Sitecore Symposium 2024: Highlights, Key Announcements, and Roadmap Insights

One North had the opportunity to participate in the Sitecore Symposium this year by sending several of our team members to the event. As a bronze sponsor, we hosted the Happy Hour in the Solutions Pavilion. This intimate setting allowed for valuable networking with fellow technologists and marketing professionals.  

The event’s theme, “Power to Build,” highlighted Sitecore’s dedication to driving customer success and fostering innovation. CEO Dave O’Flanagan emphasized three priorities: being a trusted partner, offering customer choice, and continuous innovation. Sitecore announced crossing $500 million in annual revenue and introduced Sitecore Stream, an AI-driven solution designed to boost marketing productivity and business growth. Key features include brand-aware AI, generative co-pilots, and AI-enhanced workflows, all supporting marketers in crafting cohesive and impactful digital experiences. Customer success stories demonstrated how these tools improve conversion rates and streamline content publishing. Additional sessions covered topics like XM Cloud, Sitecore Marketplace, Sitecore XM, XP, and Managed Cloud. 

Trusted Partner

Sitecore aims to be a valued and trusted partner to each of their customers, supporting them whether they are modernizing their website or transforming their entire content supply chain and marketing function. With advanced technology, skilled teams, and a partner ecosystem, Sitecore positions itself as a reliable and capable partner that can support customers through their various digital transformation initiatives and needs.

Eric Stein, Chief Operating Officer at Sitecore, emphasized the importance of trust and community, announcing Sitecore’s HIPAA compliance for their Content and Experience solutions.

Customer Choice

There has been some confusion around Sitecore’s direction for customers regarding XM Cloud (cloud) and Experience Platform (on-prem). Sitecore provided clarity by reinforcing that customers have a choice to remain on-prem or to move to the cloud. Sitecore remains committed to giving customers the flexibility to select the deployment option that best fits their needs—whether that’s on-prem, cloud-based, or a composable architecture.

AI and Productivity Tool: Sitecore Stream (AI)

Sitecore addressed key challenges faced by marketers, such as the complexity of Martech stacks and the need for faster campaign delivery. Marketers today require tools that support rapid content creation and deployment to stay relevant and competitive. They are looking to boost productivity, cut costs, and achieve more growth with fewer resources.

To address these needs, Sitecore introduced Sitecore Stream, an AI-driven solution aimed at boosting marketing productivity and growth through intelligence at every point in the content lifecycle. Sitecore Stream consists of three core capabilities: brand-aware AI, AI-enhanced workflows, and generative copilots.

• Brand-aware AI: Designed to tap into all company-related data, making it accessible for marketers and developers.
• Generative Copilots: These five copilots assist at various stages of content and campaign creation:
  • Brand Assistant: Guides brand knowledge, guidelines, campaigns, and assets.
  • Campaign Copilot: Assists with campaign creation, deliverables, and adapting campaigns.
  • Content Copilot: Supports content creation and experience generation.
  • Experience Copilot: Helps with creating components, landing pages, and optimizing A/B tests.
  • Optimization Copilot: Provides improvements based on AI reviews.

The platform emphasized building brand, campaign, and experience intelligence with a commitment to AI trust and security. Sitecore does not use customer data to train its AI models, ensuring data privacy and security.

CMO Kathie Johnson shared the importance of brand consistency and the need for marketers to stay true to their brand identity across all channels and teams. She discussed the collaboration between product and marketing teams in developing Sitecore Stream to address real-world marketing challenges.

Sitecore stream integrates into Sitecore’s existing portfolio of products: Content Hub, XM Cloud, CDP, Search, Personalize, OrderCloud, and Experience Platform (XP). Through their partnership with Microsoft, Sitecore leverages their AI technologies, offering enterprise-ready solutions with a composable architecture, allowing customers to integrate their own AI solutions if desired.

