectures, whereby the vendor is often a closed system with a single product that contains many specific components, that are glued together so that they are inseparable. <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/composable-architecture/composable-architectures-are-the-future-of-the-digital-sphere">Monoliths</a> frequently dictate certain paradigms for coding the front end.</li><li>Headless, which applies to decoupled architectures, where presentation (the head) is separate from the underlying (headless) business logic technologies.</li><li>MACH, which stands for Microservices, APIs, Cloud, and Headless. Notably, products built the MACH way can meet brand requirements for performance, scalability, flexibility, etc. However, despite the vendors’ headless capabilities, not all vendors are MACH certified. </li><li>Composable, which means that your digital-experience stack comprises various <a href="https://www.elasticpath.com/blog/what-are-packaged-business-capablities">packaged business capabilities (PBCs)</a>, each of which featuring one or more technologies and which you can add or replace without fundamentally changing the architecture. In a <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/composable-architecture/composable-platforms-what-why-how">composable architecture</a>, all the systems are decoupled. The more decoupled they are, the more flexibility for switching functionality or updating designs.</li></ul>Headless and MACH, though often cited as composable, represent different concepts, as follows:<ul><li>How composable a technology is refers to how pluggable or swappable its elements are and who can plug or swap them.</li><li>How MACH ready a technology is refers to how oriented it is vis-à-vis APIs and microservices and how mature it is in terms of MACH standards. </li></ul>Based on the above axis, we’ve generated a matrix and the diagram below that illustrates the approaches:The four choices are—<ul><li>Legacy monolith: low composability and low MACH maturity</li><li>Suite technologies: high composability and low MACH maturity</li><li>Composed MACH monolith: low composability and high MACH maturity</li><li>Composable MACH: high composability and high MACH maturity</li></ul><h2>Legacy monolith</h2>The vendors that offer a legacy monolith have been around for a while, perennial leaders in categories like digital experience platforms (DXPs), <a href="https://uniform.dev/cms/what-is-a-cms">content management systems (CMSes)</a>, commerce, and digital asset management (DAM), having started before cloud and SaaS technology became standard practice.  Those vendors have large installed bases. Since they might already have paid a premium for the technologies, the existing customers usually stay around for a few years. For other customers, it’s simply too hard to change short-term because it took years to install those systems with tentacles all over the place. 

Also, those vendors have large, loyal agency partners and systems integrators that have built their own service offerings on top of the vendor&#39;s products, given that the partners have abundant resources that are trained on the technologies required for deployment and adoption. That’s a common problem for less mature buyers, however: As amazing as the vendor presentations and demos might look, in reality, the architecture has long been outdated. Obviously, smart brands would avoid those aging platforms at all costs. <h3>Typical customers</h3>Organizations that are on fully-paid, perpetual licenses whose costs would increase significantly if they were to replatform, and organizations whose current implementation imposes few or no limitations.<h3>Pros</h3>The software has been in place for so long that organizations are no longer paying license fees, only maintenance costs.<h3>Cons</h3><ul><li>Inflexibility, involving extra costs when acquiring capabilities not offered by the vendor or when the capabilities offered cannot meet your requirements.</li><li>Vendor lock-in, i.e., a platform-based stack that often needs <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/composable-architecture/switching-vendors-for-digital-architectures-without-replatforming">replatforming</a> for modernization every four to five years.</li><li>Limited access to resources for implementing solutions based on the vendor’s proprietary technology.</li></ul><h2>Suite technologies</h2>Suite vendors have often built or purchased various products and integrated them themselves. Even though those vendors have long been around, they have added modern capabilities to their core platform since losing deals to upstart competitors, such as headless vendors. These additions include SDKs for modern JavaScript frameworks (e.g., Next.js), headless capabilities, and easy integration with their technology ecosystem. Suite vendors tend to shy away from integrating outside their suite. Since their platforms are typically not fully SaaS, suite vendors are not MACH certified and are routinely sold as a cloud, with the vendor handling updates for customers and provisioning access to systems, etc. Even though suite vendors brand themselves as composable, e.g., composable DXP, they are not composable because you lose capabilities in the suite if you replace any preintegrated products.<h3>Typical customers</h3>Less digitally mature organizations without strong in-house engineering and architecture expertise.<h3>Pros</h3><ul><li>A one-vendor contract, i.e., you buy the capabilities for your stack from a single vendor.</li><li>A preintegrated system with adjacent capabilities.</li><li>A broad ecosystem of system integrators.