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The Hero’s Journey to Composable: A Conversation with Uniform’s Mark Demeny

matt-garrepy

<a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/uniform-raises-28m-in-series-a-funding-round-for-composable-dxp/">Uniform</a> continues to drive innovation in the digital experience composition platform (DXCP) space.
As a leading provider in the emerging category, the company just announced a series of enhancements to its <a href="https://uniform.dev/canvas">Uniform Canvas</a> and <a href="https://uniform.dev/mesh">Uniform Mesh</a> products. The new features round out Uniform's DXCP as the most robust visual workspace, empowering digital teams to deliver winning multichannel experiences.
The new product releases also complete Uniform's original promise of headless technologies. Now, brands can visually weave multiple API-powered technologies together to create high-performance digital experiences quickly and with greater agility. 
According to Uniform's press release, the new functionality will allow marketers to create web and app experiences faster and more flexibly. The enhanced features will also give developers broader scope for building lightning-fast experiences with innovative technology.
Below are some of the technical highlights and enhancements of Canvas and Mesh.
<h2>Putting power back in the hands of marketers </h2>
Canvas comes equipped with two new enhancements: Uniform Dynamic Pages and Uniform Redirect Manager. These powerful additions to the visual experience builder will offer marketers and merchandisers greater control over product-based experiences.
<ul>
<li>Dynamic Pages: Enables business users to efficiently adapt and iterate across thousands of webpages, such as product detail pages, to build visual experiences at scale without developer support. No-code templates and custom page creation drive seamless content updates, consistent branding, and improves speed to market.</li>
<li>Redirect Manager: Simplifies URL management through the creation of vanity URLs, activation of fast redirects using a modern content delivery network (CDN), and reliable page access. A visual tool helps business users quickly identify browser errors, improving accuracy and ensuring a smooth customer experience.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Freedom to innovate with best-of-breed tools</h2>
Mesh’s enhanced features underpin Uniform's DXCP capabilities by removing silos, eliminating weeks of manual coding, and freeing developers to work with their tools of choice. Features will allow users to: 
<ul>
<li>Utilize any data source: Build and reuse front-end components to boost implementation speed and flexibility.</li>
<li>Leverage no-code connections to any API: This includes headless services, legacy platforms, and single-use data sources, along with pre-built connectors for key services.</li>
<li>Use Edgehancers to enable cutting-edge performance: Automatically push content to a CDN’s edge to enhance page speed, user experience, and SEO performance – all without any custom code.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Accelerate time to market</h2>
Uniform is also launching a Component Starter Kit – an open-source and fully customizable collection of front-end components to streamline ideation for testing and production. Users can easily add these to a component development system like <a href="https://storybook.js.org/">Storybook</a> and connect to content sources using Mesh.
“The excitement surrounding the new release comes from its ability to empower digital teams and tackle the challenges marketers encounter when delivering high-performing digital experiences,” said <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/is-the-birth-of-dxc-the-death-of-dxp-a-conversation-with-darren-guarnaccia-president-at-uniform/">Darren Guarnaccia</a>, president, Uniform. “These latest capabilities elevate the visual workspace, enabling true enterprise scalability and seamlessly blends content, data, and technology at remarkable speeds. With enhancements to Canvas, Mesh, and the introduction of the Component Starter Kit, we’re fulfilling the promise of what headless tools initially aimed to achieve. The envisioned future is one where marketers can focus on storytelling and audience engagement, free from the constraints of traditional platforms and processes.”
<h2>About Uniform</h2>
Uniform DXCP speeds up time to value for composable experience architecture, lowers development costs, and makes it easy for business users to build digital experiences. A composable orchestration layer for legacy and modern headless systems or any API in Uniform DXCP eliminates the need for complex custom integration code. Instead, available for marketers, merchandisers, and other business users are no-code tools to build digital experiences with content from any source—without submitting developer tickets. Furthermore, Uniform DXCP’s high-performance personalization capability, delivered at the edge, raises conversion and CX for all channels.

