Sitecore DX: Key Takeaways

by
Tom Holt
,
Head of Strategy
May 4, 2023
5 minute read

That journey, in Sitecore’s (and many others) eyes, is towards a Composable DXP future:

A composable DXP is a cloud-native SaaS platform comprised of multiple best-of-breed solutions brought together in a modular way, leveraging open-platform microservices architecture and integrated via APIs, in order to connect with internal and external systems, creating a pluggable, scalable, replaceable suite of solutions which can be continuously improved to meet business and customer need.  

The ambition is to provide operational and technical agility to future-proof your enterprise and to support a seamless flow of content, experiences and data across channels such as web, mobile app, email, chat, paid and social media, smart tv and many others.  

It has been just over six months since we joined 100s of other partners and customers in Chicago at Sitecore’s Symposium event. With the composable proposition gathering real pace, partners and customers have much greater confidence in making the leap towards the new modern Sitecore, built around XM Cloud.  

At last week’s event Chief Product Officer, Dave O’Flanagan showcased the evolving suite with the latest additions and upcoming releases for XM Cloud and the wider composable suite. Whilst there was a clear focus on delivering the core capabilities one might expect from a Gartner Magic Quadrant DXP leader, Sitecore also had a firm eye fixed on serving the emerging needs of ambitious digital leaders on the journey to composable.

The XM Cloud editor experience continues to mature into an extremely intuitive and flexible one, enabling editors to leverage the core concepts of headless, componentised content and multiple sources and channels for that content. Whilst still creating an intuitive page-based preview mode familiar to most.  

With the explosion of interest in AI capabilities since the emergence of Chat GPT, Sitecore showcased how the platform may enable customers to leverage these services to support content and media production, optimisation and rights management (via Blockchain). More to come in this area over the next 12 months for sure.

Recognising the modern MACH-focused digital leaders demand choice and flexibility to use Sitecore products or others, Dave confidently reaffirmed their “friendly neighbour” strategy. He showcased the growth of Sitecore Connect integration apps which enable fast and frictionless integration to hundreds of market-leading providers for search, commerce, marketing automation, CDP and more.  

The vision is clearly to support this strive for composability, “with unparalleled choice and flexibility” but it has been clear for some time, Sitecore aim to dominate this space by becoming the only vendor with best-of-breed solutions across an end-to-end Composable DXP suite. This vision is to provide much desired modernisation to MACH, futureproofing organisations but providing comfort of technical simplicity and commercial efficiency in ownership of a Composable DXP.  

In a final round-up, with a nod to continuing and emerging trends towards seamless omni-channel experiences, Web 3.0, the metaverse and AI Commerce, Dave exclaimed “we don’t know what channels will emerge but I do know that Sitecore will be ready”.  

The composable content and DXP space is undoubtedly a crowded and competitive one. As a Platinum Partner with over 20 years' experience with Sitecore, UNRVLD welcomes these strives to composability and the options, openness and flexibility they provide – firmly leaving behind the monolith label.  

Whilst it is unlikely that Sitecore will tick every box for all customers, the emerging platform options will provide comfort for our Sitecore customers that a strong roadmap is laid out, albeit one with significant change. It will also command careful consideration for those setting out on their own digital experience and platform modernisation programmes.