SaaS to the Future
A presentation at SUG Minneapolis/St. Paul - Q4 2021 in in Twin Cities, MN, USA by Jason St-Cyr
SaaS to the Future
Hello everybody!
For those that I haven’t met before, my name is Jason and I lead our global group of developer advocates at Sitecore. We try to help out in the community and get folks excited about what Sitecore has been working on.
Before I get started, I wanted to point out two big things with deadlines on November 30th… First up is MVP applications. There are no nominations required this year, so make sure to tell us about all the awesome stuff you did! Also, in March, SUGCON Europe is happening in Budapest, Hungary. The Call for Papers is open now, so think about what you want to talk about and get a submission in!
Today, I want to talk about the future of our industry. And the past. And a little bit about where Sitecore is heading and why.
A push forward
Sitecore has been talking about SaaS for a while now, and investing to make sure our customers are ready for the next technology wave in the industry. This isn’t the first time the industry has been trying to push us this way, though.
Back and forth
Our industry has this habit of repeating itself, swinging back and forth as it tries to solve similar technology problems over again. Server-side applications to client-side applications, back and forth we go. Bigger, richer media and applications, vs lighter-weight, faster downloads. We have been repeating this pattern a lot, trying to solve how to get rich experiences to users at high speeds.
From the past…
I got my start into the web applications software industry about 20 years ago with a job working on Java Applets, running in the browser. This is an actual screencapture I found from 2004 that somebody took because of a font issue they were having. This was state of the art stuff! You could click on these things and it would load a bunch of data about your courses and degrees. We called them ‘islands’. All data-driven.
You would download a 4 Mb applet that would have all the client-side logic. This was a huge download at the time, and people had to wait a while to get started. You’d run that in the browser on the JRE and provide a “rich” experience to the user, without all those pesky page loads that HTML websites were doing. It would communicate on a tight direct call to a running server-side EXE that had all the business logic. The communication stream was being optimized down to the bit to make sure it would be efficient. We had API version numbers that the applet would indicate when it sent data so the backend knew how to parse the message.
Sound familiar?
But the industry was moving away from loading these things loading into the browser. Nobody wanted to wait that long to download an applet! It needs to be lighter weight, more “modern”. Not long after I had joined this company, the entire thing got rebuilt on classic ASP. Now all the user interface logic was also on the server-side, closer to the back-end data logic, sending only the completed HTML to the user. This was a huge reduction in client download. I think we even used XSLT to translate the data into reports on the screen. That was… interesting.
Years later, we started rebuilding it again… this time as a .NET application with JavaScript thin-client application that would run in the browser, communicating via web services to the running server-side application logic. That was over 10 years ago.
Back and forth we go. Client to server to client to server…
… to the future.
It has been a heck of a journey.
Today’s API-first craze is not a new idea. In the industry, we’ve been separating layers and talking between clients and servers for decades. About 10 years ago or more the craze was called “Service-Oriented Architecture”. I even wrote a blog post about how to build out a Service-Oriented architecture with Sitecore in the mix as a CMS back in the day.
Folks recognized that what we needed was to isolate logic behind service layers that everybody could consume, so that we could use the pieces we needed and allow these pieces to be integrated into the application layer. Each service should do one thing well.
It’s taken a long time for us to get to the future. To get to a point where the industry considers APIs as a default. We’ve travelled through the monoliths with APIs, to microservices that decoupled the application logic, to serverless, to the Edge… The distribution and isolation continues. All of this is leading our industry to this new state:
Vendors selling API-driven software running the logic and applications you need, worrying about the infrastructure and ‘how’ it runs. Calling this ‘SaaS’.
Developers consuming everything headlessly, and only worrying about how to build, deploy, and deliver the application THEY are building.
With this approach there becomes a heavier load of integration. And for years, IT teams have hated having to do integration projects. So why are we going this way? Why are we asking for integration pain?
For years, we’ve dealt with a growing API-first movement, but the industry is finally getting to that point where investment has gone into creating unified layers. Unified delivery layers, API layers, and now business user interfaces that can consume APIs and deliver unified management layers. We are starting to see the tech finally arriving that supports solving the major pain points of integration.
Re-imagining the DXP
Sitecore has been on this journey over the years. We’ve seen the rise of the Item APIs and SSC, and then JSS and later Headless Services, all bringing us forward along this API-driven architecture.
Discussions of real SaaS with Sitecore probably started with the acquisition of Stylelabs a few years back which brought us to our Content Hub era. Then, in late 2019, we also released our first SaaS AI service for automated personalization. And then earlier in 2021 we released our first end-to-end SaaS solution for content with Content Hub and Edge, and then more recently Edge for XM.
