5 Insights from Sitecore Symposium 2020

In this video Oshyn's CEO, Diego Rebosio, shares his top 5 insights from this year's Sitecore Symposium.

Video Transcription

I wanted to make a quick video to show you guys a bit of what we thought, at Oshyn, were the highlights of the Sitecore Symposium show. And I think it’s time to bring you up to speed as to what the latest is with Sitecore. And there’s some incredible things. In fact, there’s a lot more than I’m ready to talk about here. But this is probably just the top five things that if you’re a Sitecore customer, or if you’re considering Sitecore, you might want to know about the tool, things that are probably not in the analyst reports yet, and which are key for your decisions in the next six months to a year.

So the first insight is that Sitecore AI is free in Sitecore 10. And so what that means is that the Sitecore AI portion of the platform, which was basically an additional add-on that you would pay for is now free. Now the corollary to that is that actually it used to have restrictions on traffic. And per the announcement, those traffic restrictions have been removed. So any customer at any traffic level is able to use Sitecore AI without paying any additional charge as long as it’s Sitecore 10.

Highlight number two is that platform-as-a-service, that whole architecture is going to be deprecated in favor of containers. So for, you know, people that aren’t maybe as much into the tech side of things if you’re in marketing, or you may not exactly know what this means. And it may not matter to you. But if you’re the IT department is a big deal, because the newer architectures are all going towards containers. And so Sitecore is favoring that. But also what that means is, if you were planning on using platform-as-a-service as one of the key parts of your Sitecore architecture, you may want to look at that again, if you’re not too far along with it. And if you’re already in platform-as-a-service, you might want to start thinking about a plan over time, in which you can start moving away from that.

Insight number three, this is more of a personal opinion, I believe that Sitecore’s future is going to be in SaaS, software-as-a-service. Now, that’s something that’s been already stated by Sitecore. But the part that’s a bit more my own premonition on this is as to how that will happen. And so my thought on that is that it’s probably going to grow out of Content Hub. Content Hub is Sitecore’s Digital Asset Management product. And it’s a great product in that, in fact, I think it’s so great at what it does that you should not call it simply Digital Asset Management. It does so much more in terms of optimizing how you get work done inside of your marketing department. That is I think in a class of its own, if you don’t have it, I think you should definitely check it out. If nothing else, you know, ping your Sitecore sales rep and get a demo because it’s really out of this world, and everybody in your marketing department will love it. And you know, it might just make sense for you to implement in the enterprise. But you know, what I’ve seen is that it looks like, continuously that product is getting stronger, and it’s getting more and more features. So my theory is that there’s a good chance that a lot of the Sitecore software-as-a-service version of Sitecore is going to come out of Content Hub, which is growing pretty quickly. And it’s getting a lot of love in terms of R&D dollars from Sitecore. At least that’s my observation, I don’t really know for a fact those details.

Insight number four is content-as-a-service. This was announced by Steve, the new CEO. That’s another micro insight, I guess, is that Sitecore has a new CEO, Steve Tzikakis. And, you know, a lot of the announcements that I’m making come from his keynote, and you should definitely take a moment to watch it if you haven’t already. And Steve is bringing some great direction into the company. But anyways, that’s a side topic. The new content-as-a-service product is essentially taking Content Hub…and like I was saying, taking Content Hub and making it do newer things. Well, Content Hub is now able to produce your content assets that you’re going to use in all of marketing, and then you can take those and publish them right away into any kind of platform, not just a Sitecore platform. So essentially, you have an instant publish ability within the platform. And that’s really cool, especially when integrating some of the newer architectures. Again, this is a bit more technical, but for example, if you’re doing a headless site, this could be an interesting way of using Content Hub a bit more like you would use like a Content folder or some of these other headless type, or mixed delivery type of CMS’s. So you might want to check that out. And I think it’s got some pretty cool features in there as well.

Finally, one platform to rule them all. Again, with the announcement from Steve, one of the announcements he made is that…Sitecore traditionally has been known for being the platform that instead of just being really good at content management is really pretty good at everything. So you know, if you need analytics, it’s got some stuff in there. Of course, it’s not Google Analytics. It’s not, you know, Omniture Analytics and so on, but there are different kinds of analytics that you can only get from a CMS-aware platform. So for example, if you wanted to know specific visitors that came to your website and what they’ve been doing as they move along their visitor path, and to then analyze that in the context of personalization and other rules like that, you can only do that with something that’s got all that data integrated in there. And that’s something that Sitecore does well. And so it’ll have, you know, it has the A/B testing, it has the personalization, it’s got AI, it’s got commerce, it’s got Digital Asset Management, I mean, it’s got a ton of features all in there, which you can turn on and off. Some of them require a bit of developers like us to, to help you configure them and right size them, and basically put the features together in a way that you’re going to use, but it’s all in there. And so that’s kind of nice that you don’t really have to pay tons of money for other developers to go integrate them, you know, other vendors that shall remain unnamed, may have under the same brand, a lot of different packages. And so that kind of creates the illusion that they all work together. But in reality, I don’t know any of them that actually have one thing that really works in a coherent way. And so you still need to spend an awful lot of dollars, as you would with a complete other vendor to make them all work together.

So anyways, those are the highlights. I guess a bonus highlight, or insight, is simply that next year, Symposium, the plan is that it’s going to be a physical event, and it’s going to be in Las Vegas.

So finally, about Oshyn, we’ve been in business for almost 20 years now. In January it’s going to be 20 years. We’ve done over 500 projects, and we’re trusted by, I think we did a tally a couple days ago, we’re about 10% of the Fortune 50 use, or have used, Oshyn for delivering, enterprise class solutions. And we’re pretty proud of our clients, and we do some of the most complex Sitecore implementations out there. And we focus on Sitecore, you know, almost exclusively, we do some amazing work. And even though we’re only 50 employees, we’re pretty lean and mean, so we’re a pretty tight package.

That’s it. I hope you found this interesting. And feel free to drop us a note or contact us if you want to chat about this, or if you want some other insights, or you have any other questions, we’re here. Thank you.