Takeaways from Sitecore Symposium 2021

Composable is the new black.

This new buzzword was everywhere at Symposium. Together with MACH technology, micro services, and headless, “composable” is the word that is quickly being adopted to describe software that is friendly to the new enterprise architectural paradigms. I think this is the word that’s here to stay. Sitecore has done a great job, especially with its acquisitions insofar as adding to its product stack with that vision in mind. All the new acquisitions are “composable” and to that end, the pitch for saying that these new pieces play well with other composable products (Sitecore or not) is likely to resonate with customers. To tie it all together, Sitecore has announced “Symphony” which is not yet clearly explained, but it looks like it will tie in all the pieces via an editor of sorts into headless components that are then pushed to the edge.

The future of JSS is a little questionable.

I’m assuming that JSS will be supported for a while at a minimum, and so if you are already on that technology, you’re probably ok. I would inquire a little more, though, before deploying brand new sites on JSS as I have a feeling that JSS will be replaced by a whole new set of libraries in the coming months/years.

Sitecore XP User Profiles will likely be replaced over time by Sitecore CDP

Boxever (Now Sitecore CDP) looks like it will become the new source of truth for all customer journey information and the centralized point from which you decide on personalization rules, perform A/B testing, and enforce privacy. This will help Sitecore CDP functionality be useful outside of Sitecore CMS websites (and on any CMS basically) and to track activities that are beyond the website.

Sitecore OrderCloud will likely be where all new Commerce sites go as the old Sitecore Experience Commerce eventually goes away

With lots of issues from back in the day when it was Microsoft Commerce, Sitecore XC has been problematic to say the least, and customers that are on it (including our own) seem to have numerous stability issues, with significant amounts of functionality lacking. It did have a place, and Sitecore did a great job at integrating it with XP to deliver a better mix of personalization and ecommerce. This being said, the new Four51 acquisition is now Sitecore OrderCloud. Four51 was fully MACH certified before the acquisition, and with significantly more functionality and stability than Sitecore XC, OrderCloud will do really well from what I can gather. If you are on Sitecore XC, (or on any other commerce platform that you are not happy with), you should definitely check this one out as it has vast functionality and is really well set up for the future (architecturally speaking).

Reflektion will eventually yield a new Sitecore Search and Sitecore Discover

Sitecore Discover is likely to come out first, and it will be a recommendation engine for ecommerce—while Sitecore Search will be more about having something out-of-the-box that is better than SOLR. While we love SearchStax (a great SOLR cloud vendor) and think that you should be using it for any new installs, it remains to be seen how they do long term.

In conclusion, this is going to be a really great year for Sitecore in terms of innovation. I applaud the changes and purchases made by Steve Tzikakis. I can’t wait to see how this evolves. Great job guys. I really enjoyed this Symposium.

If you didn't get a chance to talk to us at Symposium or would like to continue the conversation, schedule a meeting with us.