Sitecore Symposium 2021 Recap

What a wonderful Sitecore Symposium we had this year, yes for one more year we had it online, but as always it was a lot of fun and a lot of new announcements and news, Sitecore CDP, Search, Discover, Send, OrderCloud and many more have been announced, all can be combined in a new CMS! yes a new composable CMS, you can have a fully SaaS content management solution with Sitecore new composable DXP, if you got excited, keep reading! :) 

Sitecore symposium 2021 started with an amazing keynotes (as always) from Sitecore CMO Paige O'neil, started with a new theme [Unforgettable digital connections, it’s the last impression], explaining how a lot of things changed during the pandemic, how we have a new digital habits and sure with things getting better with it many are super excited about in-person experience, but what people said about going back to normal, are they going back to shop?! are they planning to keep shopping online? a lot of interesting statistics shared by Paige, here are some:

1. 48% of consumers plan to shop mostly online vs 17% of consumers plan to shop in person.
2. 36% will not have a need to return to in-store shopping after the pandemic.
3. Even these high numbers are being high because of the younger generation, but statistics showed that the older generation also shifted, 42% of this older generation will not return to in-store shopping. 
4. 75% want to a blend of in-store and digital shopping experiences. 
5. BUT, 65% have not had a digital experience that exceeded expectations during the pandemic. 

 

Then Steve Tzikakis Sitecore CEO, shared a lot of news and facts about Sitecore journey over the last year and what happened since his announced plans in the last symposium, he started by the innovation acceleration and Sitecore doubled the size of R&D team, how Sitecore spent the 1.2 Billion and a new 1000 staff members has been hired and how 50% of them are on the R&D division. 

Steve also announced Sitecore new Composable DXP based on the new SaaS products acquisitions, which will offer the free selection of products, with the new DXP, you will transform your architecture via modern SaaS applications, based on microservices platform and open APIs, this means easy deployment, upgrade and migration time, flexibility and choice, incremental module approach,  focusing on innovation, by giving you the tools to capture the hearts and minds of your customers. 

That was a closure of day one, BUT with second day of Sitecore Symposium Dave O'Falnaga keynote, was rich of roadmaps, plans and announcements, starting with Experience Manager Cloud, which is the new Composable DXP that Sitecore offers, which is a no-compromise CMS, which combine the traditional CMS features and also what headless CMS offer, all in one CMS,  a CMS that is headless, cloud native and Jamstack ready! 

Dave also announced Sitecore Symphony, which is also called Frontend as a Service, which is a visual editor that composes experiences from multiple content sources, its going to help marketers to build new generation of frontend with low code / no code and this is coming Spring 2022.  

Another announcement which is Sitecore Send, that going to be the core of messaging engine in the new DXP, its based on Moosend acquisitions and will be used as an email marketing automation, it will convert visitors to prospects and leverage AI powered recommendations. 

Also Sitecore CDP has been announced based on Boxever acquisitions, it will be used to collect analytics data for site contacts, basically tracking, identifying and understanding every visitor and retuning customer, will be used to segment and share customers. 

Sitecore personalize which is based on Sitecore CDP, Sitecore OrderCloud which based on Four51 in addition to Sitecore Discover which is based on Reflektion have been all announced during this excited keynotes, sharing some slides that summarize these announcements: 

But the above is not all, also Sitecore announced [Sitecore Health Cloud], which is Specialized sitecore experience manager deployed on MS Azure, and will be delivered with experts partners in this field, and Sitecore XP 10.2 release which will be very soon that have headless rendering 19 which bring MVC solution into JamStack, enhance marketer productivity and improved upgrade experience 

I hope the above gave you a quick recap of what Sitecore symposium 2021 had carried and how the future of Sitecore will looks like, I will leave you with two slides that show you how Sitecore was looking like and how it become today! 

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