Uniform Adds New Visual Editing and Integration Features to Enhance DXCP

cms-critic-staff

<h5>TL;DR – Recently, there was an epic but friendly debate in the Boye &amp; Company CMS Experts Slack channel about the confusion surrounding DXC as a category. We asked the three main voices in the conversation – Rasmus Skjoldan, Andrew Kumar, and Sana Remekie – to discuss their thoughts on Zoom. Matt McQueeny helped moderate the conversation.</h5>
<hr />
Of the great mysteries that scientists, philosophers, and theologians grapple with, one question is often overlooked:
What, exactly, is professional wrestling?
I’m not referring to school leagues or Olympic competitions – I’m talking about the <a href="https://www.wwe.com/" target="_blank">WWE</a> and its brand of sportstainment. And I don’t mean to be glib or insulting with any comparisons; heck, I’ve been to a live wrestling event many moons ago, and it was kinda fun (particularly the people watching). 
But really, what is it? Is this a legitimate sport replete with feats of athleticism? Or is it truly just performance art following a well-oiled script? If you ask <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulk_Hogan" target="_blank">Hulk Hogan</a>, the iconic figurehead of the modern experience, he might say, "Well, let me tell you something, brother…" and launch into a dissertation about sport versus stage. 
As humans, we’re classically conditioned to put things in boxes so they’re easier to understand. Sometimes, that’s not so simple. This has long been the case in the software industry, where confusion often precedes clarity when new ideas takes the mat – like <a href="https://www.boye-co.com/blog/2023/1/whats-the-real-story-about-digital-experience-composition" target="_blank">Digital Experience Composition (DXC)</a>. 
A short while ago, members of <a href="https://www.boye-co.com/groups/cms-experts" target="_blank">Boye &amp; Company’s CMS Experts</a>, a peer group focused on content management, were treated to a sort of WWE-styled “Smackdown” in the community’s Slack channel. In truth, it was a friendly exchange of ideas, with no bodyslams or half-nelsons to report (those are wrestling moves, BTW).
Still, it was spirited. And for several days, this epic “Slackdown” generated significant interest from across the DXP and DXC spectrum. It all started with a simple, poignant question from <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/rasmusskjoldan/" target="_blank">Rasmus Skjoldan</a>, Chief Evangelist at <a href="https://www.magnolia-cms.com/?mgcid=19746730468&amp;utm_campaign=&amp;utm_content=&amp;utm_campaign=brand-protect-jf_us_2023&amp;utm_medium=cpc&amp;utm_source=google&amp;utm_content=19746730468&amp;utm_term=magnolia%20cms&amp;gad=1&amp;gclid=CjwKCAjw0ZiiBhBKEiwA4PT9z53dpcpsB0M2J-tIRhHdpnwYRHUwbjghkhAGI6_Azq8wWtHBU4ic8xoC4N0QAvD_BwE" target="_blank">Magnolia</a>, a leading DXP:
“I feel like some of the Digital Experience Composition positioning going on isn’t super helpful to customers, to be very blunt about it. What’s genuinely in it for them?”
This drew several DXC defenders to the ring, but the most vocal participants were <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewkumarxyz/" target="_blank">Andrew Kumar</a>, VP of Customer Solutions at <a href="https://uniform.dev/" target="_blank">Uniform</a>, and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sana-remekie/" target="_blank">Sana Remekie</a>, CEO of <a href="https://conscia.ai/" target="_blank">Conscia.ai</a>. It was entertaining to watch these adroit leaders wrestle with a red-hot topic, but it was incredibly informative for the fans in the stands – so much so that I partnered with <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/critics/matthew-mcqueeny/">Matt McQueeny</a> at <a href="https://konabos.com/" target="_blank">Konabos</a> to take the show on the road.
A few days later, we invited Rasmus, Sana, and Andrew to join us for an informal follow-up on Zoom to wrestle down some answers.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/04/dxc_boye_debate_debrief_720.png" alt="Zoom photo of Matt Garrepy, Matt McQueeny, Rasmus Skoldjan, Andrew Kumar, and Sana Remekie" />
<h2>In this corner… DXP</h2>