Along the way Sitecore made some aggressive moves with acquisitions: Boxever and their Smart CDP, Four51 with their API-driven Commerce product, MooSend with their marketing automation solution, and now Reflektion with their commerce search technology.
Today I want to cover where these new options are going to take us on our journey. At Sitecore, we’re re-imagining our DXP.
The industry is moving, and it’s moving away from platform DXPs to something that Gartner has been calling the composable DXP.
The Platform DXP
We always executed DXP with our platform solution. In this approach, everything is tightly connected together in a single architecture. Inside, there may be many moving parts and microservices, but you cannot separate them into separate products that operate on their own. They are pieces that are grown together to make the whole.
With this approach, you’re buying the full stack of digital marketing capabilities, bundled together. Everything you need at once. This is how Sitecore XP and other Platform vendors works today. There is a simplicity to a having all the features together, and it attracts a lot of customers looking to digitally transform and move everything to a unified solution.
Usually, the complexity to hosting and lack of flexibility is seen as the negative trade-off for the simplicity of integration.
…and the Composable DXP
Then we have what is termed the Composable DXP. In this model you have a bunch of standalone products. The customer then builds out their own DXP by integrating each of these different best-of-breed applications. Some of these different DXP components might be provided by the same vendor, but typically in this approach the customer is choosing products from a variety of different vendors.
Providing choice for customers
Sitecore will continue to provide both, allowing customers to have the choice of which one is the right fit for their particular needs. Sitecore can provide the solution for both the problem you want to solve, and the way in which you want to solve it.
Why Composable DXP?
But today I will spend more time on the Composable DXP and why we are heading in this direction.
A composable DXP provides the Perfect balance between ease of use for the business and technology flexibility.
It provides faster time to value. The API first implementation leads to increased implementation and deployments.
You only implement best of breed solution product covering the features that are needed that solves business problems of today.
It’s all about what the customer needs, not what the platform provides. Not having a full platform DXP provides agility to quickly adjust to changing requirements, industry or world events like a pandemic.
While building out your Composable DXP you don’t need to replace your full marketing stack, you can use existing marketing stack and content sources.
Bringing a fully tailored solution for customers using the unique combinations of content source, cloud applications, technologies, programming languages and hosting options.
All build with your favourite Technologies and programming languages of your choice, it’s about complete technology freedom.
The way forward for Sitecore is to provide options that allow customers to address these capabilities from Sitecore either as a fully integrated platform option, like Experience Platform, or to address each of the capabilities with modern composable solutions that allow you to integrate with your existing stack and solve the missing pieces of your infinity loop.
Getting to 88mph
Obviously, taking Sitecore to this new vision is requiring everything to go full speed. Multiple acquisitions and a lot of product team innovation is fueling Sitecore forward into this new world of the Composable DXP.
We build around 3 core pillars: content, experience and commerce underpin everything.
A visual we have been using is an infinity loop to show the continuous flow and dependency of these capabilities.
AND…
Digital transformation is not a destination - it’s a continuous journey that never stops.
Right now, I want to talk about each of these pillars, and what we are planning to add and enhance our composable DXP options.
Content
Sitecore has always had Content at the core.
With Stylelabs and Content Hub, we really started into the SaaS space and the idea of the Composable DXP.
A major capability in Content Hub DAM for Digital Asset Management, used by major brands around the world.
Content Hub’s content operations also unlocks content marketing strategy, collaboration, and workflow.
While these two are key pieces of our content pillar, something is missing.
We have a new focus piece in our Composable DXP for content management: our CMS.
[traditional CMS - build 1] In the industry, we have the traditional CMS – tightly coupled with all the functionality in a single solution.
Incredibly powerful – but difficult to implement and scale.
It’s a compromise.
[headless CMS - build 2] Then we have headless CMS options – which add scale and flexibility but largely excludes the marketer from the equation.
Again, it’s a compromise.
We don’t think you should compromise
[No compromise CMS - build 3] We believe headless CMS should be combined with a best in-class visual editor – to provide the best of both worlds. You’ve been seeing some of this evolution with Sitecore JSS and Headless Services, integrated with the back-end authoring platform.
Frontend-as-a-Service
Where we want to be is having a true frontend-as-a-service layer. Sitecore Symphony will be our next-gen visual builder that will be part of the Composable DXP. It will be a standalone, composable, multi-tenant cloud platform that allows marketers to visually create experiences - initially on web, mobile and progressive web app - but our vision is to allow a business user to visually compose any experience in a low-code/no-code environment.
This will allow us to evolve from our platform work on Horizon to provide marketers and authors with the tools they need in the Composable DXP, making for a no-compromise CMS option on the content side.
