A look beyond the Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Experience Platforms

Since 2018, the Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms ¹ (DXP) has recognized vendors in the digital engagement space, offering valuable information for business leaders looking for technology solutions that best meet their current and long-term needs.

The 2022 edition of the DXP Magic Quadrant report has just published and all of us at Sitecore are happy to see that we again have been positioned as a Leader. In a market that continues to evolve, I think it says something that Sitecore is one of only two companies that have been in the Leaders quadrant in every edition since 2018 of the DXP Magic Quadrant.

Of course, every Magic Quadrant report generates a variety of perspectives. And as much as this year’s report says about Sitecore, I want to call a little attention to what we think, it doesn’t.

This is especially important when it comes to how Gartner describes Sitecore’s strengths and cautions. While Gartner recognizes our composable DXP, we think it doesn’t truly convey the value our customers get from our complementing capabilities.

Consider this customer review customer, as but one example:

"Sitecore Experience Platform offers us an all-in-one solution that includes customer data, AI, marketing automation, and analytics features so we can foster customers throughout their experience with personalized content in real-time, via any channel. This is my favorite tool because this is a feature-rich solution with headless options that enable content creation once and distribution across multiple touchpoints. With its intelligent analytics, testing, automation, and optimization features we are continuously improving our customer experiences and saving our time and money."
– Gartner Peer Insights™, Software Engineering Manager in IT Services, 12/24/2021

Exposing our product strategy and the remaking of the DXP category

In the year since Sitecore announced a $1.2 billion growth investment, our efforts have been centered on building a product portfolio that allows our customers to take an incremental, modular approach to acquiring and deploying digital experience capabilities.

Our new products — Sitecore CDP and Personalize, OrderCloud, Send, and Discover (formerly Boxever, Four51, Moosend, and Reflektion, respectively) — are much more than “complementary capabilities.” They expanded our portfolio of cloud-native, API-first, and microservices-based solutions and put us far ahead of the market in the ability to deliver a complete, SaaS-based, composable DXP.

As a result, our customers can adopt best-in-class solutions based on a future-proof architecture that ensures high performance and scalability, easier integration with adjacent technologies, faster time to value with a reduced learning curve, and greater flexibility to innovate quickly and adapt to changing business needs.

Over time, we believe the advantages of composability will make it the preferred approach across enterprises. But we know that, for many organizations, the modernization journey to composable DXPs is just beginning. Indeed, many of our customers enjoy the benefits of a single, fully integrated martech stack. That’s why we continue to offer Sitecore Experience Platform™ (XP) as an on-premises or managed cloud option and will continue to work collaboratively with our partners to help meet our customers’ needs today, as well as plan for and iteratively modernize their martech stack for the future.

Our goal has always been to set a vision for the market, and we believe our recognition in this Magic Quadrant for DXP report confirms we’re doing just that. After all, in our opinion, the strategy I just outlined above — which we embarked upon more than a year ago — aligns with what Gartner said in this year’s report regarding the trend toward composable DXPs:

“Currently, the proportion of organizations opting to assemble a DXP from multiple composable components is roughly equal to that choosing to purchase a monolithic solution from a single vendor. However, there are indications that the market is moving more toward composable DXPs, so this ratio will soon start to change. Composable DXPs are becoming more desirable as organizations are seeking flexibility, modularity and, ultimately, business agility. For now, however, most DXPs remain monolithic software (not SaaS) solutions at their core.”

Innovating to address our customers’ shifting needs and help them get ahead of future demands

Clearly, as we have stated, there’s much more to Sitecore’s strategy and our recent investments than the DXP Magic Quadrant report lets on. And that’s important, because our strategy allows customers to choose the solutions that fit their particular needs and business strategy — even if that means employing a blended approach of traditional and new methods, or plugging-in alongside competitive products.

If you’re interested in getting the complete story for yourself and learning more about the technology behind our composable DX strategy, out team welcomes you to get in touch.

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Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

¹Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms, Irina Guseva, Mike Lowndes, Jim Murphy, Gene Phifer, 23 Feb. 2022.

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