Nate Barad on Sitecore and the Forrester Wave for Web Content Management
by Barb Mosher Zinck | February 17, 2015 2:35 pm
We’ve already looked at the Forrester Wave for Web Content Management themes, and we’ve talked to Loni Stark from Adobe. Now we join the perspective of the second highest ranked vendor in the Wave, Sitecore, by talking to Sitecore Director of Product Strategy, Nate Barad.
First, let’s review what Forrester had to say about Sitecore. One point made was that because Sitecore offers a number of capabilities integrated tightly with its WCM, it offers a more consistent user experience. It also offers integrated tool kits for workflow, testing, and analytics. In terms of cloud, Sitecore provides a managed single-tenant cloud for its customers and its greatest strengths include content tagging/targeting, customer profiling, and multi-site, multi-channel delivery. Whether it needs improvement is with mobile apps and cloud deployments.
Let’s Start with Mobile Apps
If you look at the individual rankings in the report, Sitecore scored a 3/5 on Mobile Apps, and a 4/5 on Mobile Web. It’s Mobile Strategy also scored a 4/5. What’s does that mean?
One thing Sitecore is working on its delivery of WCM marketing/analytics capabilities via mobile. There are analytics apps on both the Windows and Apple stores (this one is new), mobile marketer analytics apps, campaign apps and the new Sitecore 8 interface is fully mobile compliant and tablet friendly.
What is doesn’t offer is the ability for marketers to easily create mobile apps (like Adobe does), but it does fully support mobile app development by its customers.
Then Move to Cloud
According to Barad cloud is always something Sitecore is chasing, from looking how to use Azure to more deployment options for different sectors of the market. Sitecore is looking at each point release moving further into the cloud.
For example, xDB, Sitecore’s experience database, is a cloud service. They also offer Sitecore as PaaS (as noted above) and things such as email and campaign management are offered in a SaaS model.
Sitecore also provides some service level apps as SaaS – device testing and translation being two.
Barad said that Sitecore has a cloud-first strategy for every thing they are developing right now.
And We Can’t Ignore Commerce
Sitecore is big on e-commerce. They announced a major partnership with Microsoft recently that is a new offering for Microsoft Dynamics customers and, of course, they are finishing up the integration of its Commerce acquisition. Barad said that one of the best things about the commerce acquisition was picking up the team in Ottawa who already have extensive e-commerce experience.
Expect to see much more news related to Sitecore and commerce, including the go-to-market strategy for commerce. Barad said that the content in commerce market is hot right now and Sitecore will look to building that part of its strategy up in the near future. Of course, the research and development team is at least a release and a half out from what we are seeing in the market, so there’s a lot of planning happening there.
Sitecore is Growing Fast, Can They Handle It?
Sitecore relies heavily on its partner ecosystem. A 100% led partner platform, Sitecore has thousands of partners and hundreds of MVPs developing on the Sitecore Platform. It has grown 35% in the last year and while it doesn’t boast the client base that Adobe does, it has over 4400 clients using it’s platform today – it scored 4/5 on the customer references portion of the Forrester Wave.
Barad joked that Sitecore definitely lives up to the “fast-paced, high-growth” moto that many tech industry companies talk about.
Forget about suite vs best of breed (or best of need), Microsoft vs Java vs PHP, open source vs proprietary – although all of these things are still talked about extensively and used by tech marketers in their selling propositions, it ultimately comes down to what does the platform help you do. Sitecore is building a platform that will help you do two things: know the customer, and shape the experience. And any vendor that delivers on those things is certainly worth looking at.
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