Experience Manager Cloud
We also announced at Symposium our plans for Experience Manager Cloud. We’re calling this the “no compromise CMS”.
So with Experience Manager Cloud, we want to take XM and make it natively headless with REST and GraphQL interfaces for content management and delivery. Truly open API’s - designed for builders.
We’ve been seeing this progression in our XM product today with our wide variety of Headless Services options.
Making XM cloud native, a truly cloud CMS, will make us infinitely scalable and it becomes the last Sitecore CMS upgrade you will ever do. This was a huge pain point identified for existing Sitecore XM customers.
It supports Jamstack deployment and all modern front-end frameworks and CDNs
So how do we achieve this no-compromise CMS with Experience Manager Cloud?
By combining Symphony, Experience Edge, Experience Manager Cloud, and our partnership with Vercel we have a full end-to-end Content solution that offers you delivery, content management, full developer flexibility, but also all the marketing and authoring benefits you get from a traditional CMS.
This is how we see us offering the no-compromise solution.
The next pillar of the Composable DXP we’ll take a look at is around Experience - customer data management, Personalization & testing and marketing automation.
We’ve always had real strength in these areas and Experience Platform delivers incredible value to some of the world’s leading brands today.
But we needed a more modern approach… an API-driven approach that would work in our vision for the Composable DXP.
To accelerate our innovation and have a truly cloud-native, multi-tenant, headless platform, Sitecore acquired Boxever and MooSend to deliver these composable options.
Moosend - now Sitecore Send, provides a powerful marketing automation platform. It’s an incredibly intuitive solution that balances simplicity with the power of data and AI - delivering truly omni-channel engagement. It’s so simple to use you can sign-up today online at moosend.com and send an email campaign in minutes. This will become the messaging engine in the composable platform.
Also, as data is central to our mission to transform the DXP, we need a solution for customer data. The Boxever solution becomes the central point of customer data of our new composable DXP – including every product in our portfolio with real-time analytics, customer insight and personalization. So the core customer data management capabilities of Boxever is now Sitecore CDP. With this you can aggregate customer data from multiple different sources to build a profile of your customer - both anonymous and known and create segments or groups to easily distribute to other parts of your stack - could be Sitecore or other vendors.
At Symposium we also announced a new product - called Sitecore Personalize, offering real-time personalization and experimentation capabilities in a standalone product. It’s also based on Boxever technology, and you can integrate this capability with a simple tag on the site and get going instantly. We also provide more sophisticated capabilities to personalize via APIs or personalize at the edge - delivering unrivalled flexibility in deployment. This is a great way for customers already on XM or XP to start transitioning to a cloud-based architecture.
Commerce
Moving along to Commerce part of the Composable DXP, we see 2 core capabilities - B2X commerce and product discovery.
While we’ve always had a very strong B2C offering with XC, there are other options that need to be supported in complex Commerce scenarios.
Many of our customers required B2B or marketplace solutions, so we made 2 very bold acquisitions in the commerce domain that radically expands our capabilities beyond core XC in a cloud-native way.
Sitecore OrderCloud, which came via our Four51 acquisition, opened a whole other world of commerce use cases for customers. It has a strong API-first and headless philosophy - very aligned with our overall strategy. With headless commerce this can bring commerce into channels or branded experiences that don’t fit the traditional mold of an online ‘storefront’. This allows us to move beyond a single website and start thinking about creating a commerce eco-system that works through APIs.
A very new addition to the Composable DXP is Sitecore Discover. With OrderCloud we have a commerce backbone for the future, but creating great commerce and product experiences needs more than this. it needs strong catalog management, visual merchandising capabilities, deep AI expertise and most importantly of all in the modern commerce experience - powerful search. We acquired Reflektion, now called Sitecore Discover, because we believe that product discovery in commerce starts with search box and their AI and merchandising capabilities are unrivalled in the market. The really cool thing about Reflektion is that it’s not just a great product - it’s an incredible technology platform and comes with a team of world class search experts. This created another amazing product opportunity for Sitecore and our customers..
We announced at Symposium a new addition to the Composable DXP: Sitecore Search - a Reflektion-powered search platform. This will complement our DXP by offering AI-powered content search to all our current customers as well as it being a key element of our future composable stack. It builds on all the enterprise search and AI capabilities in Reflektion to deliver
- Instant preview search as users type - lightning fast
- We can index structured data directly from the XM and CH content databases or scrape the final rendered pages for super quick deployment
- All of this using AI to surface unique content recommendations and offering marketing tools to further tune the results to boost and bury content as needed.
Now, earlier I talked about the Composable DXP and how teams bring together best-of-breed products. We’ve just gone through the options that Sitecore has to slot in here.