<a href="https://www.forrester.com/analyst-bio/joe-cicman/BIO14164" target="_blank">Joe Cicman</a>, an analyst at Forrester, has been on a quest to decipher the Digital Experience Platform. As he noted <a href="https://www.forrester.com/blogs/dxp-you-keep-using-that-term-i-dont-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means/" target="_blank">in a recent blog</a>, DXP is still misunderstood from a compositional perspective. The definition can be nebulous based on whether it’s delivered by a single vendor or assembled by an enterprise – or, in some cases, both.  
I like Joe's observation in the same post: “Every day I asked myself, ‘How is it possible for one vendor to create one product that works across multiple industries and grows in scope as a company’s digital remit grows?’ After talking to the vendors, turns out … it’s not possible.”
That might be the vein Rasmus tapped: confusion is everywhere. While DXC is emerging, DXPs continue to evolve in their own space. As he pondered in Slack, would it not be better to reenergize, modernize, or even reinvent the more established DXP label and category than trying to teach customers about another new acronym?
Add this to the confusion: Magnolia was included in an early DXC report by <a href="https://www.gartner.com/analyst/56850" target="_blank">Mike Lowndes of Gartner</a> as a vendor in this emerging field. So how does this color Magnolia’s positioning?
“When I speak to our composable die-hard customers, they are much more passionate about getting projects done, getting rid of the worst legacy apps, and reaching business goals than they are in the vendor/analyst-centric views on what’s in or out of categories,” Rasmus said. “Magnolia is seen as a DXC by some – which is fine, of course. We definitely cover that space with our own twist. To me, it just feels more like a use case than a real software category.”
That might be true. But vendors and buyers still refer to those MQ reports with biblical reverence.
Gathered in our cozy Zoom room, Matt McQueeny asked Rasmus why he felt compelled to engage with the community around these opinions.
“I'm very focused on looking at all this from the customer's perspective,” he said. “Every time I see a proposal for a category change, I'm just always asking myself, 'okay, who's actually behind this and who's to benefit from it?' Even for DXP, I sometimes have question marks around whether that really helps customers. So I felt that introducing new variations would be a significant sort of – not a disruption – but more confusion. And that's what I’m quite passionately against because I want to keep the focus on what has real value for customers.”
<h2>DXC enters the ring</h2>
TLAs (three-lettered acronyms) might be the bane of our technology existence. When I was consulting at IBM GTS, we were unpacking a catchy new triptych every week from across the cybersecurity theater. Heck, even “IBM” is an acronym... it's a bit like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception" target="_blank">Inception</a> with TLAs. 
I asked Sana Remekie about her take on this acronym acrimony – and how she perceived Rasmus’ call to quell the challenges by refocusing on the established DXP category.
“There's lots of three-letter acronyms popping up all over the place,” she said. “I think the movement towards composability and having that best-of-breed architecture is real. Customers are asking for a choice in terms of all the packaged and business capabilities that they need to build their overall architecture, and there's agreement across Gartner and Forrester on that. They may call it different things, but everybody’s starting to agree that we should give customers the ability to create and assemble their own solutions.”
So how does this momentum towards composability and DXC impact the more traditional definition of DXP – particularly as an established category? 
“Some folks are saying very clearly that a single DXP – what they call a monolithic DXP – should no longer be a thing at all,” she added. “Customers should be able to create their own DXPs by picking best-of-breed applications from across the ecosystem. With this phenomenon, we're now giving choices to the customer and power to the SIs to make those choices for the customer. Sometimes it's an IT team within the organization making those choices with, hopefully, the business in mind. And sometimes they say, ‘alright, Deloitte, Accenture, Valtech, go make that choice for me – go directly to those vendors and put together a solution that is composable.’ That happens a lot as well.”
