This year’s Sitecore EMEA partner summit has been held across major cities in Europe, so there has been a bit of a road trip for the Sitecore team. The partner summit is designed to deliver the plans and vision for the coming year of Sitecore and the partner eco-system, as well as the latest product information – in this case, the upcoming Sitecore 8.1 release.
Simon Etherington, UK Managing Director, kicked off the day with the usual thanks to the partner eco-system. The nice thing about this is that Simon has a wealth of experience in some major businesses, and therefore knows all too well what a difference engaging partners and keeping them aligned to the vision of Sitecore can make to its delivery.
Overall there have been some extremely positive signals in FY15, with new clients coming on board and existing ones remaining on the platform. The total number of Sitecore license holders in the UK is continuing to grow along with the number of partners that want to use and create Sitecore solutions for their clients. What was great about these numbers is that Branded3 has (to date) delivered five Sitecore solutions which in fact puts us in the top single digit % of partners based on licenses.
A fantastic figure of 99% retention rate shows that once a business invests in the platform, they continue to see the value of it. Simon’s final point looked at some incredible win-rate figures, showing that when the power of the platform is demonstrated in a pitch process against direct competitors, it’s very easy to see the difference and quality of the product.
The future of Sitecore
The biggest news in terms of the platform is to introduce an option that provides the core CMS features as a stand-alone solution, without the marketing and analytics. This is a very interesting approach and one that I’m quite intrigued about. I often use the phrase “Sitecore is more than just a CMS”, and that’s because it really is; the marketing features, testing, and automation alone make it stand out, but the experience database xDB kicks it up a notch. However, offering the CMS foundation is exactly that, a foundation: it doesn’t lock you out of it, it doesn’t mean you can’t use it when you are ready, but it means the platform will be even more approachable than ever and an attractive prospect to the SME market.
Something that was also discussed by Mark Floisand, VP Product Marketing for Sitecore, was the licensing model. As well as the stand-alone option above there are some new ways to shape your license to meet your requirements. I can’t go into details due to NDA, but it did show that Sitecore is listening to its partners and customers, and simplifying the license to be clear, understandable, and affordable no matter how big your company is.
I followed the technical track for the rest of the day, which primarily focussed on the continued development of commerce into Sitecore. The underlying Commerce Connect interface is powering a lot of options not only for Sitecore and their Commerce server options, (including the PoS version powered by Dynamics AX), but also for third parties, such as uCommerce, looking to connect and produce their own.
uCommerce follows the same principles as Sitecore by being a framework: it can be installed directly onto the Sitecore platform and fully integrates into the interface. This means that you can then manage your products, catalogue, etc. all through the content editor interface, so there is no learning curve for your web management team.
Commerce connect
The main thing about using commerce connect is that it “commerce enables” all of the features in the platform, i.e., allowing you to use all of Sitecore’s marketing features in your ecommerce space. For example, you can personalise your product pages, use MVT on category landing pages, and also use engagement plans to hook into events of your online shoppers, providing features such as abandoned basket rules or other marketing automation. The exiting part is you can bring your customers’ buying behaviour into the xDB, so you can see all of their purchase history, what products have been viewed, what products they might like etc. I’m not saying this is Amazon just yet, but it could be if you invest the time and effort on your customers.
Overall it was a generally interesting day – not as exciting as the Barcelona event at which SXP 8 was announced, but I guess it can’t be like that every time!
Source: Branded
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