</li></ul><h3>Cons</h3><ul><li>Inflexibility, involving extra costs when acquiring capabilities not offered by the vendor or when the capabilities offered cannot meet your requirements.</li><li>Vendor lock-in, i.e., a platform-based stack that often needs <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/composable-architecture/switching-vendors-for-digital-architectures-without-replatforming">replatforming</a> for modernization every four to five years.</li><li>Limited access to resources for implementing solutions based on the vendor’s proprietary technology.</li></ul><h2>Composed MACH monolith</h2>The composed <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/composable-architecture/the-mach-monolith">MACH monolith</a> leverages MACH-certified technologies for CMS, commerce, DAM, etc., and then builds code for manual integration between the systems that offer the user experience, e.g., MACH technologies and their front end of choice—open architecture, API first, flexible business logic.The projects typically start with one or two connected systems, which can become complex to manage and maintain once the number of integrations exceeds five and the number of connection points, 20. The architecture is more composed—e.g., gluing the selected technologies together—than composable, which is easier to adapt on the go. This example can also be an agency-created accelerator.Also, since composed architectures are often developer led, only developers can update them. Consequently, those architectures tend to focus on engineering interfaces with little need for business user UX.<h3>Typical customers</h3>Organizations that emphasize custom development and that traditionally lean toward build versus buy.<h3>Pros</h3><ul><li>Learning how to use the composed MACH monolith is easy and fast given the small number of systems.</li><li>The front end being based on modern standards leads to a larger pool of developers.</li><li>Vendors might provide prebuilt connectors to other systems or support interoperability to an extent.</li></ul><h3>Cons</h3><ul><li>You must manage multiple vendor contracts.</li><li>Significant maintenance is required over time in addition to a risk of being locked into the developer backlog for even trivial business-user tasks.</li><li>The dependency of maintenance on either the agency—thus creating a middle layer, or on the engineering team, which, over time, might balk at those mundane chores—is undesirable.</li><li>Glue code turns into tech debt, requiring constant maintenance and refactoring that slows development velocity over time. </li></ul><h2>Composable MACH</h2>The composable MACH architecture reaps the full benefits of composable, e.g., flexibility in connecting technologies to the stack and readiness in adapting to future needs, such as new front-end frameworks, new channels, and new markets.Organizations with a composable MACH architecture aim for the highest level of flexibility, optimized for the fastest time to market, and for a great UX for the teams that manage digital experiences. With a passion for maximum speed to market and time to value and learn, those organizations can iterate faster and faster. <h3>Typical customers</h3>Ambitious and mature organizations that prioritize fast time-to-market and that clamor for the ability to quickly adapt to changing business needs—while recognizing that the task of building digital experiences is shared equally between business and technical teams. <h3>Pros</h3><ul><li>A future fit as architectures become more value driven and adaptable to changes of their components on short notice.</li><li>High speed and simplicity in deploying only a few systems.</li><li>A focus on the requirements and workflows of both developers and business users with the recognition that those two teams play a crucial yet different role.</li></ul><h3>Cons</h3><ul><li>Multiple vendor contracts.</li><li>A requirement for seasoned architects, either in-house or through agencies.</li><li>The likelihood of process change to ensure that marketers and developers work seamlessly together.</li></ul>Based on the above four architectures, the diagram below highlights which solutions organizations should adopt as their architecture.<ul><li>Legacy DXPs, most of which, having been around for 10-12 years, are closed and monolithic.</li><li>Composable DXPs, which are often legacy DXPs with added modern capabilities and branded as composable DXPs. Integrating tools that compete with the preintegrated ones might result in loss of significant functionality.</li><li>Bespoke accelerators (e.g., agency accelerators), developed either in-house or at the agency. They seek to speed up adoption of MACH products, which are often integrated through glue code that’s custom-built by integrators and agencies, not through configuration. </li><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/what-is-digital-experience-composition">Digital experience composition</a>, a new category of products that build the basis for managing composable experiences at scale, integrating MACH tools through configuration with a no-code or low-code approach to preserve the benefits of composability beyond the initial implementation.</li></ul><h2>Next steps</h2>Choosing the right digital-experience architecture is crucial for gaining agility, flexibility, and high performance for your digital properties. By understanding the key concepts and differences among the monolithic, headless, MACH, and composable options, you can make an informed decision that aligns with your business goals and needs.If you&#39;re still unsure which architecture best suits you, <a href="https://uniform.dev/demo">book a free demo</a> with us to learn how a digital experience composition platform (DXCP) can help you realize the true promise of composable.

