The Role of Digital Experience Platforms in Modern Applications

by Shailesh Shivakumar

Modern digital applications demand engaging and responsive user experience and require high and on-demand scalability and continuous availability. Mobile-first and cloud native applications are becoming the de-facto standards for enterprise applications especially for the customer-facing applications.

Key characteristics of modern digital applications 

• High scalability, high availability and high performance
• Lean architecture consisting of light-weight user interface and light weight data exchange formats and based on open standards.
• Responsive, easy to use and engaging user experience
• Modular with plug and play architecture with loosely coupled architecture.  

In this blog we will examine the key solution options for designing and implementing modern digital applications.

Solution options

There are primarily three solution options to build modern enterprise applications. We will discuss them briefly below along with their applicability scenarios.

Lean UI framework based solution

Customers can select the UI frameworks such as AngularJS or ReactJS and develop a web-oriented architecture involving microservices at the backend. 

Pros

• The option provides more control over building rich, responsive and Omni-channel enabled user interfaces that are forward looking (such as single page applications).
• Provides lean architecture that is scalable with minimal license cost through usage of open source technologies.

Cons

• Custom development needed for personalization, integration, workflow.

Applicable scenarios

• Ideally suited for customer-facing web solutions that need single page applications with high scalability and extremely rich user experience.
• Web solutions that need transaction management such as retail banking, utilities solution, healthcare solution and such.

Horizontal portals based solution 

Horizontal portal platforms provide personalized services aggregating information from various sources. Horizontal portal products provide in built features for presentation, personalization, integration and security integration.   

Pros

• In built features such as personalization, aggregation, single sign on handlers, localization and out of box integrators, workflow, localization, document/asset management, administration, user management, search, analytics and such.
• Easy to use features for page creation, site creation, content management, improving developer productivity.

Cons

• In few scenarios horizontal portals lead to high license cost, infrastructure cost and maintenance cost
• Performance is impacted by heavy-weight modules.
• Can lead to tightly coupled interfaces.
• Heavy integrations impacting performance.

Applicable scenarios

• Ideally suited for web solution which has heavy needs for information aggregation, personalization and unified access.
• Can be used for web solutions that has heavy dependency on presentation and content management.

Digital Experience Platform (DXP) based solution

DXPs are fully integrated technology stack that offers out of box capabilities for presentation, digital marketing, content management, analytics, customer segmentation, search, campaign management, collaboration, security, personalization, workflow and such requiring minimal integrations.

Pros

• Fully integrated stack offering next-generation digital solutions.
• Offers high end user engagement and enhanced self-service increasing digital revenues.
• Enhanced cross-site analytics for personalized content delivery.
• High productivity improvement and faster time to market due to out of box capabilities.

Cons

• Potentially high license cost

Applicable scenarios

• Ideally suited for digital marketing that requires personalization, customer segmentation and targeted content delivery.
• DXPs can be used as front-ends for commerce platforms, CRM platforms, collaboration platforms, banking platforms, retail platforms and such.
• Can be used for cross-channel campaign management and cross-channel analytics to provide targeted content delivery.
• Customer platforms to provide engaging and rich user experiences to enhance long term relationship.

About the Author

Shailesh Kumar Shivakumar is Practice Lead & Senior Technology Architect in Digital Practice at Infosys Technologies. He is an award-winning digital technology practitioner with skills in technology and practice management and has experience in the wide spectrum of digital technologies, including enterprise portals, content systems, and enterprise search. He has over 17 years of industry experience and was the chief architect in building a digital platform which won the “Best Web Support Site 2013” global award. His areas of expertise include digital technologies, software engineering, performance engineering, and digital program management. He is a Guinness world record holder of participation for successfully developing a mobile application in a coding marathon. Shailesh holds a bachelor's degree in engineering in computer science and engineering and is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in computer science. He holds numerous professional certifications, including TOGAF 9 certification, Oracle Certified Master (OCM) in Java EE5 Enterprise Architect certification, IBM Certified SOA Solution Designer, and IBM Certified Solution Architect Cloud Computing Infrastructure. He is the author of four technical books on digital technologies and has published numerous technical white papers related to digital technologies. He is a frequent speaker at events such as IEEE conferences and Oracle JavaOne.

This article was contributed by Shailesh Kumar Shivakumar, author of Building Digital Experience Platforms.