CHICAGO — Sitecore CEO Steve Tzikakis dropped some major product and alliance news during his keynote at Sitecore Symposium 2022 Tuesday afternoon. Sitecore hosts its annual conference this week at the McCormick Place Convention Center Chicago. It's the first in-person event for the digital experience software company post-COVID-19.
Tzikakis, named Sitecore CEO in September of 2020, led off by touting Sitecore's rapid strides into a robust, flexible cloud-native and composable architecture. He also discussed the company's ability to deliver lower total cost of ownership, enabled by Sitecore’s doubling of its development staff.
However, the real fireworks started with a number of significant announcements. Here's a peek into the product announcements unveiled in the Windy City already with more analysis to come.
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New Products in Content, Search
First, there were a trio of new product announcements, all of which are cloud-native, composable and able to operate on their own or in conjunction with Sitecore or other vendors tools.
Here they are:
- Content Hub One. This is styled as the little brother of XM Cloud. It's a lightweight headless CMS offering and is meant to be more nimble and streamlined than other Sitecore CMS offerings.
- Search. This update includes AI-powered standalone search derived from Sitecore’s earlier Reflektion acquisition. It’ll be included with Content Hub One but can be integrated with an existing site as a plug-and-play solution very rapidly.
- Sitecore Connect. This includes an integration accelerator platform with a drag-and-drop interface for integrating thousands of connectors, both within and outside the Sitecore ecosystem. This will enable delivery of sophisticated stacks of functionality in a variety of verticals.
We were unable to get pricing details for these new products from the Sitecore folks manning the conference. We do know Content Hub One will be priced significantly less than the more complex Sitecore XM Cloud.
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As for possibly stepping on the toes of existing vendors, the big question is how the Search announcement will impact longtime search vendors, such as Coveo and SearchStax. Right now, that’s an open question. The Coveo team is reviewing the changes on the new product before commenting in detail.
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A Major New Strategic Partnership With Accenture
Tzikakis followed up the product announcement with a strategic partnership announcement with global consulting firm Accenture. Accenture is the majority owner of Avanade, which is a big player in the Sitecore space, so this announcement isn’t out of left field.
Still, this announcement is likely to make waves with other larger Sitecore partners as they watch to see how this plays out with Sitecore’s commitment to not compete with its own partner community. Time will tell.
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