Sitecore continues to double down on enhancing the customer experience with the unveiling of Sitecore Experience Manager (XM) Cloud. According to Gartner, “worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services was forecasted to grow 20.4% to total $494.7 billion in 2022.” It’s safe to assume that these figures will continue to rise in 2023 and beyond, highlighting the increasing global demand for the flexibility and freedom that cloud solutions provide.
For marketers, the need for a platform that empowers them to be agile and responsive in meeting customer expectations is paramount. Sitecore’s introduction of XM Cloud addresses this need, enabling marketers to deliver exceptional digital experiences.
Furthermore, Sitecore’s shift towards a fully composable architecture, compatible with various vendors, brings significant advantages for developers.
In this article, we’ll provide a comprehensive overview of the advantages of adopting Sitecore XM Cloud for your teams and business.
What is Sitecore XM Cloud?
Sitecore XM Cloud is a cloud-native modern CMS that enables brands to create, manage and deliver content to customers at fast speeds. XM cloud represents the transition of Sitecore’s primary content management solution to modern cloud architecture. It also includes the personalization and content authoring experience features for which Sitecore is already known.
It empowers organizations to meet changing market needs by providing a visual authoring experience and speedy performance. Marketers receive a more simplified platform, while developers are given the freedom to build experiences using modern front-end tools.
Sitecore XM Cloud offers pages and components that make dragging and dropping content easier. Also, the headless capabilities of Sitecore enable faster loading times and allow brands to choose the deployment options and integrations that work best for their needs.
Why Sitecore XM Cloud … and Why Now?
Brands are under pressure to quickly respond to changing customer behaviors, the emergence of new digital touchpoints, and the need to provide an omnichannel experience that seamlessly connects everything.
Sitecore’s Brand Authenticity Report for North America highlights that 70% of US customers want deeper, more personal connections with brands. This indicates that the future of brand experience will be focused on authenticity and empathy.
To cope with these demands for highly personalized digital experiences, companies need to be faster to market and be able to scale just as quickly. Moving to the cloud allows businesses to gain that scalability and easily cope with problems like security, variable site traffic, and multi-brand architectures.
Along with the customer demands for more personalization, the cloud aligns with Sitecore’s other focus areas, namely composability and MACH architecture. Adopting a composable approach gives businesses the freedom to choose the best-of-breed tools that work best for them.
Read More: Sitecore Composable DXP: At the Forefront of Innovative Adaptable User Experiences
How Sitecore XM Cloud Benefits Global Organizations
Organizations that embrace Sitecore XM cloud will be able to count on several benefits:
Swift Innovation & Updates
Whereas other CMS architectures may require organizations to update their software manually, the SaaS-based capabilities of Sitecore XM cloud mean that new features and updates are automatically delivered.
Elastic Scaling
Variable traffic demands can be difficult to manage as businesses cope with peak seasons and an influx of customers. However, they can simply set and forget to cope with traffic demands with elastic scaling.
Composability
Rather than be restricted to a complete suite, Sitecore allows brands to purchase solutions independently. Building a best-of-breed martech stack that features the right tools for the business becomes much easier.
Adaptable Engagement
As the market and customer expectations change, brands must be adaptable to respond or anticipate what’s required. Sitecore XM cloud enables that adaptability so that coping with sudden changes isn’t as challenging.
Teams can quickly launch new campaigns and go to market faster or quickly swap out underperforming third-party tools for better alternatives to rapidly improve performance.
Multichannel Content Management
Supporting personalized experiences on multiple platforms means that marketers need to be able to manage content efficiently. Sitecore allows them to create content once and reuse it across different channels.
Greater Simplicity for Marketers & Increased Agility for Developers
Marketers can count on intuitive interfaces, better content authoring workflows, and other features that streamline the experience and allow them to do their jobs much more efficiently. Developers can benefit from the freedom to use the frameworks and technologies that they’re most comfortable with without restrictions.
The introduction of headless solutions initially made it difficult for these two groups to coexist, as marketers needed to rely on developers to make even the smallest of changes to content. With Sitecore XM, they can manage content all on their own, leaving developers free to work on other tasks.
Latest Features of Sitecore XM Cloud
The benefits of Sitecore XM Cloud come from a combination of cloud architecture and Sitecore’s own capabilities. Some of the features that make Sitecore XM cloud that make everything possible include:
Sitecore Pages
An intuitive and visual editing experience enables marketers to build unique experiences across web pages. Access to static and dynamic content, templates, and media assets is available from one single location.
Multi-site Management
With multi-site management, businesses can deploy Sitecore Pages in multiple regions. That content can be easily translated into various languages and used to create a personalized experience for every customer.
Sitecore Component Builder
Sitecore Component Builder offers a front-end as a service solution with WYSIWYG for easy content authoring and restructured layouts that increase scalability. With these reusable components, content can be easily delivered to various channels and devices.
DevOps Tools
Sitecore makes it easier for developer teams to get up and running quickly using starter kits and integrated deployment. Basic code scaffolding, reference implementation, and automation help to save resources and time. In addition to XM headless development, SXA also supports React and Next.js development, which is a major game-changer. Let’s look at the impact.
Sitecore and Jamstack
First and foremost, what is Jamstack? Jamstack is an architectural approach, it decouples the web experience from any business and custom logic, effectively enabling a composable architecture with the use of APIs. With that in mind, Composability is a core reason as to why Sitecore is connecting with Jamstack. Sitecore is moving towards a fully composable architecture that is compatible with a variety of different vendors.
Another reason Jamstack is a smart move? The trifecta of project delivery: cost, performance and time to market. Jamstack is cost effective, increases performance and reduces the time to market.
There are even more benefits – within the tech industry there are a lot more developers that work with Jamstack technologies, such as React, Angular, TypeScript and Next.js, compared to the number of .NET developers that Sitecore was previously tightly coupled with.
React and Sitecore
Components is a big part of the conversation when it comes to key React concepts, as they are the basis of how React development is handled.
In addition to components, some other key React terminology includes state, properties, and elements. The state relates to React hooks and holds values of the component at a given time, typically referenced with “this.state”.
Properties are similar to state in that they hold values of the component but are more like parameters in that they are passed into the component and don’t change as frequently as the state can.
Elements is essentially how a React component can reference another React component. Then there are the ES6 concepts such as variable scoping, arrow function expressions, promises and modules.
While these concepts aren’t exclusive to React, they are heavily used in React development.
Cloud Portal
An easy-access portal makes toggling between different Sitecore products much faster and provides a single access point for launching solutions.
Build Your Next DXP with Sitecore and Content Bloom
Cloud infrastructure provides benefits of faster time to market, automatic updates, increased scalability, and more. It also provides the ideal foundation for building a digital experience platform (DXP) that allows your business to deliver personalized and engaging experiences to your customers.
Sitecore and Sitecore XM Cloud are the perfect tools to create a DXP. With the help of Content Bloom, an enterprise digital agency and experienced Sitecore partner, implementing a Sitecore solution and staying up to date with the latest innovations is simple.
Content Bloom can help you get the most out of Sitecore’s suite of products and take advantage of every content management and personalization feature it offers. When an enterprise energy retailer needed a way to overcome its security challenges, eliminate content silos and improve brand consistency, they turned to Content Bloom. By migrating them to Sitecore, they could take advantage of cloud infrastructure, a better content authoring experience, enhanced security, and headless capabilities.
Read the entire case study and learn more about how Content Bloom helped them.
