A Fair Review of the Top Mid-Market CMS for 2020 — Sitecore

HISTORY

In 1998, five friends — Thomas Albert, Jakob Christensen, Peter Christensen, Ole Thrane, and Michael Seifert — founded Pentia A/S, a systems integration company focused on implementing websites built with Microsoft technologies. After developing one website after another, Thrane decided to write a script to automate aspects of the process. He didn’t know it then, but he had just written Sitecore’s first code.

While implementing websites, the team began to imagine a better future for digital marketers: What if marketers could deliver meaningful and engaging online brand experiences without leaning on developers? The next year, they released the first version of Sitecore – a new way to manage digital content. In 2001, the Sitecore Corporation was founded, with Seifert as the CEO. 

“Sitecore came out very early on with innovative approaches to the marketplace and the technology. Sitecore has always separated content from presentation, for example, and today, headless architectures and deployment capabilities are kind of the trend. But this is something that Sitecore has really zeroed in on for the entirety of its history”, stated Matt Krebsbach, Senior Director of Product Marketing.

According to Matt, Sitecore is also quite fortunate that they have a very active and participatory private equity owner in EQT Holdings. They are extremely invested in Sitecore’s business and continue to provide them with the resources they need as an organization to compete in the marketplace. Recent acquisitions of Stylelabs and Hedgehog are good examples of how private equity ownership has been an asset to Sitecore.

KEY CAPABILITIES

The Sitecore Experience Manager is a .NET CMS with enterprise-class security and reliability that can scale content creation for an optimized experience for any channel: mobile, voice, and emerging channels and easy integration with other systems and data.

Key features and functionalities include:

ECOMMERCE CAPABILITIES

The Sitecore Experience Commerce platform natively merges content, commerce, and data in a single, enterprise-level commerce solution offering catalog and inventory management, customer and order management, and promotion and pricing management.

“We understand commerce as a broader goal within organizations that may have different requirements and objectives, and we built a commerce product accordingly. It’s a commerce product that is very well suited to meet the needs of the mid-market and upper mid-market, which I like to call lower enterprise. We are also moving further into the B2B space with the recent availability of a B2B accelerator that provides more of the traditional B2B transactional capabilities”, said Matt Krebsbach.

Key eCommerce features and functionalities include:

DIGITAL EXPERIENCE CAPABILITIES

The Sitecore Experience Platform combines customer data, analytics, and marketing automation capabilities to nurture customers throughout their journey with personalized content in real-time, across any channel.

Key DXP features and functionalities include:

TECHNOLOGY PARTNERS

Sitecore’s Technology Alliance Program provides third-party solutions for added functionality.

Sitecore's technology partners include:

STRENGTHS

Sitecore’s Point of View

According to Sitecore, the key strengths, first and foremost, are its varied development model capability. Sitecore has three different content development models that provide a supreme amount of flexibility to their customers, enabling them to deploy experiences in the way that they want, with the speed and agility that they desire, in the places that they need.

Users can leverage SXA (Sitecore Experience Accelerator) for a drag-and-drop, user-friendly interface for non-technical content authors. Alongside that, headless and hybrid-headless capabilities provide the flexibility to move content when and where needed, and most importantly, users do not lose the connection to analytics and personalization, which is a common problem. Normally, when a user moves into headless deployments, they lose that connection to their analytics capabilities, which means they can't personalize that experience. But with Sitecore, they can.

Sitecore says they always look to be very perceptive in how it helps their clients understand and achieve their digital transformation goals and aspirations. Sitecore’s training and best practice programs help their customers understand their current digital maturity, how to grow it over time, and make full use of the Sitecore platform to achieve their objectives.

Implementation Partners' Point of View

WEAKNESSES

Sitecore’s Point of View

According to Sitecore, their Sitecore Experience Manager is a more complex platform than others in the market space and it certainly cannot be considered a stand-up, out-of-box solution. It requires multiple development cycles depending on how customers want to leverage the platform.

Additionally, the pricing structure is higher than most mid-market, lower-enterprise competitors. Although Sitecore is actively looking at ways to bring costs down in certain capacities, price is commensurate to the value that it believes it provides in the platform.

Sitecore feels it has come a long way in providing a cloud-enabled platform, but there is still room for them to make some further advancements in terms of complexity, cost, and adoption to the cloud.

Implementation Partners' Point of View

KEY DIFFERENTIATORS

Sitecore’s Point of View

Sitecore says that one of its key differentiators is having the ability to manage a complete, end to end, content life cycle. Sitecore firmly believes that organizations can no longer think about web content management as the totality of how they deliver experiences across all channels. Web content management has to be a very flexible delivery system, but it really should no longer be the place where businesses plan, design and build content for all of those channels. Sitecore explains that this is precisely why it has acquired a market-leading set of capabilities around digital asset management, content marketing platforms, and marketing resource management solutions that sit in front of its web content management capabilities. That way, Sitecore feels it can better assist its clientele strategize, optimize, and build their content for a more personalized experience.

Sitecore also notes that taking a leadership role in understanding the evolution of the market, in becoming a digital experience platform many years ago, is a strong differentiator for them as well, whereas, some of Sitecore's competitors — up until just the last few months — did not believe that a digital experience platform was something that needed to be delivered to customers. Sitecore believes it has a strong lead in terms of providing that broad digital experience in a unified platform that is integrated seamlessly.