<h2>Finding the right place to “poke the DXP bear”</h2>
As the wrestling match commenced, we turned to Andrew Kumar for more insight on what ignited the debate on Slack. He took us on a brief trip in the wayback machine to his days at <a href="https://www.telus.com/en" target="_blank">Telus</a>, where the company assembled what we now call a composable or <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/the-future-is-composable-a-conversation-with-new-mach-alliance-president-casper-rasmussen/">MACH</a> architecture. 
“There weren’t these sexy marketing terms that exist today,” he said. “But in 2016, we [already] had this concept, and we created our own internal site builder on top of Contentful – and that's now part of DXC.”
Andrew also talked about the importance of the different roles and responsibilities that DXC needs to support and the tendency to lump the audience of potential users under a generic “business user” mantle. This might be a limiting descriptor, as the pool could include a wide range of team members from marketing, content ops, merchandisers, UX designers, product managers, or even data analysts.
Clearly, there’s room to improve the positioning and messaging around the DXC terminology – to find the right TLA, so to speak. And this confusion makes sense when we’re still in the early growth phases.
“Adoption and demand are still very, very nascent, but it's starting to get viral,” he said. “Despite being so nascent, it is disrupting and really ‘poking the bear’ on the big players in DXP. It's really shaping and adding maturity to headless and MACH – and these kinds of technical terms are now growing in maturity.”
Poking the bear sounds dangerous, but that’s what market challengers do. TLAs aside, Andrew went on to say that he would not recommend a “rip and replace” from DXP to DXC, but to take incremental steps towards composable.
“There are some bridges in place,” he said. “Uniform has one that can help Sitecore and AEM customers start to make those leaps. But there’s still a place for a DXP.”
<h2>What’s old is new</h2>
By this point in the match, we had wrestled multiple messages from our participants. Without question, DXC is the shiny new object blazing trails. At the same time, DXPs are evolving their posture to remain marketable. Andrew noted, “They’re decoupling and decomposing themselves, playing ball with others and having that multi-manufacturer style where you can build with OEM parts from all over the place.”
Pivoting back to Rasmus in the DXP corner, we inquired about his response to Andrew regarding the long history of APIs connecting different platforms – and how there are even use cases of Contentful feeding into Magnolia.
“I can totally back up that it's not really anything new,” he remarked to Andrew. “Magnolia has been producing a solution that is fundamentally a composable DXP for a very long time, since 2013 or 2014. We've had clients compose platforms out of multiple best-of-breed applications they put together in a joined platform for a long time.”
While Rasmus reinforced his criticism of a new TLA being injected into the ecosystem, he did express his support for how the narrative was being projected.
“If I look at some of the stuff I felt Uniform did super well, it was just a very clean story they came out with,” he said. “I totally love that. And it felt like a really novel spin that they would be the glue between all these different applications and allow the marketer the freedom to assemble, curate, and aggregate all their content and put together experiences based on many different services. I do see really good stuff about DXC. It's just not a category – and I don't think it will become a category.”
OK, so if it’s not destined to be officially blessed, where do we go from here? As Andrew pointed out, the roadmap might rest with user behavior.
“In some enterprises, there could be 60 times more technical folks that don't write code, but they're still making meaningful contributions to digital experiences. That is a huge user base. And that's where the DXC is really going to make its mark, and really going to – and this is probably an unpopular opinion – start to take over the DXP. It's serving so many more users in a more democratic low code, no code interesting way. It's empowering to that user base.”
