Today I have spent most of the day at the annual Sitecore Partner Connect in Copenhagen. The day was filled with a lot of interesting talks aimed at Sitecore Partners and customers. In this post I will try to distil the day into a number of key topics.

While the day offers a long range of different talks, there was three key concepts that was somewhat central in most talks: Composable, Headless and Generative AI. While some presenters joked about them being ‘buzz words’, I think they all carry an actual meaning that is important to understand where the world of Sitecore is heading. So, lets look at each concept and how it is relevant to Sitecore:

Composable

In general, composable architecture is a design pattern where a software system is built using small independent components that are woven together to form the complete system.

As Thomas G. Andersen from Sitecore highlighted in his introduction, Sitecore (the company) used to be associated with a single product: Sitecore (the product) which – as the years went on and more and more features was added – ended up being Sitecore Experience Platform (XP). XP is a CMS – but it can also do personalization , analyse of the behaviour of the visitors, do commerce and much more. To put is short: XP is a system for creating digital experiences across various channels and devices in a very broad sense.

Products of this kind is referred to as monolithic. While there is – I believe – nothing fundamentally wrong with a monolithic system, it certain has its fair share of problems: Monolithic systems tend to be big, complex, expensive, and inflexible. And they are certainly not composable: If you e.g., want to use another personalization platform in Sitecore XP you cannot simply replace the personalization part of XP with a product from another vendor.

So to simplify things a bit, to be composable Sitecore is in the process of replacing some of the capabilities of the XP platform with independent product acquired and rebranded by Sitecore. This means that in the future personalization will be done with Sitecore Personalize (formerly known as Boxever), commerce with OrderCloud (which come from the acquisition of Four51 and was being presented by Peter Fellows from Sitecore) and so on.

The core CMS functionality of Sitecore has been further developed into the SaaS product XM Cloud – which can now be used alone or together with a selection of other Sitecore offerings (or components from other vendors). The integrations between the different components can be done with Sitecore Connect which is low-code IpaaS platform built on Workato.

Finally, to the mix is added a number of new Sitecore products that offers features that is not readily available in XP. One example is Sitecore Search which offers content search based upon web crawling as presented by Kristian Leonhard from LB Forsikring.

The impression from the talks of the day is that Sitecore has really made steps forward in maturing the composable offerings – both the XM Cloud platform and the acquired offerings.

Headless

The second key concept is ‘headless’ which was discussed in the first of two panel debates.

In a headless setup, the front-end presentation layer is decoupled from the back-end. This separation allows for greater flexibility and agility when creating digital experiences across various channels and devices.

So, going back to the original Sitecore CMS, to build a web page Sitecore needed content (text and images) and presentation details consisting of layouts (where to put components on a page) and renderings (how to render each component).

In a web-only world it made sense to have a single system capable of combining content, layouts and renderings into a HTML webpage on the server.

However, when Sitecore started serving content to other devices like native mobile application, the close coupling between content and presentation became more tenuous. Also, as modern frontend frameworks became available, some of the rendering tasks could be moved into a frontend application written in e.g., React.js or Next.js resulting in a way faster experiences.

So, in a typical modern headless Sitecore setup, the Sitecore XM is accessed via APIs by a rendering host (a frontend application typically hosted on Vercel). The Sitecore XM still manage the content and the layouts, but this is sent to the rendering host as JSON where it is then converted into e.g. HTML for a web page, or content for a mobile application.

While ‘composable’ is about splitting out somewhat ‘auxiliary’ functionality out of the CMS, the switch to headless is splitting out what was traditionally regarded as core CMS functionality into different systems.

The challenge in a headless architecture is that while there are many benefits in decoupling the content of a digital experience with the presentation from a technical perspective, from the content editors view the two parts of the experience are tightly coupled. It is nearly impossible for a content editor to produce great content without having the presentation in mind. One of the key selling point in a headless Sitecore architecture is the editing host which is rendering mechanism capable of rendering the page as an WYSIWYG editor (the Experience Editor).

Generative AI

The word generative in the sense of generative AI simply means AIs that can generate new content instead of analysing existing content. The AI parts is fuzzier because there is many many mechanisms and techniques.

Morten Ljungbergs talk about “Generative AI in Content Cloud” showcased integrations with two of the major significant generative AIs out there: ChatGPT which can generate text based on text prompts and DALL-E which can generate images from a text prompt.

The main takeaway from a Sitecore developer perspective was actually the ease of setting up these integrations using webhooks (see my blog posts about webhooks in XM Cloud here and here). There was a brief glimpse of Sitecore setting up an entire page based on a text prompt – I am looking forward to seeing how that is done.

However, Sitecore is also building native AIs into their products, and as Jose Alberto Valles Nunez from Sitecore outlined in his introduction, AI will be the major thing for Sitecore in the future (as it indeed will be for us all).

Final thoughts

My impression is that Sitecore now has mature offerings for a composable and headless architecture. As discussed in the second panel debate of the days the journey into a modern architecture will not happen over night, but the offerings are there, and they do look promising. The Generative AIs are also coming, but I think its a bit more how exactly they will change things – at least for me. But Sitecore will be part of that journey.

Thanks to Sitecore (and especially Veronika Bruce from Sitecore) for an exciting day.