Conscia

Both federation and #orchestration platforms can act as an #abstraction layer in a #composable stack, which is essential to decouple your frontend from your backends.  They can even stitch data from multiple backend APIs, reshape data for consumption for various consumers (or experiences) and enhance the performance of your experiences.  But….they’re not the same thing! It's up to vendors to help their buyers understand the difference, and so, I'm taking a stab at that here. Here are some key differences between the two: 1️⃣ API/Data Orchestration accesses data straight from its source while data federation layers require you to push your data into them using their ingest APIs.  Challenge: This means that you must own the process of data synchronization and the ETL pipeline to get the data in the format required. ---------- 2️⃣ API orchestration accesses the data and business logic straight from the source and is able to unlock the full set of capabilities native to your backend systems.  Data federation treats backends as dumb data sources.  Challenge: You can sync data, not business logic.  For instance, how would you sync the image transformation/optimization logic in Cloudinary?  ---------- 3️⃣ API Orchestration allows you to chain API calls in a certain sequence based on dependencies between them whereas federation layers don’t offer any such capability. Challenge: There is no way to personalize content based on customer data if they sit in two different systems as it would require chaining the API call to a CDP/CRM to get customer information followed by a call to the CMS to get relevant content. Personalization requires orchestration of APIs, not federation. ---------- 4️⃣ API Orchestration offers both read/write capabilities whereas data flows in one direction in API federation i.e from data source to the federation layer to the frontend.  Challenge: A federation layer is not able to ‘abstract’ out a checkout process from the frontend as it requires both read/write capabilities, which is not offered by federation platforms. ---------- I'm not saying that there aren't use cases out there where federation is needed. Even Conscia itself offers a module called the DX Graph, an API-first data layer, that does data federation, but I believe that is only necessary when the data is unavailable via APIs. For all other use cases, you need to either build or buy an API orchestration layer. I'm curious to hear thoughts and objections from my network as I may be missing something in my analysis. Jason Cottrell Tomas Antvorskov Krag Janus Boye Rafaela Ellensburg Bart Omlo Carrie Hane Adam Peter Nielsen Nabil Orfali Everett Zufelt Adam Böhm Andrew Sharp Manny Mattos Katarina French Jacob Pat, MBA Clay Hobson Maria Robinson Andriy Samilyak #DXO

At MACH 3, there was a huge interest around the topic of 'MACH vs Monolith' and how brands are looking to create innovative customer experiences without having to do a re-platform. So, we decided to host a webinar where we'll talk about our perspective on this. Most enterprise organizations have one or more monolithic platforms including DXPs, Commerce platforms, ERPs, CRMs etc as well as home grown and legacy systems in their technology ecosystem. It would be naive to think that you can get rid of them and build your 100% pure #MACH tech stack. These platforms have evolved over the years through customization based on your specific needs and it's not really possible to replace them easily with something else. The pragmatic way to go about your digital transformation is to think about how you can add #composable technologies to your existing tech stack without a complete rip and replace. In this meetup, we'll talk about how this is achievable through a layer of abstraction and orchestration so that you can employ the strangler pattern to decompose the monolith, one piece at a time. MACH Alliance Bart Omlo Maria Robinson Clay Hobson

In my first hours exploring Conscia and the way they discuss their Digital Experience Orchestration software, I sketched out a chart to crystallize my thinking. I knew I was on the right track when today on a partner call, their solutions head jumped on the screen share and went to start drawing the exact same thing! Here’s some of my learnings, and a thought technology that might help you cut the Gordian knot on who #DXO is for - diagram below. For #DXO, like a lot of technologies that execute #MACH principles, there’s a potentially-polarizing build versus buy. Let’s rule out “do without” right away; every modern experience is going to need to converge data from a variety of services. Each integration for each experience requires upfront effort to build and an ongoing effort to host, extend, and maintain. The dev-hours commitment both initially and post-launch scale up based on the cross-product of the number of experiences managed, the number of countries, locales and regions supported, and the amount of services integrated. For each, a little bit of custom code is written, either directly in the web Javascript or in a dedicated BFF; but there will be code, and this code is always service- and use-case-specific. If anything needs to be updated, or new capabilities brought online, or a service exchanged for a new entrant then we're stuck writing feature request tickets and waiting for resources to come available days or even weeks later to make it happen. By contrast, licensing Conscia is a known resource allocation; adding a new integration takes hours, not weeks; and the maintenance effort of each integration is a fraction of what maintaining a codebase requires. So for a scaled brand, with complexity in their customer facing experiences (present or near-future), Conscia is tailor-made to efficiently manage world-class composable web experiences. Obviously the ratio of dev hours per dollar differs across firms (onshore vs nearshore vs offshore, etc), but all that does is adjust the tipping point rather than change the equation fundamentally. In the emerging composable consensus the need to integrate technologies to experiences is table stakes. For leading enterprise brands, though, the “secret sauce” that they want to bring to the table probably isn’t around building and maintaining infrastructure. Instead, it feels like a no-brainer for brands with sophisticated experiences and a variety of tools and services, touchpoints, and locales (either now or on the roadmap) to configure a best-in-need tool dedicated to the task, rather than building (and supporting, and patching, and re-building) a good-enough coded solution. And I haven’t even touched on personalization or the “daily driver” experience! More to come as I dive in deeper.

