XM Cloud – the game-changing CMS now on a modern cloud architecture

Today we’re announcing the release of XM Cloud — the cloud-native, agile, and composable CMS.

It’s an exciting step forward for our composable strategy, as well as ensuring every solution in our content-to-commerce Digital Experience Platform can be delivered on a modern cloud architecture. This release opens an exciting new chapter for Sitecore and, more importantly, for our customers’ continued success.

To help contextualize the impact of XM Cloud for business leaders, we’ve asked Sitecore Chief Marketing Officer Paige O’Neill, who has overseen numerous global website builds and rebuilds, to speak to why this matters for marketers. Then, Sitecore Chief Product Officer Dave O’Flanagan will speak to the importance of this milestone product for technology leaders striving for faster innovation and flexibility on the development approach to stand up, maintain, and iterate differentiating solutions.

Everyone is headed to the cloud

By Paige O’Neill

It goes without saying that marketing has been a true trailblazer in the shift to the cloud. Yet, I’ve always found it frustrating that my website could never run on the same platform as my ABM, email, or workflow tools, to name just a few. As a marketing leader who has overseen many global website builds, including multi-brand sites, multi-lingual sites, and omnichannel delivery, what I always wanted was a way to go faster. Finally, with XM Cloud, I have my solution.

There are a lot of benefits to taking something like your CMS to the cloud via XM Cloud, and then some other benefits you get from our unique approach, but let me highlight the ones that matter most to me as a CMO:

Speed: Traditionally, marketers have had to rely on an internal IT team to find solutions to help us get our messaging out the door. With XM Cloud, I’m excited that my teams will be able to stand up new experiences on our own timetable. This will help me get my list of priorities done faster with a much happier team.

Flexibility and scalability: From surges in demand to enabling a remote workforce at a moment’s notice, the cloud can handle swift market changes. I like the certainty that the modern cloud brings in supporting my ability to amplify my brand globally.

Collaboration: My teams around the world can access assets, data, and workflows from anywhere, making international collaboration, and therefore a connected customer journey easier and more effective.

Data insights: XM Cloud is unique from all the other tools I’ve used previously because it has embedded visitor analytics that tell me what’s going on. Once again, I’ve made it easy for my teams to get insights out of the system to help us make better data-driven decisions.

No upgrades/constant updates needed: The old world of upgrades and planning for and budgeting for them is now gone. I’m thrilled this mission critical solution now operates like the rest of my tech stack and I get constant updates delivered to my teams so I’m always on the cutting edge.

The promise of cloud to me has always been this – free up my team and my company’s resources to focus on our core mission. My cloud vendor should focus on what it does well, which is provide rock solid software that’s easy to get up and running and easy to keep running. For anyone that needs to deliver digital experiences, there are so many reasons to be thrilled about this new release and what it can mean for your team’s go-to market speed and agility.

Why XM Cloud matters today

By Dave O’Flanagan

XM Cloud is a truly modern cloud architecture solution and I couldn’t be prouder of my team’s and our engineering team’s collaboration to bring this to reality.

At last year’s Sitecore Symposium, we unveiled our plan to launch a SaaS CMS. Content has always been our core business and it had to make the transition to the cloud because that’s what our customers and partners were demanding.

But while many technology companies have made acquisitions and rebranded their products, or took the simple route and moved their monolith in the cloud (without solving any of the end user customization or update challenges), we took the bold route to rebuild our flagship Experience Manager to address these challenges head on.

That means XM Cloud combines easy-to-use visual content authoring and management for marketers with modern APIs, agile DevOps and easy upgrades for developers. It uses a headless edge architecture to ensure lightning-fast site performance. And, of course, it’s Jamstack-ready to allow the most flexible development approaches.

As a cloud-native service, XM Cloud introduces a no-compromise enterprise content platform that benefits developers, marketers, and IT:

Speed: Deliver perfect page speed scores for web experiences with fast, global content delivery APIs that enable developers to create immersive experiences using modern front-end Jamstack technologies such as Next.js and Vercel.

Agility: Robust tools enable developers to customize and extend the content authoring experience, while powerful APIs enable developers to use their front-end framework of choice to create fast, modern experiences. This is also how we are able to deliver continuous updates to your XM Cloud instance without affecting the customer experience you’ve built.

Relevance: Embedded analytics and personalization capabilities, based on the market-proven capabilities of Sitecore CDP and Personalize, enable marketers to drive relevance and optimize their sites for conversion and engagement. When we made our acquisitions last year, a core tenant of our strategy was the ability to re-use these packaged business capabilities in other areas of the Sitecore platform. We wanted to use market-tested technology to give our users confidence.

Security: XM Cloud is always up-to-date, scales on-demand, and meets rigorous controls so organizations can power their global, content-driven digital experiences with confidence.

Speaking to developers specifically, I think they will love the agile development and faster dev cycles thanks to:

• Modern headless architecture
• The ability for anyone to choose their favored front-end development frameworks such as Next.js, React, Gatsby, etc.
• An agile DevOps workflow
• A composable and customizable architecture that means Sitecore will integrate and add value to your existing technology solutions

Naturally, your next question might be, how does this all work together? After all, it doesn’t matter how impressive the tools in your stack are if they can’t work together.

On top of this XM Cloud release, I’m also pleased to announce that we have developed a new Cloud Portal to connect the Sitecore DXP portfolio of each customer by having a single sign-on, central location to manage team members and partners within an organization, and user interface and navigation that drives connectivity between products to unlock more potential for our customers. The overall goal is to create an experience to support IT and business collaboration and simplify Sitecore products and services onboarding.

With XM Cloud, users can say goodbye to upgrades and re-platforms for good. And because it’s composable by nature, users can use it to build the customer experience stack they require — whether that means AI-driven omnichannel personalization, marketplace-ready commerce, or the needs of tomorrow that we’re unaware of today.

I hope you share in my excitement today and I’m looking forward over the next few months to seeing more and more digital experiences being powered by XM Cloud!

You can learn more about XM Cloud here.