<h2>A DXC by any other name is a… DXCP? DXO? EDP?</h2>
While pondering the future of a DXC category, Andrew quickly pointed out one basic flaw with the acronym: <a href="https://dxc.com/us/en" target="_blank">DXC Technology</a> is the name of a well-established global agency (which happens to sponsor <a href="https://dxc.com/us/en/manutd" target="_blank">Manchester United</a>). To that end, he feels “DXCP” might be a more suitable mantle – which Uniform has already been using across its communications.
He also talked about the long shadow cast by large competitors and the importance of establishing authority as a new category. “It’s really a challenge for new players to enter [the DXP market]. There's just so much <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/adobe-experience-cloud-adds-new-headless-cms-capabilities-updates-to-commerce-integration/">Adobe</a>, <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/optimizely-partners-with-google-cloud-to-take-experimentation-to-the-next-level/">Optimizely</a>, or <a href="https://www.magnolia-cms.com/" target="_blank">Magnolia</a> dominance. They've been around for so long. There’s no space for new entrants without a large insurmountable challenge.”
Sana also shared her perspective on the DXC category conundrum, which echoed my recent conversations with other vendors under the DXC umbrella. While <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/occtoo-dives-deep-to-unify-data-and-kill-integrations-a-conversation-with-ceo-niclas-mollin/">Niclas Mollin at Occtoo</a> is positioning around the Experience Data Platform, Sana is building a beachhead for Conscia as Digital Experience Orchestration.
“Conscia's not a DXC, even though we're playing in the space,” she explained. “There's a lot of confusion, so we said, you know what? We don't want to call ourselves a DXC because that would mean that we're tied too closely to a specific front end. So we’re going to act as the central piece of the composable ecosystem, which connects all the dots from the back end to the front end and is agnostic of both – and we’re able to orchestrate API's and experiences.”
<h2>And the winner is…</h2>
Er… not clear. We’re still wrestling with the answers, and the analysts have yet to canonize anything. But if we can smell what <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwayne_Johnson" target="_blank">The Rock</a> is cookin', we might be in for more confusion as DXC continues to find its footing. 
What’s abundantly clear to us, however, is that DXC is building real momentum, and DXP continues to drive demand. With the advent of AI and other innovations, the DXP market is still predicted to grow to over <a href="https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/digital-experience-platform-market" target="_blank">$30 billion by 2030</a>. While our guests shared strong opinions about DXC's future as a category and the underlying challenges, each seemed committed to demonstrable value over category woes.
At the end of our session, Matt McQueeny noted that we ended up where we always end up: with a clear mandate to focus on the business and the customer. 
The best part of this conversation was each participant's undeniable respect and reverence for one another, despite their competitive position or conflicting ideologies. Collectively, this industry powers millions of websites, apps, and experiences. Yet, the top minds shaping its trajectory represent a tightly-knit community of shared innovation – and we had three of the best participating in this forum.
We'll give Andrew Kumar the final word: “It’s definitely a fun time to be in this space. It can be confusing, but there's a lot of innovation and disruption happening – and it's ultimately for the business and end customer's benefit.”
I can hear Hulk Hogan saying, “Amen, brother…”
<hr />
Big thanks to: 
<ul>
<li>Rasmus Skjoldan. Andrew Kumar, and Sana Remekie for participating</li>
<li>Matt McQueeny for helping to moderate, facilitate, and transcribe this session</li>
<li>Janus Boye for creating a community to host these kinds of debates</li>
</ul>