Which digital experience architecture is right for your business?

As a market leader of solutions and services for radio and satellite communications for both sea and land, Denmark-based <a href="https://cobham-satcom.com/">Cobham Satcom</a> provides mission-critical connectivity to service providers, enterprises, and governments. Cobham Satcom also continually explores technologies, partnerships, and spaces, designing and manufacturing performant radio and communication terminals, gateways, and systems.To engage with potential customers across industries and develop new qualified leads worldwide, Cobham Satcom needs a strong and compelling online presence. “Our customers are digitally savvy, and they expect to find on our website in-depth information about our company and products: who we are, what we offer, what we’ve done before, and what’s new,” says Patricia Kunth, global digital marketing manager at Cobham Satcom.

Until recently, however, Cobham Satcom fell short in meeting those expectations. What was required was a refresh of the technology stack to accelerate content creation and a more flexible and agile website that could discover potential leads faster while serving as a catalyst for internal workflows.<blockquote>Check out the full case study <a href="https://res.cloudinary.com/uniformdev/image/upload/v1662386798/marketing/partner_marketing/case_study/CaseStudy_CobhamSatcom.pdf">here</a>.</blockquote><h2>Uniform as a new foundation</h2>At the outset, the Cobham Satcom team decided to build and go live with a new website quickly and then incrementally upgrade and optimize it as they learn more about their customers. As a first step, the Cobham Satcom team engaged <a href="https://kruso.dk/">Kruso</a>, a technical consulting agency that selected and assembled the components for the new site. Kruso integrated those components with Uniform—the foundation for building a composable digital-experience platform. “Uniform enables us to get up and running quickly,” says Kunth. “It’s as easy and fast as drag-and-drop. Also, we’re marketing people. Not having to delve deep into technical issues saves us time to focus on customers and offerings.” By virtue of Uniform’s versatility, the Cobham Satcom team deployed <a href="https://strp.cc/3CLrNOr">Strapi</a> as a headless content management system (CMS), integrated Microsoft Dynamics 365 for lead generation, and the Segment customer data platform (CDP) for tracking and segmentation of customer data. That new stack gave Cobham Satcom an agile, adaptive Jamstack architecture with fast delivery and high performance. Also, the team can personalize webpages based on user information from Segment and perform A/B testing to continue enhancing the engagement process with site visitors.<h2>Major benefits of adopting Uniform </h2>Uniform offers five major benefits for the swift transition of Cobham Satcom site to one built with a composable architecture. <ul><li>Fast deployment 
Deploying a new site quickly—in only four weeks—has enabled Cobham Satcom to stay ahead of the competition by continually customizing the experience to accommodate customer demands. An example is an online newsroom, whose components were integrated through Uniform.</li><li>Agility for evolving business and customer needs
As a result of the new experience stack and technology enhancements made possible by Uniform, the Cobham Satcom marketing team can update the website much faster, sometimes in only a few hours instead of weeks as required by the old way of customizing pages. Ultimately, the company can adeptly strengthen its business through redefined offers.</li><li>Transformation of the digital marketing team into an internal agency
Renovating Cobham Satcom’s digital experience has resulted in the digital marketing team acting as a first-call internal agency that stakeholders can call on and collaborate with as a driving force for key projects. Impressively, that team is also partnering with other companies to develop mixed digital initiatives. </li><li>Collaboration with agile, proactive vendors
Uniform provides responsive and support, proactively taking the initiative in solving problems. </li><li>Preparation for a change-filled future
The Uniform-based digital experience stack translates to confidence in the digital marketing team to get ready for changes ahead. With digital moving fast, flexibility is a must for instant adaptation. The effectiveness and support from Uniform inspires trust, assuring Cobham Satcom that Uniform is there to help the company grow and move forward.</li></ul><h2>The stats that tell the story</h2>It took Cobham Satcom only four weeks to deploy its new website, and a little over three weeks to build and deliver new features. Since the site went live, Cobham Satcom has seen a 150 percent increase in qualified leads—a magnificent jump by any measure. Check out our most recent <a href="https://res.cloudinary.com/uniformdev/image/upload/v1662386798/marketing/partner_marketing/case_study/CaseStudy_CobhamSatcom.pdf">case study.</a>[![Cobham satcom case study](https://res.cloudinary.com/uniformdev/image/upload/w_400,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto/marketing/partner_marketing/case_study/CaseStudy_CobhamSatcom.png)](https://res.cloudinary.com/uniformdev/image/upload/v1662386798/marketing/partner_marketing/case_study/CaseStudy_CobhamSatcom.pdf)