Here we go! Looking forward to two great days at #MACHTHREE. Excited to be in #NYC with our CEO Sana Remekie and our new colleague Clay Hobson. Welcome on board! Conscia MACH Alliance

I’m now on my way to New York after spending a wonderful Father’s Day with my husband and my partner in crime, Dwayne Remekie, my father-in-law (who I call ‘Dad’) and my daughters. As much as I feel bad missing out on the opening night of MACH 3, I’m happy that I was able to celebrate this day with the most important people in my life. As I depart from Toronto to NYC, I’m filled with both excitement and gratitude for having the best of both worlds: my work and my family 🙂. I can’t wait to talk to the many MACH enthusiasts about how we can create a practical and pragmatic path to a #composable future, minimizing disruption, and future proofing your architecture so that you don’t end up creating another #monolith! Really looking forward to my time in NYC with my team and our partners including Apply Digital, Valtech, EPAM Systems, Orium, and several others. See you all really soon! MACH Alliance Conscia Bart Omlo Clay Hobson

Do you know why we call Conscia the 'Brain of the Composable Stack'? Our #DXO can connect to any component of your technology stack and acts as a central point of control to orchestrate data, APIs and even business logic between systems. Most of the time, we talk about Conscia as an orchestration layer that sits between the frontend and the backend, however, as you can see below, Conscia can also connect any two applications within the stack horizontally. This can be done in both synchronous and asynchronous modes and involves events, triggers, listeners, scheduled jobs, webhooks, batch processes and of course real-time API orchestration. Here are some examples of horizontal orchestration flows: ➡ Export a data extract from the ERP and have Conscia transform and load it into your commerce engine. ➡ Listen for an external event such as the record is updated in the Commerce engine, which then needs to be updated in the Search index. ➡ Write customer data directly into an AI model based on a real-time interaction. ➡ Create an order in your OMS based after the customer checks out and completes an order online. Here are some examples of vertical orchestration flows where the DXO acts as a BFF: ➡ Personalization: Call CDP for customer segment, commerce engine for cart information, weather API for real-time weather information and then retrieve relevant content from a headless CMS ➡ Get product information from commerce engine and related product content from a CMS, stitch them together and reshape the data model based on the frontend requirements ➡ Set rules for what content to show in what context to what customer ➡ Call a CDP for customer information and pass it to an AI model to determine the right promotion to show to a customer and then call the promotion engine to fetch the rest of the content for that promotion. In the comments below, you will find links to our documentation that showcase various DXO recipes to give you an idea of the types of complex orchestration flows that Conscia can handle.

There are lots of solutions out there that claim that they ‘do personalization’.  What’s interesting is that these ISVs come from a variety of different categories: CMS, DXP, Search Engines, Personalization Engines, CDPs, Recommendation Engines,… So, when an ecommerce brand wants to offer a personalized experience to their customers, which tool(s) should they rely on?  Confusing right?  Well, it is even more tricky in a #composable stack. In this article, I've attempted to explain why a single software vendor can't claim full ownership of #personalization. Jason Cottrell, Andrew Sharp, Dirk Jan van der Pol, Casper Aagaard Rasmussen Rebecca Wyatt Carrie Hane Rafaela Ellensburg Bart Omlo Conscia Maria Robinson

Have you ever felt like an an imposter? I know I have and still do at times. If this is even a little bit true for you, I encourage you to tune into this live session as I'll be sharing my experience as an engineer and a CEO/co-founder of a tech startup (Conscia) in a world dominated primarily by men. Really looking forward to speaking at EnlightenHER #7 along with Danielle Diliberti and Dom Selvon, live streaming from MACH #3 about how to overcome impostor syndrome!

Conscia is a proud sponsor of MACH THREE this year! Bart Omlo and I will be there, eager to engage in meaningful conversations with our ISV and SI partners and hear transformative stories from brands on their journey to a more #composable future. Don't miss out on MACH THREE in NYC, happening on June 17th & 18th. This event is your key to shaping your MACH strategy with insights from industry leaders and real-world success stories. Convincing your board about the value of the MACH journey can be daunting, but MACH THREE provides validation and confidence in your decisions. Join us to weigh the risks and rewards, discuss costs versus returns, and network with peers. MACH Alliance #MACHTHREE #composablecommerce #techconference #MACH