What is Composable Architecture?

Composable architecture is a modern approach that enables no-copy integration with cloud data warehouses like Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery, and AWS Redshift. Instead of moving or duplicating data, composable architecture allows systems to directly tap into live data where it resides, ensuring real-time access, consistency, and efficiency.

How Composable Architecture Works

At its core, composable architecture eliminates traditional data movement by leveraging zero-copy data access. This means applications and services can query and process data in-place within a data warehouse or lakehouse, avoiding redundancy and reducing costs. By keeping data centralized and maintaining a single source of truth, businesses can ensure governance, scalability, and performance while integrating with best-in-class analytics, AI, and operational tools.

Key benefits of no-copy integration include:

Key Features of Composable Architecture

Composable architecture with no-copy data integration offers several critical advantages:

Directly queries and processes data within cloud data warehouses like Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, and Redshift, eliminating duplication and ensuring real-time access

Warehouse-Native Processing

Leverages the computing power of the data warehouse instead of extracting data into separate systems, reducing latency and cost

Unified Data Governance

Maintains a single source of truth by keeping all data centralized, improving security and compliance

Enables immediate access to customer, operational, and analytics data without syncing delays

Flexible Technology Stack

Allows businesses to integrate best-in-class tools for analytics, customer engagement, and AI without rigid dependencies on a monolithic platform

How Composable Architecture Works

No Data Movement

Instead of copying data into separate customer data platforms (CDPs) or analytics tools, composable systems query live data directly from cloud warehouses.

Warehouse-Native Computation

Applications execute transformations and aggregations inside the data warehouse, leveraging its processing power rather than external servers.

API-Driven Connectivity

Businesses can connect their existing tools—such as BI platforms, AI models, and customer engagement solutions—directly to the warehouse via APIs.

Scalable & Modular

Companies can add or replace services as needed without disrupting the core data infrastructure.

What It Looks Like in Practice

Instead of exporting customer data from Snowflake into a traditional CDP, a business using composable architecture would:

Activate Customer Data in
Real-Time

A marketing team can query customer data directly in Snowflake and push audience segments to ad platforms without data duplication.

Power AI-Driven
Personalization

AI models can access product and customer behavior data stored in Databricks, enabling personalized recommendations without ETL pipelines.

Improve Reporting
and Analytics

A BI tool like Looker or Tableau connects directly to a cloud data warehouse, ensuring real-time dashboards without stale or siloed data.

By keeping data centralized and accessible without copies, composable architecture streamlines operations, enhances decision-making, and ensures businesses can scale efficiently.

Benefits of composable architecture

Composable architecture offers several important benefits that make it an attractive option for businesses looking to build modern, agile and scalable technology systems.

Agility and speed

Composable architecture enhances agility by allowing businesses to quickly respond to changes in the market, customer preferences, or internal processes. With modular components, companies can rapidly deploy new features, update existing functionality or switch out underperforming modules with minimal disruption to the overall system.

Benefit: Businesses can innovate faster, improve time-to-market and maintain a competitive edge in dynamic industries.

Cost efficiency

By allowing businesses to purchase and implement only the components they need, composable architecture can be a more cost-effective option than traditional monolithic systems. Companies avoid the expense of overbuilt solutions and can scale their systems incrementally as needed.

Benefit: Businesses can start small, adding only the modules necessary for their current operations, and then gradually expand their system over time as their requirements grow.

Customizability and control

Composable architecture offers a high degree of customization. Businesses can choose the specific modules, tools and services that best align with their strategic goals, allowing them to tailor their systems to their unique needs.

Benefit: Companies have more control over how their systems operate, which means they can design a solution that fits their business processes, regulatory requirements and customer expectations.

Future-proofing

The modular nature of composable architecture makes it easier for businesses to adapt to future technology trends, industry changes or evolving business needs. As new technologies emerge, businesses can easily replace or upgrade individual components without having to redesign their entire system.

Benefit: Composable architecture ensures that businesses are not tied to outdated technology and can continue to evolve their systems to remain competitive.

Use Cases for Composable Architecture

Composable architecture with zero-copy data integration is transforming how businesses leverage their data. By keeping data centralized in cloud warehouses like Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, and Redshift, organizations can drive efficiency, real-time insights, and AI-powered experiences.

Customer Data Activation Without Duplication

  • Who benefits? Marketing and Customer Experience teams
  • How it works: Instead of exporting customer data into a traditional CDP, teams can query real-time data directly from the warehouse and sync audience segments to ad platforms, CRMs, and email marketing tools.
  • Business impact: Faster activation, reduced data redundancy, and improved personalization.

AI-Powered Personalization & Recommendations

  • Who benefits? E-commerce, Media, and Subscription-based businesses
  • How it works: Machine learning models access live product and customer interaction data from a data warehouse to generate real-time personalized recommendations.
  • Business impact: Increased conversion rates, better user engagement, and lower infrastructure costs.

Advanced Measurement & Attribution for Advertising

  • Who benefits? Digital Marketing and Analytics teams
  • How it works: Teams can run multi-touch attribution (MTA) or marketing mix modeling (MMM) directly on warehouse data, ensuring that ad spend is optimized without exporting data to third-party platforms.
  • Business impact: More accurate marketing measurement and reduced data fragmentation.

Real-Time Customer Support & Retention

  • Who benefits? Customer Support and Retention teams
  • How it works: Support agents and AI-driven chatbots can access up-to-the-minute customer data (e.g., past purchases, recent issues, and engagement history) directly from a data warehouse to provide personalized responses.
  • Business impact: Improved customer satisfaction, reduced churn, and more efficient support operations.

Conclusion

By leveraging data warehouse-native integrations, composable architecture enables organizations to build flexible, scalable, and AI-ready ecosystems without the limitations of traditional monolithic platforms. This approach ensures that data remains where it is most powerful—inside cloud data warehouses—while enabling seamless connectivity with customer experience, analytics, and AI applications.

Learn more about Uniphore and how we support businesses with advanced AI and modular systems. For more in-depth definitions and terms, explore our glossary of terms.

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