So, this is just off the cuff as I sit eating lunch in my hotel room at the Disney Dolphin, where Sitecore Symposium is taking place today and tomorrow (I miss the Thursday half-day already, if only for a good reason to stay for the attendee party). This is my personal opinion on what I heard, and there's three major things.
Sitecore XM Cloud is now SitecoreAI...and so is the rest of it
So, the first of the two big announcements was that Sitecore XM Cloud was being bundled up with Content Hub, Search, CDP/Personalize, etc, as well as agentic AI, to become SitecoreAI. (Mind you don't put a space in there, Sitecore's official X post called it that...this will become like not capitalizing the C in Sitecore I think.) Apparently licensing will be all based around this all-in-one model, though I'm not sure what this means for entitlements, which were really confusing to navigate and overly restrictive I think. That I'll leave to the bean counters, but the first thought that struck me was a joke I made when Sitecore XM Cloud and that ecosystem was first announced, with the composable stack idea.
Given they had a product in each main space of the composable stack, I called it the composable monolith. Well, Sitecore even said during the presentations that they're going from composable to composed...so is the monolith back? If so, will there be better connections between products, or can we go back to event handlers over webhooks that had more stability and even a bit more versatility? (Seriously, a webhook for item:deleting...I tried that out, by the time it went to operate on the item being deleted, which you should be able to do, the item was already gone.)
Time with tell. I do see positives here as it keeps customers in the ecosystem and saves energy in shopping around. But the parts need to work together more smoothly, and the entitlements area needs to be smoothed over.
SitecoreAI Pathway was more intriguing to me
Maybe because it's the actual "newer" thing than a marketing deal with AI added in, but Pathway is intended to be a content migration helper from a variety of CMSes, and I imagine can be customized to connect to other ones as well not out of the box. Given how much of a pill content migration can potentially be, this is a product I'd like to find out more about. The confusing part for some was they announced "if you have Sitecore 360, you already have it now" - so is this a service you have access to, is this a professional service that Sitecore will do for you with X number of credits, or what's the scoop? I imagine more will come out in the near future.
Jesse Cole was the highlight by far
Jesse Cole, the founder of the Savannah Bananas and the whole "banana ball" concept, was excellent. Great energy and messaging. What's funny is, when he said "we're not in the baseball business, we're in the entertainment business," my first thought was Vince McMahon, who said that about WWE and pro wrestling. Jesse doesn't strike me as Vince-like though, thank goodness! I mean, he did have four people come on stage, blindfold themselves, do a dance-off, and the winner was the guy who started taking his shirt off...but it was funny because Jesse made the guy think he was competing still for 30 seconds after the last person was tapped out. And he gave away two pairs of underwear!
Okay, seriously, dude was funny. And yes he wore the yellow outfit, complete with hat. He needs a monkey mascot called Curious George to finish the ensemble, though. I think Sitecore streamed the morning session, though I'm not sure if this was on there...I think it definitely deserves to be seen by a wider audience. If not, then Jesse is more than welcome to come to my son's tae kwon do school and give them a talk!
Alright, almost time for the breakouts to start, so if you're reading this and you're at Symposium...you might be late to the first breakout! (It's 12:42pm as I post this.)
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