Sitecore - "One" fit for your business

Yes, you are reading it right. Sitecore Experience Platform is the one-stop-shop for all your digital needs within your business and suits well in heterogeneous enterprises. Though every technology leader aspires to have complete control over their IT ecosystem and move towards rapid go-to-market, it is still a dream for many. In real-time, we have seen segregation of digital platforms is not just limited to the regions, it extends to the business units, departments with business units, individual interests, etc. Sitecore understands the problem and the complexities around such ecosystems, hence the product in nature can adapt to the dynamic needs of enterprises where Sitecore is used as a Digital Experience Platform for every touchpoint.

Based on our experience, we need to have a platform that can adapt and work seamlessly with multiple digital enablers in an enterprise to provide end to end digital customer experience which includes the streams like Commerce, Digital Assets, Marketing, CRM & Customer Data Platform, Channels, Search, Cloud and Integration.

Commerce: With the Covid situation all around the globe, the need for seamless and rapid eCommerce implementation is grown tremendously. Digital sales are now driven through the AI, multi-channel or omnichannel experiences and customers are looking for both connected, and context-driven sales, definitely not the traditional one-way product selling. Sitecore natively provides a commerce suite that is well known for the greater implementations around B2C for small to medium enterprises. On top of this, the recent acquisition of Four51 gives more strength to Sitecore on SaaS-based commerce implementation with any CMS platform on both B2B and B2C. Apart from these two native products, Sitecore goes well with the commerce platforms like Magento, Salesforce Commerce, UCommerce, Shopify..etc and this is quite common integration that we have seen in the past.

Marketing: Martech is another crucial segment in the experience platform and Sitecore has got an inbuilt Marketing Automation suite to drive the campaigns and journey-driven marketing executions.  The recent acquisition of Moosend gives more strength to the platform and brings a more sophisticated SaaS-driven marketing platform for marketers. Nevertheless, the enterprises who are Salesforce shop and got SFMC already in their Martech series can easily plug, integrate with Sitecore and as the same case for other products like Hubspot, Marketo..etc

DAM: Digital Asset Management is like the “heart” for any Content Management System, the inbuilt Media library feature available in Sitecore is good for a typical web implementation, where the assets are intended only for the build that we are working on. Enterprises who are looking to manage the digital assets end-to-end beginning from the creation, manage, process, moderation, usage, secure, and archive can look for “Sitecore’s Content Hub”, a cloud (SaaS) based ready-made DAM solution not just limited to the Sitecore but for any applications/platforms. Yes, Sitecore works well with other enterprise DAM suites as well like Aprimo, Digizute, and document or record management like SharePoint.

Channels: A decoupled headless model of exposing the content from the hosting platform to any channel is becoming the fundamental need of experience platforms. Sitecore comes with the native capability to perform both the headless model of exposing the content to various front-end channels either be its lightweight React-based application or mobile app or core applications built on .Net or Java.

CRM: Ready-made connectors are available to integrate the CRM platform like Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Zoho with Sitecore. Customer management can happen very well within the larger platform already available and Sitecore can be used as a front face to provide a seamless customer experience in all stages of CRM.

CDP: “Single view of the customer” by performing the data democratization and connected experience & marketing platforms drive the CDP need for business. Sitecore’s xDB is used more from personalization and profile management aspects only, but the true customer orchestration and journey management are expected to scale with the new “Boxever” in the Sitecore ecosystem. Of course, Boxever is not just a CDP rather I would call it a “Smart Experience Hub” which provides the true digital experience across channels/modes to the customers. Boxever is one more cloud (SaaS) based product within the Sitecore ecosystem which can work with any platforms in your business (Adobe, Salesforce, Microsoft. Etc) not just limited to Sitecore.

Cloud: The long-term strategy for Sitecore is always to be on the cloud and move towards infra-free implementations for any customer experience solutions. Sitecore is adaptable to all major cloud service providers, docker/container enabled in AWS/Azure and PaaS modeled in Azure. All the new add-ons like Boxever, Four51, Moosend are available in the major providers like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, importantly as “SaaS Platforms”. Apart from this, Sitecore has its cloud-managed services as well for hosting and management. The overall direction of Sitecore is to reduce the large infra investments and operational costs to the business, move towards the code-free or low code implementations, and go to market rapidly with SaaS/PaaS-based cloud products.

Integration: Microservices – API-driven model is the fundamentals of Sitecore which in turn accelerates the integration of Sitecore with any platform. There are many integration connector modules Sitecore provides in the product stack like Salesforce Connect, Dynamics Connect, Commerce Connect, SharePoint, and plenty of 3rd parties ready to use products are available to ease the integration of Sitecore with other systems.

Search: Sitecore natively supports Solr and in the legacy, it was with Lucene. Search implementations are always crucial in the experience platforms and the customer expects the search feature to be intelligent, context-driven, and personalized. The search implementations are made easy through the products like Coveo and SearchStax in Sitecore, where we see the business who look for enterprise search solutions use Coveo and search solutions specific to the experience platforms are in SearchStax.

Finally, the seamless customer experience, accelerated marketing & growth, connected digital touchpoints, single view of the customer, brand imaging, reduced operational overheads, meet global demands is possible only when you have a platform that is flexible to fit in the hybrid business models and IT systems and Sitecore will be an ideal fit for all your business needs.