The Mythical “Monolith”

Creative framing is common in competitive technology sales. It’s an art form to position your software in a positive light, and your competitor’s software in a … less positive light.

This is sometimes known as “FUD,” or “Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.” Vendors will often “FUD the competition.” This happens all the time, to the point where I don’t normally respond to it. But lately, something has come up enough to bother me.

I was in Melbourne, Australia last week doing a panel discussion on headless CMS at our partner Luminary. There were five vendors on the panel.

Two vendors were from CMSs that are full-stack systems: web content management with a built-in delivery system (I was one of them; I’ll let the other vendor identify himself, if he so chooses).

Three of the vendors were representing systems that could be considered “pure” headless. (Two were ground-up headless builds. One was a spin-off from an existing vendor.)

I’m not going to name names, because I’m gonna get a little excited from this point forward. And, to be clear, the folks on the panel are all great people (I used to work with one of them). They represent good companies making good products.

But they fell into a pattern of FUD that’s become so ingrained that I don’t think they even notice it anymore. They kept calling Optimizely and my fellow full-stack vendor a certain word –

“Monolithic”

Oh boy. I have … feelings, here.

At risk of putting words in someone’s mouth, here is the argument from the perspective of a pure headless vendor.

Our system does a very tight, limited set of things. We understand you need to do other things – templating, personalization, data acquisition, etc. We want to give you the option of picking other vendors for those things. So, count on us for content management only, and pick from the buffet of other vendors for the rest of it. And if you don’t like something, just swap in a new component later on.

This is the tech buzzword du jour: “composable.” The idea is that you “compose” your suite from a cornucopia of technology options. You’re not locked into anything. Pick and choose. Be free.

(Note that the buzzword is new, but the concept is decidedly not. We used to call this “best of breed” back in the day.)

(Also, don’t get me started on the “just swap something else in” line. Until there’s a comprehensive, accepted protocol for MarTech, nothing “just swaps in.” Talk to me again when CDIS becomes a thing. And if you “swap something else in” by just including some new JavaScript tag … well, every system can do this. This isn’t a unique advantage, and everyone knows it.)

Now, I’ll again speak for our composable friends and assume this is the FUD they have about Optimizely and vendors like us:

Their system does everything, which means you’re locked into it all. You have to use what they provide, and if you don’t like it, too bad – you paid for it, so either use it or it’s all wasted. They want you to do things their way and their way only.

To them, we are what they call a “monolithic” system. And the reference is clearly pejorative – very rarely is “monolithic” used in a positive sense. They’re implying that we’re a big, black box of functionality that can’t be opened. We’re the Borg Cube of DXP.

Problem: this just isn’t true. It’s not true for Optimizely, and it’s not true for most of the other vendors in this space.

Here’s the truth:

• You can buy just our CMS. Lots and lots of customers do. We have hundreds of customers running our CMS and nothing more. We have lots of other tools, and we hope you use them, but you don’t have to pay for them if you don’t want them.

• Our CMS works with a wide range of other tools. We have official, supported integrations for 150+ vendors, from localization providers to customer data platforms to product information systems.

…wait, what does this mean!? Could it possibly mean that Optimizely CMS is composable too!?

OMG! What will we tell the children!?

The truth is, we are very composable. People have been composing custom MarTech suites using our product for decades. We were composable before “composable” was even a word.

Yes, we also have an experimentation platform, a content marketing platform, a customer data platform, a content recommendation engine, and a B2B commerce engine, etc.

A-ha! So it is a monolith!

…nope. We acquired all those pieces in the last two years. (Optimizely, Welcome, Zauis, Idio, and Insite, respectively.)

So don’t tell me our suite doesn’t play nice with others, because that’s literally how it was built. To be frank: I know our system is composable, because we composed it.

[ drops mic; exits stage left ]

I’ve given it a lot of thought, and I think this is where “composable” and “pure headless” became a pair –

A pure headless vendor has to be composable, because their product can’t complete the content cycle by itself. A pure headless system has no delivery and it has to depend on other tools to deliver content. Pure headless systems are incomplete, by design.

Then, in a fantastic turn of marketing, they took that incompleteness and re-framed it as “composability.” Sure, they might want to be composable. But they also have to be.

Optimizely CMS doesn’t have to be composable at all if you want to deliver a website. It stands alone for this use case. We provide a delivery layer you can use if you want, and most customers do. If you don’t, that’s fine – you’re not really paying extra for it. At some point, headless vendors decided to throw delivery away, made you to find your own solution, and somehow convinced the market this was a strength.

That’s like a company that makes tires claiming that they’re actually the best car company. Yeah, yeah, you just need to add the rest of the car to make it do anything, but that’s part of the charm. Sign here.

(A self-proclaimed “composable” vendor may claim that a built-in delivery layer means its a monolith, but who gets to decide this? Who gets to decide how much you strip off a genre of software before it reaches some ideal that you personally feel is pure enough?)

I’m tempted to say “composability is a myth,” but that’s too far. I’m sure there are systems that are indeed monolithic and live up to every word of the strawman quote I posted above.

But we’re not one of them. Neither was the other, similar vendor on the panel with us. In fact, I think those systems are far more rare than the market is leading you to think.

Now don’t interpret any of this as anger. It’s just a spirited response to … marketing. To … framing. To … FUD.

I know a lot of people working at pure headless vendors. I like them all. I love content management as a discipline, and I understand there are a lot of approaches to it. I’m a “Big Tent” guy.

But if you hear the word “monolith,” assume it’s simple marketing BS unless definitively proven otherwise. You can “compose” with almost anything. Don’t take the FUD at face value. Do your research.

Again, a lot of software marketing is about creative framing. I get that. But this label needs to be retired, because it’s become the broadest possible brush.

Anyone throwing around the word “monolith” is likely demonstrating more carelessness than expertise.