Cobham Satcom harvests new leads with Uniform DXCP

Nearly seven in 10 consumers worldwide <a href="https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1239068/sales-channels-travel-tourism-worldwide">book their travel online</a>, flocking to various online travel agencies (OTAs) for bookings, reviews, and to research trips, and to hospitality brands for leisure experiences and packages. For leading destination brands that serve these travelers, delivering advanced content doesn’t require switching to a brand-new content delivery network (CDN). There’s another way. Pages on travel and leisure sites of all kinds receive extremely high web traffic and require smooth sailing online, providing accurate pricing in real time, highly personalized content for visitors, and fast load times. These travel providers need a reliable platform and the ability to leverage modern features.To do both, and ensure personalized web performance, OTAs and hospitality brands still operating from a monolithic platform like Sitecore can <a href="https://docs.uniform.dev/sitecore/?_gl=1*1vcdtop*_ga*OTkwMzcwNTU3LjE2NzM5NzMzMTU.*_ga_0ZPMWSNFET*MTY3Njk3Nzc0Ny4zNC4wLjE2NzY5Nzc3NDguNTkuMC4w">integrate Uniform while maintaining their Sitecore investment</a> to generate static pages that deliver a smoother digital experience.In a recent episode of Unpack the Stack, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/timbenniks/">Tim Benniks</a> of Uniform and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/tjuranek/">Tomasz &quot;Tomek&quot; Juranek</a>, CTO of <a href="https://includeagency.com/">Include Agency</a>, which specializes in Sitecore web development, elaborated on how a leading, premium hospitality brand on Sitecore integrated with Uniform and immediately reaped gains in personalization, reliability, and speed. That gratifying win was accomplished by maximizing the value from the hospitality brand’s tools into <a href="https://www.akamai.com/">Akamai</a> and Sitecore without IT having to switch to a different CDN.<h2>Mandatory personalization for OTAs</h2>Travel sites rely on personalization to assist visitors with recommendations, but they also perform additional personalized tasks that are pivotal to a great experience, such as converting pricing to the appropriate currency based on a visitor’s location or saving a visitor’s place online when they leave the shopping journey.It’s very common for visitors to begin researching a trip on a site, leave, and return later. When this happens, that site needs to keep the shopping journey intact as well as recommend previously viewed trips or flights still in consideration. All of this adds up to a lot of personalization for a platform to deliver.Happily, the hospitality and leisure brand working with Tomek and Include Agency saw incredible improvement in the performance of its personalization features after implementing <a href="https://docs.uniform.dev/sitecore/introduction">Uniform for Sitecore</a>.Tomek shared an example of site personalization and how the hospitality site overcame an issue navigating between different currencies, caused by the static generation of the site. The team solved it by moving the API calls to get currency from the server side to the client side, making it compatible with static generation. Without that compatibility, pages were often stuck on prices that were actually two or three days old.Uniform addresses this issue because it is able to translate the personalization rules that a brand inputs into Sitecore and then executes the personalization running at the CDN level with the same speed and scale characteristics as static content. Tomek said it took four milliseconds for each personalization to appear on a page though the Uniform for Sitecore implementation. That meant that a visitor saw no difference in performance between pages that were personalized and those that had no personalization.<h2>No more outages: performance at peak times</h2>Another benefit of the switch came in the form of managing high-volume campaigns. Tomek said if the marketing team, for example, ran a TikTok campaign that increased traffic, the Uniform implementation helped keep things running smoothly to avoid web crashes.The site’s infrastructure didn’t need to be scaled up to manage these high-volume campaigns, it could run as normal without impacting the customer experience. Uniform for Sitecore also adds additional security to the site, since the personalization and custom logic is running at the edge, closer to the end user.Tomek also saw improvement in, “time to first byte,” seeing a large improvement in page render speed. Previously, it could be half a second, and sometimes as long as one or two seconds, but now it’s running at 50 to 150 milliseconds.<h2>Resolution of the basics and a focus on performance</h2>Overall, implementing <a href="https://docs.uniform.dev/sitecore/?_gl=1*eyrjoq*_ga*OTkwMzcwNTU3LjE2NzM5NzMzMTU.