🌶️ Hot takes ahead: let's talk industry buzzwords (MACH, Composable, DXC, DXP)

this is Tim from hgraph and in this video you will get a few hot takes and spicy opinions on my part because I feel like it's time we need to talk about all the bus wordss Mac composable dxp DXE dxo Federation the list goes on and of course there's a place for these best words they help us Define certain things but they also confuse so what I want to do in this video is go over a few of the most important Buzz words and give you my opinion on them of course feel free to comment down below because I'm sure don't agree on everything and then afterwards we address the thing what do you really need to make your architecture work and then based on your company's maturity technical skill and special needs you can start to choose some of the other things but most likely you won't need them so stick around to somewhere in the middle of this video where I actually talk about the basic so you can see what you [Music] need let's talk about Mac which first of all is the coolest acronym because Mac one and two and three speed for airplanes and fun stuff like that but also Mac stands for microservices based API first Cloud native and hatless and so Mac is not actually a technology it's not a product it's not software it's actually just a collection of best practices to be able to create create highly flexible super fast scalable futureproof software so best practices to create software that's it next on the list is composable composable architecture refers to a modular approach of reusable components that Brands choose so you choose exactly what you need over choosing an off-the-shelf big product that has everything and we like to call that a monolith yeah not a bus word and so the cool thing about using a composable architecture is that you choose exactly what you need and if the market changes you just change one part of your architecture and you're good to go because if you have an off-the-shelf product and something changes and you need to adapt fast you either have customization or an upgrade path that both are timeconsuming and expensive or in the worst case you might have to rebuild your whole architecture which is way worse and so generally composable architectures focus on the a inside Mac so API first let's talk about dxp dxp or digital experience platforms are generally a collection of features and Technologies and services that allow semi-technical or non-technical users to do lots of stuff with drag and drop and visual editing to basically control their whole digital experience I love that word experience right because what is experience it's just their website generally and so they can do personalization make landing pages do changes to product data a lot of things all in one and generally these are monolithic pieces of software which means yes it's another fancy word it's just an off-the-shelf product with all these Services built in by one Fender so a good example is Adobe amem or sitecore next up is dxc digital experience composition which essentially has the same goal as the dxp the digital experience platform but the main difference is the tech it's much more modern it's much more modular and especially it's agnostic to whatever stuff you plug into it so it's a very light platform that you as a brand can choose which specialty sources that you need from CMS to personalization to images whatever you plug it in and then content editors that are not super technical can still do all the things that you were able to do in a dxp so it's essentially a modern version that's agnostic to the tools that you choose which makes it fit in this whole composable architecture story that we just talked about about before last but not least let's talk about dxo digital experience orchestration and so this is not DXE and it's not dxp and the main difference is that they scul down what they do so dxp and dxc have opinions on how you do the implementation of their tool in your front end right they have SDK so software development kits that developers use to talk to the system dxo has no such thing it's just the data orchestration bit that you would do in your DXE dxp for Content editors but then nothing for developers and so this doesn't make them last good it's just a different scope that they chose and for these folks it's actually a feature because there's no opinionated piece of software in the front end that you have to use to connect to it anybody can use it no matter what and they choose on their own how to do that so that's as a company less scope to deal with which is pretty cool so it's yet another flavor of the same thing now that that is out of the way um feel free to put down some comments because I'm sure I didn't hit up all the nuances because then this video would be like half an hour all right let's go into what you really need as the basis for your architecture before we then jump into all of the buzzwords with a market changing so fast nowadays people tend to put their domain content so the content that they use specifically that defines their product or their company or brand in specialty tools all small ones because these specialty tools we like to call them best of breed that's yet another lovely term it's essentially a a company with a smaller scope that specializes in that scope only so a perfect example is like algolia for search they are by far the best search engine and result ordering and reranking and personalization tool out there so that's of course where you put your search off the-shelf products that offer everything can never be that specialized so your base nowadays is you put all your stuff in specialty buckets and then somehow all that stuff from these specialty buckets all your domain content needs to get into one place so you can somehow unify it and connect it all up to be able to then actually build a website or an app or something like that and so you somehow need to Federate the content that comes in and make a unified VI and that unified VI can then be used by implementations um like a front end like a website or like an a refrigerator application something like that and so you have to be able to Federate this data uh while keeping the sources where the data comes from Super flexible autonomous and secure so you keep it literally securely away because your implementation on the front end never talks to it it actually talks to your Federation layer and so once all your data is in that Federation layer makes it super transparent and standardized there's only one way to query it and then there are some system systems that are really good at if your data is super messy you will then maybe use that system to fix that up a little and that's where a dxo comes in for example but most of the time you don't need that at all so you just need a system where you grab the specialty data you put it into one place and then it's a really easy transparent way to then query it and then afterwards you might need a CMS and then you're done but now you have to look at your mature level your technical skill and your special needs you might need a visual editor for your content or you might need specific personalization or you might have a certain data analytics driver that you specifically need and this is where those more buzzword type things come in so you might potentially want a dxo if your data is super messy you have to do some real-time Transformations off all this data to orchestrate it before it goes into your CMS and to your front end or you might want want a dxc if you need all this drag and drop stuff because you change stuff every day and so you need to figure out what do I need as a company what are my special needs what are my technical abilities to understand all these things and then you choose but for 90% out of there out there of you you probably just need get some data into a Federated system and then use a headless CMS query it and build your front end done dust it basically everybody in the mid market and lower up of the the Enterprise Market just needs a solid CMS with workflows that also then talks to the Federation and then all the specialty sources come into it and so these best words kind of mean nothing unless you know what problems you have to solve and understand your Basics and your Basics are you have to have a federation platform that keeps your sources autonomous so you can actually have teams working on these special sources and then you have to have a front end that is very easy to query is a unified View and that's your core that's your base and that is hgraph hgraph is literally a really solid headless CMS with Federation features inside it for most use cases and from there you can grow it as much as you want um but that's not for this video so you now know what Bas you need you need Federation and then you probably need a CMS and you're good to go anyways that's it for today [Music] cheers