Sitecore’s Composable DXP and 2021 Acquisitions

2021 was an accelerating and fruitful year for Sitecore as they expanded their vision of the future with valuable acquisitions of Boxever, Four51, Moosend, and Reflektion. Sitecore’s product team continuously improves and innovates their Digital Experience Platform (DXP) in order for brands to successfully create digital connections.

Re-imagining the Future with Sitecore

Dave O’Flanagan, Sitecore CPO said: “Brands need to move at the speed of their customer. Sitecore isn’t standing still, we’re evolving and transforming not just to keep pace with the market, but to leap forward and be ready for tomorrow’s customer, wherever they may be, or whatever they may want.”

During this year, Sitecore invested $1.2B to drive growth and grew its R&D capacity by over 50% to accelerate innovation. Their 4 strategic acquisitions established Sitecore as the first cloud-native DXP on the market. This acquisition allowed them to re-imagine the future as a composable DXP where brands and organizations can assemble a stack as they choose.

Sitecore DXP revolves around 3 core pillars – content, experience, and commerce, allowing the technology to work in harmony within a continuous customer journey.

Content

As content is the heart of practically everything we do, it acts as the center of the DXP. Sitecore is one of the leading CMS technologies on the market, what makes it even more powerful is its acquisition of Content Hub. Sitecore Content Hub acts as a central tool for content strategy offering two important products:

Content Hub DAM – market-leading Digital Asset Manager that powers digital operations. It’s a tool that increases the value of digital media and provides organizations with advanced control and security.
Content Hub Content Operations – transforms and defines the way marketers execute their content marketing strategies and creative assets through easy collaboration and workflows.

Sitecore’s improved CMS doesn’t compromise developers’ productivity vs marketers’ agility. They understand the importance of digital immediacy and balancing site speed with content relevancy. For Sitecore, it’s all about delivering a fast, performant, and stable website that delivers great experiences and optimized for SEO.

Because of this understanding, Sitecore combined a traditional CMS with headless giving marketers and developers the freedom to build, deploy, and preview depending on their needs. The new CMS solution is known as Experience Manager Cloud – a cloud-native headless, that includes site layouts and page management that is easily scaled. Marketers are now exposed to a low-to-no-code environment with the ability to create a site with a new site management and visual authoring interface.

Experience

The experience pillar has 3 core capabilities, customer data management, personalization and testing, and marketing automation. Sitecore’s experience platform needed a more modern approach and evolved architecture to accommodate a cloud-native, multi-tenant headless platform. In order to do so, they acquired 2 products:

Moosend – now Sitecore Send – a powerful and intuitive marketing automation platform that utilizes data and AI to deliver an engaging omnichannel experience. Sitecore Send will act as the messaging engine in the new composable DXP.
Boxever – now Sitecore Customer Data Platform (CDP) – businesses can utilize data to make every customer interaction smarter, optimized, and more personal.  Sitecore CDP differentiates itself from other CDP vendors by acting as a “smart hub” and going beyond simply collecting data. Using AI and ML technology, the CDP is able to activate your data with cutting-edge decisioning, testing, and personalization.

A newly launched integration, based on Boxever’s technology is Sitecore Personalize offering real-time personalization and experimentation capabilities in a stand-alone product. This new tag offers more personalization capabilities with ultimate flexibility.

Commerce

As commerce becomes more complex by the day, Sitecore acquired two products that allow the platform’s capabilities to expand further.

Four51 – now Sitecore OrderCloud – a headless B2X Commerce platform, that delivers diverse experiences at scale with an end-to-end structure.
Reflektion – now Sitecore Discover – an AI-powered search and merchandising solution offering personalized recommendation in real-time. By combining it with OrderCloud, Sitecore creates unique buying experiences with data-driven results.

Powered by Reflektion, Sitecore announced Sitecore Search, which offers AI-powered content search that delivers instant preview search, dynamically indexed search content, AI assistance, and the ability to boost or bury content results.

Summary

Sitecore’s composable DXP offers 9 different capabilities across 3 pillars (see full stack below). Although it acts as a unified and integrated platform, the whole suite is optional, allowing the products to act as stand-alone solutions that can easily be integrated with other vendors without the need to upgrade.

To end things with Dave’s words: “The DXP is like a blank canvas, it’s going to allow each and every one of you to create a technology stack that’s as unique as your customer.”

To learn more about the composable DXP w atch our latest webinar Inside Sitecore's Composable DXP, featuring our VP of Client Services, Dave Stawinski, and Sitecore's Product Marketing Manager, John Massie.