*_ga_0ZPMWSNFET*MTY3Njk5ODEwNS4zNS4xLjE2NzY5OTgxMDYuNTkuMC4w">Uniform for Sitecore</a> enables brands like this OTA to manage large-scale traffic and address needs that weren’t considered when Sitecore first launched. By implementing Uniform, brands can keep the custom logic and processes in place that they already built up with Sitecore. For example, it’s understandable that a major brand may not want to rip and replace a platform and retrain hundreds of content editors. Where Uniform can step in is by solving some basic necessities like page load times, reducing outages, and powering personalization. Going even further, Uniform helps improve scalability and improve security by offloading the traffic from web servers to an enterprise CDN.In the end, as Tomek agreed, companies are saving money in hosting costs, their servers don’t get overtaxed, and their teams can have more headspace to focus on performance and innovation.He summarized by saying that a brand interested in moving to a Uniform integration with Sitecore might be hesitant because of the complex custom logic already built into the Sitecore solution, the challenges around scale, and performing in multiple languages and in multiple markets.However, it’s good to remember that when integrating Uniform, not everything needs to be moved or managed at once, Tomek said, adding, “Just do it.”<h2>Beyond the travel industry with Uniform for Sitecore</h2>The mission of Uniform for Sitecore is to help Sitecore customers meet modern web needs, and we have information on <a href="https://docs.uniform.dev/sitecore/capabilities">capabilities</a>, <a href="https://docs.uniform.dev/sitecore/downloads">how to download</a>, and running <a href="https://docs.uniform.dev/sitecore/whats-new/docs">documentation updates</a>.If you want to bring modern capabilities and performance to your Sitecore experiences, you should reach out to us for <a href="https://uniform.dev/contact">a free demo</a> today. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XSG-apDT6c">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XSG-apDT6c</a>

How a premium hospitality brand saw immediate results implementing Uniform for Sitecore

In recent years, a new model called <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/composable-architecture/composable-platforms-what-why-how">composable architectures</a> has emerged for building digital experiences, with headless, API-first services like CMS, commerce, or DAM, which developers then connect together to spur digital experiences. Developers or technical teams that have <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/composable-architecture/switching-vendors-for-digital-architectures-without-replatforming">replatformed</a> your martech stack might well be familiar with such a model. By eliminating the need to buy a suite of unnecessary software, composable architectures are much more flexible and efficient, offering developers many advantages. For marketers and business users, however, the benefits come with a steep price. It now suddenly requires several tools to perform tasks that used to be easy, and even publishing simple pages or making basic changes would require support from developers, slowing down both teams. As a result, the company is on the back foot, unable to respond to market conditions, technological innovations, or changes in customer behavior as quickly as rivals.To become mainstream, composable architectures must empower business teams to work independently and maintain control over digital experiences while retaining (or even improving) the technical and cost benefits for developers. Tools that address those dual challenges of usability and integration have started to emerge, notably a new category that has been coined by Gartner: <a href="https://uniform.dev/what-is-digital-experience-composition">digital experience composition.</a>[![DXC ebook Banner Image](https://res.cloudinary.com/uniformdev/image/upload/w_700,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto,dpr_2.0/marketing/blog/DXC_Ebook_Blogbanner.png)](https://uniform.dev/resources/unlock-composability-with-dxc)<h2>Making composable productive for business users </h2>Composable architectures comprise different best-of-need products that serve a single purpose. Business-class websites and apps cannot run on content alone so, in addition to a <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/headless-cms/uniform-for-headless-cms">headless CMS</a>, composable services like <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/composable-architecture/uniform-for-headless-commerce">commerce</a> for product information, shopping-cart features, and DAM for video and images are also required. Of course, those services must work together, but they all come from different vendors and don’t connect automatically out of the box. For marketers, this scenario creates issues around productivity and control. Given the technical complexity, they might not know which composable service holds what data or might need to log in to multiple tools to make edits. Launching a page often means submitting an IT ticket and waiting.Since a digital experience composition platform (DXCP) makes it easy for composable services to work together, businesses can build an experience layer through which marketers, merchandisers, and other business users can create digital experiences with no-code tools without worrying about how the