Sitecore bets on best-of-breed, with its composable digital experience platform

Having raised $1.2B at the start of 2021, Sitecore delivered on its promise to rapidly accelerate innovation at its Symposium in Chicago this week with three key new product innovations; Content Hub One, Sitecore Connect, and Sitecore Search.

It also announced enhancements to Sitecore Experience Manager Cloud.

CEO Steve Tzikakis told Digital Nation earlier this year that he believed his business had stolen a march on competitors like Adobe in the creation of the next-generation marketing cloud. The company describes its approach as a composable digital experience platform.

The approach involving an open architecture that allows marketers to build their own tech stack easily is a break from the dominant model of the previous decade where Adobe, Salesforce and Oracle went on an acquisition binge to create huge unified clouds. More often than not, though that unification was more of a brand story than a technical amalgam.

The model came unglued as Adobe and Salesforce overreached, extending their strategy beyond marketing and into adtech.

Think of it as a teachable moment. And the lesson Sitecore has taken is that customers have complex needs that are better served by having a strong core platform that easily integrates with best-of-breed solutions.

Three new releases

Chief product officer at Sitecore Dave O'Flanagan outlined the three key releases around that core during his keynote speech at Sitecore Symposium.

Content Hub One meanwhile is a headless CMS (which means the content repository is decoupled from the presentation layer.)

He said, “Content Hub One has all of Content Hub’s, powerful content modelling, content authoring, and edge delivery, packaged in a radically simpler proposition with a completely new UI, and a simplified API focused exclusively on headless content management.”

O'Flanagan said that the fact it is built on the Content Hub platform means that marketers can be confident that it's a proven product with enterprise scale, and performance.

On the composability front, Sitecore Connect enables brands to use a drag-and-drop user interface to connect Sitecore products to an existing technology stack. With more than 1,000 connectors expected, Sitecore Connect will offer a low code / no code interface that will help brands build their own recipes or use the more than 400K community recipes expected to be offered through the product. The company claims that by using Connect, brands can simply define a target system, set the flow and publish.

The third announcement is Sitecore Search which leverages the capabilities the company acquired when it bought Reflektion (now called Sitecore Discover) last year.

“The acquisition was influenced by just how great the underlying technology was, but there was a bunch of super smart ex-Googlers with deep search tech and AI expertise. We knew they had the smarts to take this platform and abstract the technology from e-commerce products and actually apply it to content also.

According to O'Flanagan, “It provides fast predictive search, relevant content as you type. It anticipates your intent and milliseconds. It actually tailors a search using AI."

“The marketer can easily manage the search experience without technical knowledge, which is a really, really big differentiator. It also has detailed search analytics and content analytics to allow the marketer to understand their search performance, and tweak and adjust the search indexes as needed to make the experience as performant as possible.”

On the XM Cloud upgrade meanwhile, he said, “XM Cloud is the platform and architecture completely retooled for the cloud-native world. It's our front-end authoring environment that is dramatically different.”

He said it offers unparalleled marketer and business user productivity. “And we've got embedded personalisation and testing that provides everything that actually had a more.”

What’s next?

While these products are now available O'Flanagan also flagged a new area of innovation, called Project Affinity internally. “It’s going to expand Order cloud and create a much broader commerce platform particularly targeting B2C commerce."

It is going to involve two key innovations, he said. “The first we're going to take IP from Discover and embed that into Order Cloud.  They’re not going to sit side by side. We're enhancing the Order Cloud solution with IP from Discover, and adding extended capabilities like products catalogue, merchandising, analytics, and AI, all within the order Cloud Platform.”

“Secondly, we're going to create a storefront builder in XM cloud with a suite of commerce components that can be assembled into pages in our visual authoring environment.”

He told delegates, “We believe this is going to make order cloud a true competitor in the composable commerce space.”

Andrew Birmingham travelled to Sitecore Symposium as a guest of Sitecore.