Video: 10 Minute IT Jams — Who is Sitecore?

Sitecore has big ambitions for the future. 

That is clear from Senior Director of Product Marketing, David Schwer, who joined 10 Minute IT Jams this week to outline the global company's next chapter following its recent $1.2 billion investment. This unprecedented injection of capital, Schwer says, is fuelling the transformation of how businesses connect digitally with their customers.

"Sitecore makes a digital experience platform," Schwer explained, "and the way that our company has evolved really came out of our heritage in the web content management space." According to Schwer, Sitecore's cutting-edge technologies drive the digital presence of over 3,000 brands around the world. "That's probably what most people know Sitecore for," he added.

But the company now sees itself as far more than a provider of traditional content management systems. "Using that as a starting point, there's a whole wrapper of other products and services that make up that digital experience platform," Schwer said.

The Sitecore platform, he explained, "spans content to commerce". This means supporting processes from "upstream content creation via our Sitecore Content Hub," where teams can organise digital assets, to "commerce products" that power online sales and product discovery.

"For us, Content Hub handles the strategy, the planning, and the execution of making content for delivery – which brings us back to that heritage we have in web content management," he said.

Schwer detailed how, following a series of acquisitions in 2021, Sitecore expanded its offerings. "We really built out what we call our experience pillar of our products – this is personalisation, customer data platform," he said. The logic is simple: "Using that heritage of content, now you want to marry that with data to deliver actual personalisation."

On the commerce side, Sitecore offers "a full e-commerce suite", but has also made moves into "product discovery", harnessing real-time data to suggest new items to customers and improving the customer journey through intelligent recommendations.

The $1.2 billion growth investment, announced earlier this year, is firmly focused on accelerating innovation and strengthening Sitecore's product suite. "Most of that actually went into research and development," Schwer said, describing how the money has helped Sitecore "build in-house development" and "round out that digital experience platform".

Notably, the funding has also enabled a rapid expansion in headcount and global reach. "We've almost doubled our employee count since our CEO Steve Zakakis took over," he said.

But for customers, the most visible impact is the accelerated rollout of "new products, new services, and then, as I said, having more resources to make you successful," Schwer said.

Asked about the trends driving Sitecore's future product development, Schwer is clear that flexibility and personalisation remain top of mind. "As we think about upstream content creation, one of the big themes we're investigating is modular content," he explained. This approach allows businesses to reuse blocks of information "more effectively and across different channels".

Within content management specifically, the push is towards cloud-native, multi-tenant solutions. "We see this opportunity in the market for a real, highly configurable CMS solution that can again be elastic with the amount of visitors that you get," Schwer said, highlighting the benefits of scalability in a cloud environment.

When it comes to the customer experience, Sitecore is investigating how to "activate your data" and "create personalised experiences while still retaining compliance and really treating customers like you want to be treated yourself." Schwer noted the growing importance of first-party data: "We all know that cookies are going away, you need to be able to use your first-party data better."

In commerce, rapid improvements continue in product discovery. Schwer pointed out that consumers expect a sophisticated experience from something as simple as a website's search bar. "There's so much elegance that's presented to people with a good product discovery experience," he said, noting that this is an area where Sitecore wants to "continue to press on".

On the practical matter of how businesses can engage with Sitecore, Schwer highlighted the company's worldwide footprint. "We have teams in all the regions around the world and so we can engage with you," he said. He also suggested interested businesses search for Sitecore online or use the company's partner network to find locally certified partners. "It'll be regionalised, help you get in touch with regional partners and regional Sitecore resources," he explained.

As Sitecore pushes onwards with its rapid evolution, Schwer is unequivocal about the company's ambitions to support businesses on their digital journeys. "It's about offering new products, new services, and then as I said, having more resources to to make you successful," he said.