You might choose to do an example targeting the web channel with a personalization solution. XM Cloud, Content Hub and Personalize all working together in our composable stack. Symphony unites the marketer experience, Edge unites the developer experience.
All deployed quickly and easily using NextJS with our partner Vercel for global scale delivery of your application.
For more advanced Commerce scenarios, you might see customers start adding together multiple pieces of the stack in different ways. Here we see a team that is trying to provide a composable B2X eCommerce solution, with product discovery and marketing automation for engaging with customers.
There might be other vendor solutions in here as well, providing other pieces of the puzzle. All of this is about having options!
Composable DXP
The main take away I want to drive home is that each piece will be strong for you on its own and will play nice with the systems you need to integrate with, but Sitecore’s goal will be to provide additional value when these pieces start working together so that when you are making a choice of what to bring together, it makes logical sense to bring in more Sitecore options.
Introducing Sitecore XP 10.2
I’ve talked a lot about the Composable DXP, but I’d also like to quickly cover a few highlights of Sitecore XP 10.2, which was just released.
Sitecore 10.2 Highlights
Version 10.2 has a few major highlights, and you can see a theme around productivity and headless, which will support bringing our customers to the cloud and headless solutions.
The Horizon and SXA teams continue to put the marketer first in their evolution of the page building experience. Page component and rendering management have been made much more intuitive.
The Developer Experience team continues to enable our developers and service providers great tooling to manage and operate Sitecore products.
There has also been an effort to address some underlying needs for existing customers like performance, data management, container operations, and a bunch of functional improvements and fixes throughout the build.
Sitecore 10.2 Highlights – Headless Managed Cloud
I don’t talk about Managed Cloud much, but there was an announcement at Symposium about our new upcoming Headless Managed Cloud option. With this modern solution approach for Sitecore XM 10.2, you will be ready for a SaaS-based future with Sitecore while benefiting today from the lightning-fast performance of Experience Edge and a lower total investment by moving away from Content Delivery nodes.
Bring your MVC Solution to Jamstack
We are also excited to announce that with 10.2, we will include product enhancements to facilitate the inclusion of Sitecore MVC components in the output of Experience Edge and assist in the conversion of existing Sitecore MVC sites to Jamstack architectures using Next.js.
This will give customers the opportunity to reap the benefits of improved page performance and lower infrastructure cost for Sitecore MVC sites. But most importantly, allow customers the ability to incrementally convert to headless Sitecore architectures without a full rebuild, providing a bridge to our Composable DXP.
So as we think about that 10.2 bridge to composable and upgrading existing solutions, it’s a good point to remind that composable isn’t just exclusively about our SaaS software and cloud.
I’ve been talking a lot about SaaS being the future, but the composable DXP is about being able to take different software and bring them together to build your solution. This means that PaaS or IaaS systems can also be integrated with our newer SaaS offerings. Here we show a sample of a hosted XM/XP that’s integrated and enhanced with Content Hub, Personalize and Search.
As another example, we have a customer who is a leading footwear company that launched on our platform offering, including Commerce, and have also paired with our CDP/Personalize offering.
These are all cloud solutions and can integrated with XP in weeks to deliver outstanding results for you and your customers. So, while upgrades and moving to headless will make your transition easier, it isn’t required! You could start attaching things today, no upgrades required, and as you transition more business processes into these tools it will become easier to start adopting things like XM Cloud, or other options, in the future.
Providing choice for customers
The most recurring theme here has been about having Options. There will be customers who want to jump on the SaaS train as fast as possible, able to use the latest and greatest headless technologies, and we’re really looking forwards to working to help those customers achieve their goals.
Some customers don’t want to, cannot, or are not ready yet to adopt SaaS and we want to make sure people know that they are not left behind. There is still a highly capable quite of Sitecore products here to help those customers out as well.
Personally, I think this is going to be a lot of fun! It’s definitely been a really exciting time for our team with all this new tech arriving so quickly, and building in new ways. Sitecore is starting to be a lot more open with things, we’re seeing more of an emphasis on being software solutions that are easier to work with, more accessible. I haven’t seen Sitecore go this fast in a long time, and I’m excited to see where this is going to take us in the future!
Questions?
THANK YOU! BE EXCELLENT TO EACH OTHER!
Jason St-Cyr Head of Developer Advocacy Sitecore @StCyrThoughts
Sitecore has been talking about transitioning to SaaS for a while now, and with all the recent product releases and acquisitions this plan has 1.21 gigawatts of power behind it now. In this session Jason will take the tour of all the pieces of this new Composable DXP, and where we see Sitecore going in the near future. Strap in, because where we’re going, we don’t need installers!
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