composable services in the back end are connected. All that translates to significant time savings for marketing teams as they launch engaging experiences, and for developers, too, who would save the hundreds of hours of coding it can take to manually integrate services while setting up a new martech stack.To show how DXCP affects your day-to-day work, consider the process of building a Product Detail Page. You need information from the commerce platform to add a product carousel, detailed product images from a DAM, and links to articles in the CMS to show potential customers how to use the product. In a traditional composable model, you’d need to work in at least three different systems and retain the context throughout. To change any formatting, you must submit an IT ticket and wait. In contrast, DXCP gives you a clear outline of the page with slots into which to place the content and control of the front-end components. That means marketers can quickly bring in what they need to build a seamless experience by assembling prebuilt components and then deliver it to the appropriate channels.As Gartner explains, digital experience composition is “emerging to handle digital multiexperience orchestration in a ‘headless,’ decoupled, composable world,” adding that “these tools allow developers to set up digital experiences and hand them to business users for day-to-day management in no-code environments.” <h2>Building experiences is different from building pages</h2>Page builders are tools with which small teams create well-crafted, one-off pages by simply dragging and dropping components and quickly changing the visual style. Those tools are suited for minor use cases with simple designs, whose elements and layout you can create easily. In contrast, experience builders like Uniform cover a much wider scope: pages, apps, and omnichannel experiences. Uniform manages content at scale, enabling reuse of aggregated content, publication to multiple channels, and smooth team collaboration with a UI that focuses on findability and reuse. Below are Uniform’s major tasks.<ul><li>Orchestrate composable tools.</li><li>Personalize digital experiences.</li><li>Enable advanced API connections.</li><li>Create omnichannel experiences.</li><li>Enhance content through automation.</li><li>Perform A/B testing to raise conversion rates.</li></ul><h2>DXCP makes it easy for marketers to build composable experiences </h2>In recent years, companies have been increasingly transitioning to composable solutions based on headless CMS and other API-first services. And for good reason: higher performance, lower costs, cutting-edge capabilities, and, most important, an ability to pick and choose the right tools for the business’s unique needs.However, for many companies implementing composable for the first time, those benefits have become broken promises as the marketing team finds itself losing control over its most important assets. For composable architectures to work for most businesses, marketers must be able to launch and build cutting-edge digital experiences fast, as well as focus on creation and iteration, while developers own the back-end infrastructure.Uniform DXCP does just that with a powerful no-code experience builder for omnichannel experiences and high-performance, edge-based personalization for a captivating CX, more conversions, and higher SEO ranking. If you’re looking to take control of your stack and empower marketing teams, <a href="https://uniform.dev/demo">contact us </a>for a demo. <h2>More about digital experience composition</h2><ul><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/what-is-digital-experience-composition">What is digital experience composition?</a></li><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/digital-experience-composition-dxc/explaining-dxc-and-its-benefits-to-marketers">What is digital experience composition and why should marketers care?</a></li><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/digital-experience-composition-dxc/from-dxp-to-headless-to-composable-to-dxc">Why digital experience composition is the future</a></li><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/digital-experience-composition-dxc/why-the-rush-to-composable-is-not-paying-off-for-marketers">Why the rush to composable is not paying off for marketers</a></li><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/digital-experience-composition-dxc/tame-the-martech-chaos-with-dxc-and-mach">Tame the martech chaos with digital experience composition and MACH</a></li><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/digital-experience-composition-dxc/orchestrating-composable-systems-harmonizes-team-workflows">Bring harmony to digital teams by orchestrating composable systems</a></li><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/digital-experience-composition-dxc/are-digital-experience-solutions-truly-composable-or-just-composed">Are digital experience solutions truly composable or just composed?</a></li><li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/demystifying-digital-experience-composition-lars-birkholm-petersen/">Demystifying digital experience composition</a></li></ul>

What is digital experience composition and why should marketers care?

