What does Sitecore XM Cloud Mean for the Enterprise?

Sitecore’s latest announcement of the complete transition of its core CMS product to a headless SaaS offering highlights its commitment to flexible and top-of-the-line digital experiences.

As part of their commitment to power dynamic and seamless experiences in the cloud, the release of Sitecore Experience Manager (XM) Cloud will provide customers with accelerated release cycles, better deployment processes, easier upgrades, and reduced ownership and maintenance costs.

What exactly does this mean for enterprises, and how can they benefit (or not) from using Sitecore XP Cloud? Read on to find out.

Sitecore Experience Manager Cloud: What Is It?

Sitecore XM Cloud is a complete SaaS-based CMS designed to accelerate time to market and scale infinitely according to your business needs.

With the growth of SaaS-based DXP, Sitecore XM Cloud is built to power cloud-based digital experiences by enabling marketers and developers to easily build, manage, and deploy content in little time ⁠—without the painful and arduous upgrades or infrastructure maintenance.

What’s more, businesses will be able to grow by integrating with other best-of-breed offerings available on Sitecore. This clearly shows the growth and focus of the Sitecore suite as it follows other products such as Sitecore Send, Sitecore Personalize, Sitecore CDP, and Marketing Automation.

According to Sitecore, the Sitecore XM Cloud offers companies a chance to build their digital experience platform on a cloud-based architecture by enabling continued innovation through constant new feature additions and improvements. They also provide elastic scaling capabilities and multichannel content management.

Read more: Sitecore Headless: What’s it?

Is Sitecore XM Cloud a Good Fit for Enterprises?

Sitecore Experience Manager Cloud is a very appealing choice for many companies, however, it may not be best for every use case. Let’s consider the following points and how Sitecore XM impacts your enterprise’s ability to deliver on your business goal.

Faster Development and Release

Using Sitecore XM Cloud means your development releases are going to be much faster than before. You can build and deploy a nimble Web UI with minimal stress.

For enterprises with websites based on Sitecore Experience Manager and Sitecore Experience Platform, the only downside is that you’ll probably have to reimplement and build your website all over again. In a sense, it’s a good option for brands that are building a new website.

Composable Experience

Sitecore XM Cloud follows other recent Sitecore SaaS-based solutions such as Sitecore Send and Sitecore DXP in enabling composability. Composability relates to the seamless integration of independent SaaS-based API-first solutions.

Sitecore makes it a possibility by making all of these capabilities public and secure on the internet so that you can compose them together. You can simply create your website using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS and integrate them with other best-of-breed SaaS solutions.

Take note, however, that all the key features present on Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) such as analytics, personalization, AB testing, and campaign management, won’t be available here since it’s essentially a headless solution.

Ease of Adoption

Keep in mind that, for an existing Sitecore customer adopting XM Cloud, you’ll have to untangle all the functionalities on XP and re-architect your website. Since the XM Cloud is headless, you’ll have to start adding new functionality to replace all the features that were previously part of your digital experience platform with Sitecore XP.

For a company just starting, this offers you a chance to adopt Sitecore’s SaaS-based offerings right away.

Internal System Integration

Enterprise customers want their website to connect with their own internal systems such as ERP, product information, custom CRM, search engine, and other internally hosted solutions that are not cloud or SaaS-based. For companies with this unique architecture, the XM cloud may not be ideal for you.

The old way of connecting your CMS to other internal systems is obsolete. Now, you will need to create your own external service layer outside of the CMS for any connections to your internal systems. Then, you need to use the “composable strategy” or the “Back-end or Front-end” strategy to bring the data together with your content for end users.

Another potential challenge for these enterprise companies is the choice between using JavaScript or building a new .NET application or Java application to access and connect to the internal systems.

Build an Enterprise-Class Digital Experience Platform With Oshyn

Sitecore XM Cloud is another glowing addition to the Sitecore suite of products built to meet modern enterprise needs. As a headless and modular product, XM Cloud allows enterprises to integrate other Sitecore SaaS offerings and third-party best-of-breed solutions to form their digital experience platform.

While this is a welcome addition to the Sitecore suite, it’s not for all enterprises. Enterprise companies may not have access to some of their most used functionalities or have difficulty integrating with internal systems or solutions.

Sitecore XM Cloud is best suited for marketing-focused websites with limited complex functionalities that prioritize speed to market and SEO. Companies with complex logic, especially logged-in state logic that does not prioritize SEO, will have limited benefits and limitations. These limitations will outweigh the benefits over time.

Oshyn is a certified Sitecore Partner that can help you assess and audit your infrastructure and use cases to identify the Sitecore solution that’s suitable for you. Boasting a team of over 25 developers, analysts, and designers, Oshyn can help you with any Sitecore development or implementation needs you may have.

To learn more about Sitecore’s core offerings, read about the Sitecore Experience Platform.