What are the business benefits of being a composable enterprise, powered by low code?

• By enabling composability in digital services, enterprises are better equipped to take advantage of digital economies.
• It offers the ability to easily orchestrate, assemble and package services together based on customer subscriptions.

Every futuristic business today is seemingly knee-deep in digitisation efforts, striving to transform its technology to create newer business opportunities.

Their goal is to participate in economies that are beyond their customer interactions. By enabling composability in digital services, enterprises are better equipped to take advantage of digital economies. Composable enterprises promise exactly that! They are by design – flexible, adaptive, and resilient towards market shifts.

In a recently published research paper titled 2021 Strategic Roadmap For The Composable Future Of Applications, Gartner summarised that the future of application experiences will be built from composable business capabilities.

The report states that by 2023, 30 per cent of new applications will be delivered, priced and consumed as libraries of packaged business capabilities. 

The business benefits of being a composable enterprise are many. At an organisational level, there is increased collaboration between business and IT, in their common pursuit to offer personalized, individual unique experiences to customers.

Developing building blocks as opposed to monolithic structures allows agile development and helps accelerate innovation. Imagine a Lego-like system where products and services are seamlessly integrated with the rest of the ecosystem, and partners can pick-n-choose business integrations. That’s what composable offerings are.

Most importantly, it also enables new business models by which industries can participate in shared economies (e.g. Banking – Open Banking, Telecommunications – TM- forum APIs, Healthcare – HL7 interface etc.), creates unique multi-channel experiences, and monetize on fine-grained data.

Here are some key tech capabilities of composable enterprises:

• Enterprise services offered as packaged business services that are independently built, consumed and priced
• Ability to easily orchestrate, assemble and package services together based on customer subscriptions
• Highly configurable and customizable user experience coupled with associated business service
• Ability to API-enable every business component to be easily exposed, secured, managed and consumed by internal as well as external stakeholders 
• Flexibility to deploy and provision application services and offerings to any infrastructure of choice 

Now, where does low code fit in? 

The principles of low code focused on visually building applications and services using ready-made components, integrations and design patterns align perfectly well with the theories of plug-n-play and composability.

Low code platforms can offer great speed and flexibility to services and components that can be reused for different use-cases.

This reusability and componentisation can come in especially handy for core software builders or ISVs who need to implement software with speed, and onboard a bunch of end-users with quick customisation capabilities. 

How can low code help composability?

• Fusion teams: Low code can foster better collaboration between business users/ citizen developers and pro developers. Developers can quickly build custom reusable business components that can be easily stitched together by citizen developers.
• Component Driven Design & Development: Forcing design and development to be based out of configurable platform components like templates, widgets, layouts and domain objects allows for greater flexibility and reusability across the enterprise.
• Micro-App architectures: Building full-fledged applications as micro-apps that can be bundled together as micro front ends helps with easy composition of business functionality. 
• API-enabled enterprise: Auto generating APIs from existing business logic and data sources (databases, web services, custom business logic, legacy system connectors) that can become the foundation for developing custom packaged business functionality and custom UI integrated widgets. 
• Plug-n-play business assembly: Composition of business services using visual drag & drop WYSWYG interface. With the plug-n-play model, these services can be configured and customized based on individual business needs. 
• Zero DevOps: Low code platforms offer seamless deployment of business services into any choice of infrastructure. They can be deployed as individual microservices that can be individually versioned. 

Not just for the enterprise, taking a composable approach also lays out a variety of benefits to consumers. The low code application development paradigm provides an accelerated journey for enterprises looking to get there. Needless to say, even the most powerful low code platform has to be augmented with new-age processes and technology thought leadership.

It also means unified efforts from stakeholders at all levels (visual user interaction teams, business analysts, architecture leaders, development teams, operational teams and business executives) to be aligned towards thinking, designing, creating, and supporting reusable composable business services to taste success.

• Mayur Shah is a Senior Director of Product Management and Marketing at Wavemaker, open standards-based low code development platform.