Sitecore Terminology in a Changing Marketplace

Platform DXP/CMS

This is how we (the Sitecore community) are referring to the Sitecore XP/XM product that has been around for 15+ years (also known as "the monolith"). As of this writing it is in version 10.2, about to be 10.3 soon.

XM Cloud

The first SaaS version of Sitecore XP product. It has had all of its "XP-ness" gutted from it, streamlined as a headless CMS, then built up with some neat new features such as Pages (new editor), Components, delivery of content via GraphQL/JSON, and some basic personalization. XM Cloud is currently on version 1.2.98 (yes, it's a new versioning system, because it's a new product). Its codebase has forked from Platform DXP/CMS XP/XM. Think of it more like they used the super-mature content management capabilities of Sitecore XP, copied it, made a new product out of it, and started building on top.

Managed Cloud

Sitecore can host your Sitecore Platform DXP (formerly Sitecore XP) in THEIR cloud and you pay them for hosting your solution.

CDP/Personalize

This is basically the same product with two different capabilities that can be turned on or off depending on which license you purchase. The CDP provides user profiling and analytics and Personalize provides the ability to create rules that affect what content a user sees on your website.

Content Hub

This product was born as a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system but has grown into a marketing task/content workflow engine with many other content ingestion, task management, and content ideation capabilities. As a DAM only, it can be integrated with any of the Sitecore content management products to make asset delivery happen for web pages, including edge delivery.

Content Hub One

This product uses the innate structured content capability that was part of the DAM solution and makes it work.

Composable

A strategy for building web pages that integrates features and content from multiple SaaS platforms to construct a web experience that is closer to the ‘glass’ (i.e. browser). Compared to integrating systems using server-side code, the advantage of doing it in JavaScript in the browser is that performance and interactivity can be better.

Monolith

A system where all the logic is in one unit. That unit is typically compiled and deployed as a single unit. The reason it is derisively called “monolith” is because it tends to be large and not very nimble. This is the traditional way of building Sitecore XP (now Platform DXP/CMS) solutions.

Headless

A strategy closely related to ‘composable’ where the User Experience of a website is completely separated from the CMS or Commerce (or other) engine that is providing content (CMS) and functionality (Commerce). Typically the “head” is created in JavaScript (as defined in composable), but not necessarily. Headless really just describes the separation of the content management or commerce management from the user experience that utilizes the CMS or Commerce platform.

Cloud

Whew, this can be a whole bunch of things so I’m just going to try to define the concepts around the Sitecore Ecosystem:

1. Public Cloud Providers (e.g. AWS, Azure, GCP). Your Sitecore XP solution could be deployed in any one of these cloud providers. The Public Cloud Provider account could be owned by YOU (i.e. your company), or you could pay someone else to use theirs (Oshyn does this for customers). Your public cloud provider account can be connected up to your corporate Data Center or Office using Site2Site VPNs to allow your website to access internal systems.
2. Sitecore Managed Cloud — Sitecore MC uses Azure. You are paying Sitecore to host it in Azure instead of hosting Sitecore XP/XM in your own environment (either your own data center or your own Public Cloud Account).
3. XM Cloud - new Sitecore product described above.

SaaS

Software as a Service - this is probably the most well-known of these terms, but I’ll give it a few words from the Sitecore angle. It means Sitecore owns/is responsible for the platform (either XM Cloud, CDP or Content Hub). You, the customer, don’t do anything other than ask for an account, pay the monthly or annual price and get a login to do everything you need. The biggest advantage here is you no longer have to upgrade your Sitecore software, it happens automatically (just like you don’t incur any effort when you get a Salesforce upgrade or a Constant Contact/MailChimp/Marketo/Eloqua upgrade).

Edge Delivery

Pushing both content and logic out to servers that are closer to the end user in order to improve performance. A more traditional (read ‘older’) phrase for this is CDN (content delivery network). However, the traditional CDNs tended to be ‘dumb’ in that they would just cache and serve static files, while new “edge delivery” could also provide Rendering Hosts to do SSR (Server Side Rendering) using JavaScript.

Rendering Host

Sometimes you build a ‘head’ in a headless application that requires some server side code execution. Since your head is built in JavaScript, it is possible to make your JavaScript application run on a Rendering Host that is smart enough to know which pieces of your head application MUST be run Server Side and which pieces of your head application are capable of being pushed to the Edge and run on the browser. In the Sitecore Headless world, there is a component that REQUIRES a rendering host in order to translate the Headless CMS content feed from the CMS to the JavaScript libraries used to render the content. This component is called JSS SDK. It is also possible for the Rendering Host to be .NET instead of JavaScript if you plan on either proxying your headless CMS services through a .NET application to a JavaScript head (because maybe you need to consolidate/merge it with data from another system) or if you do not want your head in JavaScript and instead want it in .NET.