To keep up with the ever-evolving technological advances of current times, businesses continuously need to upgrade and improve as they grow and look to expand in their market. Tech-forward companies make use of composable applications as innovative tools to accomplish this.
Composable applications help simplify traditional workflows and dynamically improve the potential of next-gen services and applications for enhanced productivity. They also save each company a lot of time and money as it’s possible to repurpose and reuse them according to the company’s business needs.
Before implementing composable applications in any company, however, business owners and decision-makers need to take the initiative to learn more about them and the different components they encompass for a digital transformation. These high-level stakeholders should also understand how companies utilize these applications in business, how to create them, and why they’re the future of software development.
Understanding Composable Application Architecture
Composable applications are business-directed apps composed of modular building blocks. These building blocks are rather easy to modify, which allows businesses to reuse and repurpose these applications as they see fit. They have the ability to change the purpose of each composable application according to their needs and use the building blocks from one app to help create another.
Composable apps rely on the concept of composability to work. Composability is the ability to collectively manage, reorganize, and change components within a design — specifically, the ability to work with the building blocks that make up each composable application.
These applications are more competent, functional, and fluid than traditional applications. They reduce workload intricacy and help make services a lot more operational, yet they’re still easy to set up and reconfigure by development teams of all types.
The flexibility that composable applications provide allows companies to save a lot of money and time when it comes to creating new applications. Businesses have the ability to take some parts from previous composable applications and use them to create improved ones throughout a digital transformation.
What Is a Composable Enterprise?
According to Gartner, composable business is the natural acceleration of digital business and allows for the delivery or resilience and agility to meet demands of the current time. It describes using a modular approach in software development and digital service delivery for business processes.
Basically, a composable enterprise involves a plug-and-play application structure in which the different components are easily adjusted and modified by the development team. This allows companies to quickly evolve and keep up with new technological demands.
Companies accomplish this by breaking down complicated enterprise components into smaller, more manageable tasks. They also have the ability to connect these smaller separate components using an API, thus allowing the systems or apps to still communicate with each other throughout a digital transformation.
Packaged business capabilities (PBCs) are the building blocks of composable architecture and enterprise. PBCs are the result of breaking down components into microservices, with each of them dedicated to a particular business function to enhance business processes’ flexibility.
An e-commerce website is a great visualization of what PBCs are in terms of business operations. There, multiple end-user PBCs include shopping carts, chatbots, review engines, and recommendations. In a composable enterprise, these PBCs aren’t built from scratch. They’re a mix-and-match of existing, repurposed applications as composable technologies.
Some of PBCs’ most essential characteristics include:
- Internal or external development and endless combination abilities
- Interaction with APIs and events
- Articulation on personalizable applications whenever needed
- No need for specific execution environments
Sometimes, though, companies understandably encounter some confusion when it comes to PBCs versus microservices. Theoretically, microservices allow for the creation of programs utilizing the best of many microservices. This means high costs that typically outweigh any benefits. While PBCs pertain more to how companies bring their applications to market, they also mean a smaller number of pieces or components in each piece of technology.
The Composable Enterprise Model
Implementing a composable enterprise model into a business gives it an extremely competitive advantage. With this model, companies find themselves capable of creating new solutions with ease, as they don’t need to design and build every new application from scratch. They should turn to existing products and always take a look at the blocks that they already possess to repurpose them for other functions with a composable architecture.
Composable enterprise models encompass four primary principles: a higher speed through discovery, increased agility through modularity, the strengthening of leadership roles, and the creation of autonomous business resilience.
How to Create a Composable Enterprise
A company’s composable enterprise ultimately depends on the industry, target market, and overall business strategy. Before beginning its transformation into a composable enterprise, the company should establish its long-term goals at a minimum.
They should also know which markets they wish to target, if a new business model is necessary, how consumer expectations may change with time, and if it’s necessary to change the business operational structure to fit with this growth and change.
Once companies answer these questions, it’s then time to begin developing the composable enterprise. The four steps necessary to create one are as follows:
- Use business architecture to drive innovation.
- Adopt adaptive working practices.
- Use the information to drive smart decisions and deliver new services.
- Modularize the digital and technical platforms.
First, the company needs the collaboration of stakeholders from every department to collect input from every business team regarding the new business model. To facilitate this process, many companies rely on APIs.
APIs connect different cloud services, business systems, and mobile applications, allowing different departments, vendors, and partners to share secure data. APIs are essential to the development of a composable enterprise.
Secondly, it’s necessary to adapt business working practices by creating fusion teams that incorporate both IT and non-IT workers. They combine the human side of digital business with the technical side to create comprehensive models and adaptable, innovative technology that’s usable by everyone involved. This composable architecture is much more advanced and community-driven than a traditional IT infrastructure.
