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Four signs your organisation is ready for composable technology

Composable technology is a highly debated topic, currently at its peak in terms of interest from marketing technology professionals. With the hype come inflated expectations, different interpretations and vendors using it left, right and centre to describe their solutions. In this second episode of our 3-part series, we break it down into the essentials and describe the 4 signs your organisation is ready for composable technology.
Jens Scheerlinck
Jul 04, 2023

Navigating the landscape of marketing and composable technology can be daunting. Before you dive into the decision to go ‘packaged’ or ‘composable’, it’s worth asking yourself a couple of questions to determine if you’re ready to embark on the journey.

1. Do you embrace a data centric strategy?

Do these things ring true?


  • Your organisation considers data as a key asset, as valuable as human capital, intellectual property, and sound finances.
  • You are shifting from an application-centric to a data-centric approach to IT, where you define data once and use it everywhere.

2. What is the complexity of your organisation and its processes?

Consider the following considerations:


  • Do you have a plethora of legacy systems that need replacing? Composable technology can be a step stone approach to phase out these legacy systems.
  • Do you have disparate business teams each with their own requirements? Adopting a composable architecture can allow you to empower individual business units with different tools catering to their needs instead of a one-size fits all approach.
  • Does your organisation have an efficient procurement process? Going with different vendors with specialised solutions puts a strain on your procurement team, having to do negotiations with multiple vendors. This may end up taking too much time and hurt your time to value.

3. Does your company culture breath engineering?

Consider these aspects:


  • You have a high need for customisation. Existing solutions had to be tailored to your organisation’s needs.
  • You prefer to build rather than buy and want to use composable technology to adopt a ‘buy-to-build’ ethos.
  • You have a strong (data) engineering function with in-house people who have the skills, time, and priority to work on a composable architecture.

4. Do you expect the need to scale or pivot?

Do the following things keep you awake at night?

  • You anticipate rapid growth and need a scalable customer data infrastructure to keep up with the increased demand.
  • You will need to respond with agility to changes disrupting your industry and swap or add marketing technology components flexibly to adjust.

Every organisation is different, and you don’t need to answer yes to every single question to benefit from composable technology. However, to get the most value out of your composable customer data strategy, consider our four guiding principles.