How to Create Composable Commercial Software with Mendix

Composability achieves business agility by reusing engineering efforts rather than replicating them. For Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), composable business models champion resilience, adaptability, Lego-brick modularity, and–when successful–can create exponential growth.

A single composable solution can be used in limitless applications, resulting in a software development framework that tech writer Chris Dixon likens to compounding interest in finance.

However, with low-code, you don’t need to wait for your investments to mature. Mendix’s model-driven development platform naturally fits within—and complements—a composability framework. If composability is the what, the Mendix platform—accelerating app development with easy technology integration and horizontal and vertical scalability—is the how.

Mendix, composability, and independent software vendors

Mendix’s approach to low-code application development and composability share a multiple-discovery-style relationship. Both have a long history of using order, efficiency, governance, and scalability as philosophical North Stars. In our age of rapid technological change and social unpredictability, connecting the two is a powerful blueprint for competitive advantage.

Engaging low-code, model-driven development to create reusable solutions that are easily maintained and easily scalable allows an ISV to extend its catalog of services with fewer resources and less work. Using the Mendix platform to create a composable framework enables ISV partners to:

  • Never miss an opportunity: Rapidly develop, templatize, and reuse solutions that reduce your time to market.
  • Become agents of digital transformation: Create, adapt, maintain, and upgrade core commercial software solutions on cloud-native architecture.
  • Stay relevant, with reduced overhead: Easily build custom third-party connections or use innovative connectors built into the IDE to incorporate cutting-edge technology into a commercial solution.

Incorporating composability into your solutions portfolio

Mendix enables an ISV to kickstart a suite of offerings by building a starter application. Think of this application as a component or reusable element within your composable framework.

An ISV can reposition this Mendix-built starter application horizontally to create new opportunities in parallel use cases and market scenarios. Mendix also makes the app easy to iterate and maintain throughout the development life cycle, utilizing new technology and vertical scaling possibilities to reinforce constant improvement.

With composability, each new use case requires drastically less development time than the original implementation. There’s even space for composability in highly regulated industries like finance and insurance. Mendix customers in both sectors use—and reuse—sharable components to expedite development in each new scenario, from single sign-on (SSO) applications to large-scale regulatory compliance that meets FedRAMP specifications.

Mendix makes it easy to integrate with the latest technology

Enhancing a commercial solution so an enterprise can recognize the most value becomes even more powerful when you quickly and efficiently incorporate the features users want. Let’s face it: reinventing the wheel is not cost-effective. Why rebuild for each instance when a robust marketplace of third-party and managed service provider user-facing solutions is available to integrate with your product?

Further, why clutter your core? Architecting composable modules within the Mendix platform enables adaptability. In addition, you can minimize the customer experience interruption by retaining a composed front end while you modernize the back end. And finally, you can drive the adaption and consumption of new and existing services by repackaging APIs by the business case.

The result is a suite of scalable, adaptable solutions that an ISV can quickly iterate and implement across its customer base.

What does that mean for partners and enterprise customers?

Composability is not gated by industry, application, or use case. ISV solutions and components built on Mendix can serve as the kernel for something bigger, ensuring that each round of application development is an opportunity for reuse. Enterprise customers with business models built around efficiency appreciate a marketplace of composable solutions and components designed to the highest security and governance standards.

An ISV can use Mendix low-code application development to spin up a new commercial use case for a tool or service. When time and budgets are tight, a Mendix-built application or component is implemented quickly into an Enterprise ecosystem and connects agnostically to different systems. The result is one application or component that serves multiple experiences for different users through APIs and connectors. Composable assets create infinite possibilities for extending your ISV portfolio and integrating into your Enterprise customer’s ecosystem with less technological overhead.

Composability allows your ISV to grow exponentially

Low-code speeds up the process of digital transformation at a time when acceleration is essential to survival. Enterprises need to move fast. They need access to technology innovation to, in turn, create market differentiation.

ISVs that can pull from their internal applications and what’s available through Managed Service Providers (MSPs), open-source marketplaces, and other third-party sources stand to offer more to their customers. When ISVs integrate apps into customized modular component blocks, they save development time and redefine customer expectations with new functionality and updated experiences.

With Mendix, ISVs create solutions that are available for reuse based on opportunity and technology. As their stable of Mendix-built applications grows, ISVs begin to satisfy their customers’ needs with practically the same availability as out-of-the-box solutions. ISVs can also create solutions using the Mendix low-code application development platform that customers can take and customize with their own internal development team.

Mendix Makes It Easy to Build Composable Services

For today’s enterprise, disruption is a constant. Technology is always in motion. Just understanding the evolution of the market is a full-time job. Low-code application development is the vehicle ISV organizations need to move quickly and scale efficiently to build the right solutions for their enterprise. Reach out to start your composable commercial software journey.