Sitecore has announced a new product called XM Cloud, a web content management system (CMS) that offers the best of the two primary CMS architectures: a headless CMS’s front-end flexibility and the monolithic CMS’s capabilities for authoring content and experience. Sitecore is changing its focus to composable, and the availability of XM Cloud benefits customers who are interested in the new direction.<h2>The background behind the switch from monolithic to composable</h2>Sitecore believes that the future of digital-experience management is <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/composable-architecture/composable-platforms-what-why-how">composable</a>. That means that brands can select the products they prefer from the vendors of their choice, and that those products can work together to support the entire production lifecycle of digital experience. Since Sitecore offers most of the products brands typically need for that lifecycle, brands can rely on Sitecore as their only vendor.However, a composable approach varies from the monolithic approach on which Sitecore XM and XP are based. With the monolith, all those features are a part of Sitecore itself, and you cannot separate, remove, or update them without replacing the entire system. Given today’s requirements for digital experiences, the monolithic’s disadvantages greatly outweigh its advantages. Not surprisingly, therefore, companies like Sitecore, whose flagship product is a monolith, are embracing the composable approach.<h2>The challenges of switching to Sitecore XM Cloud</h2>Brands are well aware of the differences between the composable and the monolithic approach. Vastly different are the products, the pricing model, and the way in which sites are built, deployed, and delivered. By embracing Sitecore’s new direction, brands are in for major changes.If you are running Sitecore and would like to move to XM Cloud, be aware of the following:<ul><li>License. Sitecore XM Cloud is a new product so you must buy it. </li><li>Features. XM Cloud offers tracking, personalization, and testing capabilities through limited versions of <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/sitecore/edge-side-personalization-sitecore">Sitecore CDP and Sitecore Personalize</a>. These are included in the price of XM Cloud whether you need them or not. However, Sitecore CDP and Sitecore Personalize work very differently than traditional Sitecore, so any existing tracking, personalization, and testing must be recreated. </li><li>Caching. <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/headless-cms/uniform-for-headless-cms">Headless CMSes</a> typically include a caching layer for efficient content retrieval. XM Cloud, being built on traditional Sitecore, has no such layer. Instead, Sitecore offers Experience Edge to provide caching for XM Cloud. Like with Sitecore CDP and Sitecore Personalize, you pay for this functionality whether you need it or not.</li></ul>In addition are these technical nuances:<ul><li>Instead of simply moving your existing Sitecore sites to XM Cloud, you must rebuild them in XM Cloud, i.e., replatforming is a must. </li><li>Local development requires containers. If your IT and development teams are not familiar with them, those teams must learn how to use and support them.</li><li>XM Cloud’s delivery process varies from the traditional Sitecore workflow. If your sites are built with Sitecore Headless Services (JSS), the XM Cloud process will be familiar to you. Otherwise, it’s a steep learning curve to learn the new concepts and techniques.</li></ul><h2>The advantages of moving to a composable architecture with Uniform</h2><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/sitecore/raise-your-sitecore-sites-performance-with-uniform">Uniform</a> offers a much more convenient and efficient way for moving to a composable architecture. Specifically:<ul><li>With Uniform, your Sitecore implementation is already part of a composable architecture, hence no need to upgrade to the latest version of Sitecore. </li><li>Uniform accepts your Sitecore license, imposing no limitations on what products you use to build your front end, which hosting service you retain, and which CDN or cloud you deploy your sites to. </li><li>Since Uniform preserves Sitecore XP’s tracking and personalization features from Sitecore XP, your business users can, with Uniform, continue to manage personalization with Sitecore’s Rule Set Editor. Also, for optimal performance with scaling, Uniform applies personalization on your preferred CDN, including Akamai and Cloudflare. Sitecore Personalize, XM Cloud’s preferred solution for personalization, is a separate product from XM Cloud. In addition, Sitecore Personalize’s client-side approach could negatively affect site performance, resulting in a lower search-engine ranking and slower user experience. </li></ul>In conclusion, XM Cloud is definitely a step in the right direction for Sitecore because the benefits of composability can no longer be ignored. As much as XM Cloud offers the benefits of composability, however, customers with existing Sitecore sites have a load of tasks to tackle, including <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/composable-architecture/switching-vendors-for-digital-architectures-without-replatforming">replatforming</a>, for a switchover. <a href="https://uniform.dev/contact">Contact us</a> if composability is what you’re after. In particular, if you don’t want to wait or replatform, Uniform is the solution for you.<h2>References on Sitecore</h2><ul><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/sitecore/raise-your-sitecore-sites-performance-with-uniform">Overcoming Sitecore challenges with Uniform</a></li><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/sitecore/the-pros-and-cons-of-migrating-to-sitecore-xm-cloud">Is migrating to Sitecore XM Cloud worth considering?</a></li><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/sitecore/uniform-an-effective-fast-and-flexible-approach-for-composable">Uniform spells versatility, flexibility, and low cost for composable</a></li><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/sitecore/life-after-sitecore-migration">Life after Sitecore migration</a></li><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/sitecore/deliver-better-digital-experiences-with-a-cdn">Deliver better digital experiences with a CDN</a></li></ul>

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