Key Takeaways from Sitecore Symposium 2022
Nine of our Sitecore experts had the pleasure of attending the Sitecore Symposium last month. Our team is always energized by the opportunity to rub elbows with over 2500 fellow Sitecore professionals and enthusiasts in the community.
This year’s Sitecore Symposium was packed full of content around Sitecore’s composable functional areas, three new DXP product offerings and Sitecore’s Customer360 success plan. Sitecore 10.3 was also announced to launch that week, with plans for a Sitecore 10.4 launch in fall 2023.
Sitecore’s CEO, Steve Tzikakis, kicked off the meeting by focusing us on one percent.
Sitecore is going to help their customers improve their business one percent at a time with these three commitments: Innovation, Customer Centricity & Delight and Ecosystem.
How are they going to do that?
Composable
- Lower total cost of ownership: By moving to XM Cloud, customers and partners will no longer be responsible for hosting and upgrading their Sitecore implementations, lowering the customer and partner’s total cost of ownership.
- Increase ROI of content management: By having a composable end-to-end solution, Sitecore is enabling their customers to own the entire content lifecycle, and empowering them to face challenges of content demand from their customer channels. Sitecore’s composable solution will increase ROI in 3 areas: centralized asset management, improved content production and robust content management.
- Simplify complex solution stacks: Sitecore has developed a well-architected DXP foundation, which uses the same programming language (.NET), has a single data management platform (Sitecore Experience Database, or xDB) and a single API framework (Sitecore xConnect)—helping to simplify all integrations.
New Product Lineup
Sitecore is adding three new products to their DXP:
- Content Hub One: headless iteration of Sitecore’s existing Content Hub/CMS, allowing developers to build front-ends for content delivery across multiple channels while marketers work in parallel to create the content.
- Content Search: plug-and-play, AI-driven and personalized search engine solution, capable of searching content beyond just text, and promoting content based on customer’s behavior and search needs.
- Sitecore Connect: allows brands to integrate Sitecore products with existing solutions within the MarTech stack, having a drag-and-drop UI, and offering more than 1,000 connectors. Connect aims to solve complexities involved with integrations of the composable DXP.
Customer 360
Sitecore described their customer success plan and how to maximize investment through their three value pillars.
- Faster time to value: Sitecore’s Customer360 offers structured onboarding, certifications, learning and training. It also recommends adoption strategies, providing the right tools that are easy to use, enabling proactive, fast support to help its customers and partners get up and running as quickly as possible.
- Access to Sitecore experts: Sitecore provides full support throughout the entire Sitecore journey, offering 24×7 / 365 support, a support portal, community forum, documentation library, a customer success manager and much more.
- Drive results: Sitecore provides guidance on day-to-day operations, provides more value for partners, long-term optimization and over 60 robust assurance activities.
As organizations strive to achieve this 360-degree customer view, it’s important to understand what that means, the benefits you can expect to gain, and how to go about collecting data to compile that 360-degree view.
The Symposium may have wrapped, but our team continues to buzz with excitement over Sitecore’s new product suite. We’ve been sharing notes on our favorite sessions and new features, including:
- Deliver Fast using XM Cloud
- Sitecore Search
- The Future is Composable
- Content Cloud Roadmap
- CDP and Personalize for XP Fanatics
- Frontend Fabulous
Be sure to check back for future posts covering our thoughts on these topics and more. In the meantime, Sitecore is still offering a virtual experience, which allows registrants to access on-demand content from the Sitecore Symposium 2022 until Friday, November 18th. We highly recommend registering, which is free to do!
Photo Credit: Marcel Gruber | One North
As an Architect, Stephanie provides clients with quality products and services to ensure 100 percent satisfaction, continuously working to find best-in-breed technology to improve testing capabilities and solution performance.
Favorite breakfast food: Pancakes all day!
Most unusual job: Growing up on a farm, every summer from about age 10 I was a “bean walker.” A bean walker walks down a designated row in a bean field with a hook and cuts out weeds from the fields. This job of course no longer exists thanks to technology and chemicals.
Vinu is the Director of Solutions Architecture at One North, defining technical architecture for complex marketing/IT systems and products, acting as a technology consultant for clients and working with One North’s Strategy and Design teams to define and implement solutions that will serve the client’s objectives now and in the future.
Marcel is a Senior Developer at One North. He has worn many hats throughout his career and brings full-stack web development, SEO optimization, analytics, DevOps and marketing knowledge to the table. The result is a uniquely flexible skill set as well as a comprehensive approach to web development and digital marketing.