Then, companies should make use of the power of information to deliver new services. APIs work as a great link between consumer and business data. They help secure and manage data that’s then used to effectively develop new applications that meet the consumers’ needs.
Finally, companies need to modularize their platforms. This means breaking their different processes into smaller building blocks that are then operable individually and ultimately in an automated fashion. This not only increases productivity and efficiency but also marks the transformation of the business into a composable enterprise.
Working with a composable enterprise requires a shift in the mindset of workers. This means that companies must look for talent and vendors capable of innovating and thinking outside of the box to create unique solutions.
A composable workforce requires IT and business leaders to align their goals while creating a tighter collaboration between vendors, tech staff, and contract workers. Sometimes, this entails exploring alternative management methods and partnering up with application-specific enterprises if necessary.
Composable enterprises are definitely contributing to a change in the workforce. Because composable applications require the cooperation of both IT and non-IT workers to meet common objectives and to implement composable systems, these departments are now more united than ever, thus further strengthening the company.
How Composable Applications Are Being Used in Businesses
Businesses are adopting composable enterprises to simplify the workflow and ease the workload of employees, which helps improve their productivity and efficiency. With composable applications, businesses further their abilities to do more with less and deliver faster. This results in digital acceleration, resilience, and innovation.
As previously mentioned, composability involves improved and expanded storage, networks, and computation power, which, in itself, is a great competitive advantage. The more building blocks integrated into a company, the more flexible it is in creating innovative solutions.
These applications rely on new processes that don’t necessarily require coding knowledge. This allows companies to create business-IT teams that then combine their expertise when solving new problems. Responsibilities are distributable by both business or non-IT teams and IT teams alike.
Composable applications are beneficial not only to the company and its workers but also to the customers. Composable businesses make it a priority to improve the customer experience and cater to their demands.
Many top companies are already invested in this ever-evolving business environment. For instance, Nutanix, a U.S.-based computer software company, recently began the development of composable design and applications.
They announced the development of the Nutanix Era in collaboration with HPE ProLiant servers, which offers composable business applications and hybrid cloud services to its customers.
HP Enterprises and Dell Technologies are also major players involved in the development of composable applications. HP merged its HPE Prime Storage, HPE composable rack, and HPE Synergy in 2019 to enhance application composability and make offerings more attractive to customers.
On the other hand, Dell created an Active System Manager (ASM) that arranges shared resources and service-based tech to help companies overcome workload-related issues and enhance flexibility for teams.
Apart from these organizations, several others are already investing in composable applications and infrastructure such as Liqid, NetApp, Lenovo, Western Digital, and many more.
Composable Applications — the Future of Software Development
Experts expect the market value of composable applications to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.21% by 2028, according to a report by Verified Market Research.
The European Computer Telecoms mentioned in a publication that 25% of communications service providers will operate as composable service providers by 2025. They also predict that, by 2023, “60% of mainstream organizations will list composable enterprise as a strategic objective.”
Considering these predictions, it’s easy to understand why composable applications are definitely thought of as the future of software development. They present considerable advantages to businesses that are no longer possible to overlook, which is why companies continuously invest in them. Increased productivity, fast service delivery, and flexibility are only a few features of composable applications.
Other positive outcomes of adopting composable applications and technology include:
Increased Efficiency
Composable applications allow companies to upgrade specific pieces of applications without having to work with and change the entire app. It’s a lot more efficient to continuously update pieces of applications at a time.
Reused and repurposed common componentsCompanies don’t need to create new applications from scratch to meet client demands every time a new project pops up. They retain the ability to reuse the components they already have, repurpose them, and simply add whatever’s necessary to meet the end requirements.
Little or No Code Requirements
This is probably one of the biggest benefits of composable applications. These apps usually don’t require a lot of coding knowledge to solve the different problems that come to the surface during a creative process. This means that non-IT departments also easily use them in combination with their business abilities to create next-generation apps with enhanced operational complexity.
Enhanced Intelligent Systems
At the base of composable applications is the idea of breaking applications into smaller, more manageable tasks. These tasks are then easily automated, creating new intelligent applications that can adapt to the needs of the market compared to a traditional IT infrastructure.
Composable applications and composable technologies utilize simple building blocks that give teams a break by reusing, repurposing, and mixing and matching components to create a completely new and different application. They are extremely beneficial for businesses as they are cost-effective, increase productivity, and reduce the workload of employees.
These applications come with a large set of benefits. Some of them include automation, ease of use, improved customer experience, flexibility, and enhanced intelligent systems. As they don’t require a lot of coding knowledge, non-IT teams also use these applications without the need for specific development skills all the while bringing their business expertise into the development of new applications.
Start Composable Applications Projects With BairesDev
Businesses across the globe are investing in composable applications as they are extremely flexible and versatile. A composable business model can help companies face uncertainty by providing them with innovation and resilience.
