Uniform CEO Lars Birkholm Petersen talking at his company's virtual conference.

This week, Uniform held its inaugural DXC Assembly conference, which claims to be the first event dedicated to composability. This event was a great history lesson on how the market has shifted and the pendulum swing between developers and marketers. It brought forward the vision of what DXC is and how it will change the market moving forward as composability is adopted.

Let's dig into four key takeaways from DXC Assembly:

1. Adopting a Composable Stack Is Hard

Lars Petersen, co-founder and CEO of Uniform and pictured in the featured image, kicked off the event talking about the growth in the DXP space and how it enabled marketers to build personalized experiences; however, this came at the detriment to developers. DXPs often introduced proprietary technology that hindered innovation and the developer experience. This resulted in a pendulum swing in favor of developers, with headless platforms that provided modern APIs and a delightful developer experience.

However, with the adoption of many headless products, marketers became overwhelmed with managing many tools and working with developers to "glue" them together.

That said, the value and benefit of headless led to the concept of composability: multiple products that work together to form a unique stack for each business as opposed to an all-in-one DXP suite that forces a vendor's capabilities that may not be needed. Businesses are unique and need a martech stack that is as unique as they are; they need to focus on "best of need," and composability affords them this.

Composability may be the solution; however no one said it is easy! One of the major problems with composability is the need to integrate multiple products. This has often led to custom point-to-point integrations that grow exponentially as the number of tools in the composable stack grow. This is exactly what Uniform has set out to solve, by balancing the needs of marketers and developers. Uniform DXC promises "composable without compromise."

Related Article: 8 Things to Know About Composable DXP

2. DXC Is the Future

In the Hype Cycle for Digital Commerce (2022), Gartner introduced the term Digital Experience Composition (DXC). According to Gartner, "DXC is emerging to handle digital multi-experience orchestration … these tools allow developers to set up digital experiences and hand them to business users for day-to-day management in no-code environments.”

Uniform DXC follows a snap in, snap out approach to the martech stack through three layers:

  1. API Integration: A mesh that integrates content and data across many API-driven platforms such as a Web CMS, commerce engine, DAM, internal systems, etc.
  2. Experience Builder: A low code/no code business layer at the heart of DXC to manage and publish composed experiences to any channel using any source of content and any front-end components.
  3. Front-end Orchestration: No-code connections from content sources to the visual front-end presentation of content in the right context of the user journey.

These three layers enable marketers and developers to collaborate together in service of the customer experience. Developers focus on the front-end layer, building the UI and components that consume the unified content in the lower layers. Business users leverage the components to compose unique experiences that are published to any channel in the right customer context.

3. Uniform Unveils New Updates to Its DXC

Uniform used DXC Assembly to announce some key updates to its DXC capabilities. These key feature updates are a direct result of feedback from Uniform's customers and partners.

  • Uniform Canvas, the no-code visual composer, has been updated with multi-source live preview to enable a better marketer experience while building experiences.
  • Project Map has been added as a feature to Canvas as a way to visually represent all of the integrated content from many sources that make up an experience through a hierarchical tree view.
  • Edgehancers have been added to Mesh as a way to deliver content from any source.

Related Article: Have You Recognized the Potential of the Composable Digital Experience Stack? 

4. What's to Come With Digital Experience Content Creation

Lastly, Nick Barber of Insight Partners closed out DXC Assembly with some key digital experience trends and what you can do as a business to bring on the right tools to adapt to growing content creation process:

  1. There is great consolidation and convergence in the market. Many products offer overlapping capabilities and features. A great way to avoid over-spending is to conduct a gap/overlap assessment.
  2. AI is being leveraged to support the content velocity problem. Leveraging AI to enrich your content and data can help support the volumes of content needed for personalization across channels.
  3. Workflow automation in the creation process can reduce bottlenecks and enable you to focus on high value tasks vs. repetition.
  4. Collaboration tools enable creation and empower employees. Use these tools to foster a "creator" mindset among employees.

Conclusion: DXC Market Is Emerging

DXC Assembly was a great first virtual conference from Uniform that offered many insights into what DXC solves and where the market is going. This market is innovating very quickly as more and more organizations start to adopt composable martech stacks.

Uniform wants to solve the composability adoption challenges through a balance of need between marketers and developers in service of the customer experience.