Wrestling with Category Confusion in the DXC "Slackdown"

“I get by with a little help from my friends...”
When The Beatles recorded this classic tune, they probably didn’t realize it would one day land on Rolling Stone’s list of <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rolling-stone-500-top-beatles-songs/" target="_blank">500 Greatest Songs of All Time</a>. Then again, maybe they did. They were, after all, The Beatles.
We all need a little help sometimes. Case in point: if you’re feeling overwhelmed by the specter of evaluating content management systems, your friends at <a href="https://uniform.dev/" target="_blank">Uniform</a> are providing a little help to get by.
That help comes at just the right time. With so many CMSes flooding the market – from monolithic to headless, open source to composable – finding the right solution can feel a little helter-skelter. Using Uniform's <a href="https://uniform.dev/resources/cms-comparison-guide" target="_blank">CMS Comparison Guide</a>, you can get a vendor-neutral breakdown of some leading CMSes and tips for picking the best tool for your job.
<h2>Navigating the noise with Uniform</h2>
Uniform is a new breed of digital experience composition platform (DXCP) that works with many of the world’s leading CMSes as part of a composable architecture. It gives developers and business teams the tools they need to do their best work and deliver faster than ever.
Uniform works as a value-add for many companies because its product can tap both emerging technologies and legacy systems through what they call an “experience layer.” For developers, this means greater flexibility and less time creating “glue code” between services. For marketing teams, this layer provides a consistent experience in accessing data from multiple sources or previewing content prior to publishing.
No stack would be complete without CMS. Because these platforms play a central role in content development and delivery, it makes sense that Uniform would have insight into the different types of CMSes available – and how to choose the right one for your goals. 
<h2>What’s in the CMS Comparison Guide?</h2>
The in-depth comparison guide catalogs the details of 15 leading CMS vendors, including three monoliths and 12 headless and composable CMSes. Along with side-by-side comparisons, the guide details the strengths and weaknesses of each vendor across features such as content modeling, integration, workflow, and more.
The real "meat" of the guide is the granular comparison table, which organizes the attributes for each system into a large grid. This allows you to scan every vendor's abilities – from delivery APIs to CDN capabilities – with relative ease. 
“The CMS field is getting increasingly crowded, making it difficult for brands across industries to identify a partner and know where to start,” said <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/is-the-birth-of-dxc-the-death-of-dxp-a-conversation-with-darren-guarnaccia-president-at-uniform/">Darren Guarnaccia</a>, president, Uniform. “Our guide helps you cut through the noise, as our team has decades of experience working with and for CMS providers. Our platform further assists companies by preventing them from getting locked into a single vendor, fueling more innovation, and eliminating content management pain points.”
Cutting through noise and eliminating pain points? Sounds like the kind of help we could all use from our friends.
If you're ready to avoid a hard day's night, <a href="https://uniform.dev/resources/cms-comparison-guide" target="_blank">download Uniform's CMS Comparison Guide</a>.
<h2>About Uniform</h2>
Uniform DXCP speeds up time to value for composable-experience architecture, lowers development costs, and makes it easy for business users to build digital experiences. A composable orchestration layer for legacy systems and headless APIs in Uniform DXCP eliminates the need for complex custom integration code, which delivers no business value. Instead, available for marketers, merchandisers, and other business users are no-code tools to build digital experiences with content from any source – without submitting developer tickets. Furthermore, Uniform DXCP’s high-performance personalization capability, delivered at the edge, raises conversion and CX for all channels.
Learn more at <a href="https://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Funiform.dev%2F&amp;esheet=53363599&amp;newsitemid=20230320005058&amp;lan=en-US&amp;anchor=uniform.dev&amp;index=11&amp;md5=44f6949a6ad8549958a74a274dbc71fa" target="_blank">uniform.dev</a> and follow them on <a href="https://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkedin.com%2Fcompany%2Funiformdev%2F&amp;esheet=53363599&amp;newsitemid=20230320005058&amp;lan=en-US&amp;anchor=LinkedIn&amp;index=12&amp;md5=c100ec7e79a11df76897aa4ce2fb0f43" target="_blank">LinkedIn</a> and <a href="https://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2FUniformDev&amp;esheet=53363599&amp;newsitemid=20230320005058&amp;lan=en-US&amp;anchor=Twitter&amp;index=13&amp;md5=02b5c59cd07ca0555ebf05eff75f2814" target="_blank">Twitter</a>.

Uniform Releases Comprehensive CMS Comparison Guide

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Uniform logo against a blue background featuring logos of various CMS platforms

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The Hero’s Journey to Composable: A Conversation with Uniform’s Mark Demeny

Uniform Adds New Visual Editing and Integration Features to Enhance DXCP

Wrestling with Category Confusion in the DXC "Slackdown"

Uniform Releases Comprehensive CMS Comparison Guide

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