XM Cloud Roadmap

Liz Nelson, Senior Director of Product for XM Cloud, provided an overview of the platform’s current state and roadmap. She highlighted its rapid growth, which has made it the fastest-growing product in Sitecore’s history. The team has been focused on defining its future, evolving it from a SaaS product to a comprehensive cloud platform.

Key updates and new features discussed include HIPAA compliance, publishing performance improvements, updated media library support, native A/B testing in pages, and significant architecture changes to enhance the developer experience.

Liz also outlined the vision of making Pages the central hub for experience building, with a focus on extensibility, contextual views, and AI integration. The introduction of the Design Library was highlighted as a game-changing investment, allowing for better management of design assets, components, and templates. Additionally, the Marketer’s Dashboard was also highlighted, providing comprehensive insights into site usage to support optimization efforts.

Next-generation publishing capabilities were also discussed, featuring a new content service to provide total publishing visibility, instant publishing, and scheduled releases. Expanded site foundries and management capabilities will also enable marketers to create and manage campaign sites quickly.

Finally, Liz highlighted the importance of reimagining content management to leverage AI to unlock intelligence within enterprise content. The development of this new content service is positioned as a long-term strategic investment in support of this vision.

Sitecore Marketplace

The Sitecore Marketplace is a new offering created to provide a dynamic solution for Sitecore customers and partners to discover, install, and integrate a wide variety of apps, plugins, and extensions. The marketplace is designed to accelerate implementation, enable flexibility and extensibility, and foster growth and innovation within the Sitecore ecosystem.

From a customer perspective, the marketplace allows users to easily customize and tailor their Sitecore environments to meet specific business needs. For example, users can integrate apps like a digital asset management tool and SEO health checker directly within the Sitecore interface. This provides a seamless experience for marketers and content editors to extend the functionality of their Sitecore deployment.

The marketplace offers developers and partners a smooth experience building, deploying, and sharing their own apps and solutions. The platform provides the necessary tools, SDKs, and documentation to create standalone apps, plugins, and industry-specific accelerators. Developers can manage their apps, control visibility, and receive insights on usage and performance.

Future Vision and Roadmap: Sitecore XM, XP, and Managed Cloud Roadmap

Sitecore’s roadmap for the next year and a half is all about making its platform the best single-tenant XP on the market. The focus is on simplifying integration with composable products and enhancing their managed cloud services to be the most secure, reliable, and scalable in the industry. Sitecore is also committed to providing support for their products through 2032 and beyond.

The roadmap includes many updates, including dot releases, Sitecore Stream, modules, and third-party compatibility updates. They’re also working on a second iteration of their codeless schema extension and focusing on tooling to assist with MVC to headless migrations. They’re committed to providing support for customers on containerized deployments and are spending a lot of time on security updates around their hub-and-spoke architectures.

Sitecore is also working on provisioning templates to be headless-ready from day one. They’re focused on Gen AI and intelligent DXP, with brand assistance and content generation capabilities. Their PaaS 2.0 architecture provides significant performance improvements compared to PaaS 1.0. Their Managed Cloud service will focus on end-to-end hosted services, routine and maintenance updates, advanced application monitoring, security operations, web operations, and disaster recovery.

They’ve also developed a DR validation tool to assess the likelihood of a successful failover and are building automation for customer-initiated DR testing. They’re also offering customer-assisted DR testing as an opt-in service. They’re even working to streamline the upgrade process for their products.

Sitecore is committed to engaging with customers, partners, and MVPs to ensure that their roadmaps are relevant and valuable.

Sitecore Symposium showcased the company’s commitment to driving digital innovation and supporting marketers with powerful AI-driven tools, flexible deployment options, and a trusted partnership model. From significant updates to XM Cloud, Managed Cloud, and Sitecore Stream, this year’s event emphasized Sitecore’s dedication to evolving alongside customer needs. With a clear roadmap extending into 2032 and beyond, Sitecore continues to focus on empowering brands to create impactful, secure, and data-driven experiences.

Photo Credit: Eugene Golovesov | Unsplash