Implementation Partners' Point of View

TRAINING & SUPPORT

Sitecore provides both instructor-led and online training courses. Once you’ve completed your training and are ready to become a Certified Sitecore Developer, you can sign up to take one of Sitecore’s Certified Professional exams.
 
With every Sitecore Maintenance Agreement, you automatically get Standard Support. With Standard Support, you’ll get a response within one to three business days, depending on the complexity of the issue. Users must take and pass the developer certification exam to get access to the Sitecore Support Portal. Premium Support includes faster response times for non-critical issues and immediate support by phone for business-critical issues, 24 hours a day, seven days a week with a response time of an hour for critical issues.

IMPLEMENTATION PARTNER PROCESS

At the time of this publication, Sitecore listed 450-plus trained and certified implementation partners in North America (800-plus globally) that have deployed at least one Sitecore project in the last 12-months. Sitecore has tiered partner classifications to help customers find the partners they need, plus reward partners as they evolve and mature in the Sitecore Solution Partner program. Finding and evaluating best-fit Sitecore implementation professionals in any region with experience in a specific industry and technology should be fairly easy. Regardless, I would still recommend contacting Sitecore directly to discuss your specific project and assistance in providing a shortlist of best-fit implementation partners.

CUSTOMERS

Worldwide Deployments: 5,200-plus

Top Market Sectors: 

Notable Sitecore Brand-Name Customers:

Customer Comments:

James Millett, Head of Digital at easyJet
“The sheer power of the tool out of the box has transformed the way we can change the site to react quickly to external factors. For example, during the recent wet spell, we had a series of ad banners encouraging users to escape the rain —such a simple premise but very difficult to achieve quickly before we implemented Sitecore. This power, coupled to the dynamic pricing and the increasing levels of personalization the site is beginning to offer, means we are able to offer ever-more relevant content to our visitors, which helps us drive our brand values — easyJet is passionate about making travel easy and affordable!”

Kent Oldham, Associate Director at Procter & Gamble
“By migrating our sites from various CMS platforms to Sitecore, we’ve streamlined, simplified, and standardized our digital marketing operations to deliver a better consumer experience."

Lubomira Rochet, Chief Digital Officer at L’Oréal Global
“L'Oréal has enjoyed great success as a result of the project, including significant cost savings and faster innovation for its customers worldwide. Today, the company can launch a new website in just ten days, the number of unique monthly visitors has increased by 35%, and customer satisfaction is up by 40%. One unexpected benefit is the effect the platform has on the ways countries interact with one another, giving rise to fresh interactions and new synergies within the company itself. We now have a worldwide website factory marketplace to make it easy for every brand and country to concentrate on providing the best experience for our consumers.”

 Customer comments and testimonials are all third-party verified

Featured Case Study

L’Oréal Deepens Brand Loyalty with Digital First Attitude

FUTURE ROADMAP

A topic of conversation for Sitecore going back to the Symposium in 2018 is its next-generation user interface, which is codenamed Horizon. This is a complete redevelopment of the editorial experience. Sitecore is rethinking and rebuilding that user experience that streamlines daily tasks and provides more intelligence through the incorporation of artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. Sitecore is also planning to advance the platform's ease of use through more streamlined workflows and tasks for more intelligence within the editorial experience. In addition, Sitecore is leaning towards lessening the number of steps required to complete particular tasks — getting closer to a one-click kind of capability.

“I would say that we're looking to lower the time to value by how we grow our ecosystem and really leverage personalization. So, one facet of that is how we continue to expand our technology partnerships and strategic alliances with organizations that provide complementary capabilities to Sitecore that are outside of our core capability set and where we are best suited to deliver but have class-leading capabilities that are meaningful to our customers”, states Matt Krebsbach.

Sitecore also plans to continue expanding Salesforce Marketing Cloud for multichannel campaign management, delivering web content management capabilities that integrate seamlessly with Salesforce and other Technology Alliance Program partners such as Microsoft.

Finally, the continued integration of Sitecore Content Hub capabilities, digital asset management, content marketing, and marketing resource management platform with the Sitecore experience platform, is going to be a core development area for them going forward. How does Sitecore plan to increase visibility? According to Matt, it will be with more enhanced analytics around segmentation, and other aspects of customer behavior, and increasing partnerships like Salesforce and other strategic alliances in the marketing technology stack.

PERFORMANCE GUIDE

CMS-Connected's performance guide is based on our interviews with the vendor, their implementation and technical partners, customers, and leading industry analysts.

Category Scoring: 5 = Excellent | 4 = Very Good | 3 = Good | 2 = Satisfactory | 1 = Unsatisfactory

Overall Performance Scoring: 57–70 = Excellent | 43–56 = Very Good | 29–42 = Good | 15–28 = Satisfactory | 1–14 = Unsatisfactory

ANNUAL HOSTED EVENTS

Sitecore’s annual event is the Sitecore Symposium, which is a great place to get up to speed on all the latest platform and company developments form a notable lineup of keynote speakers, discussing content management, experience design, omnichannel experiences, and more.