With its advanced capabilities, scalability, and flexible architecture, Sitecore XM Cloud delivers personalized customer experiences, streamlines operations, and drives meaningful results. But how do you know if it is indeed the platform meant for you? After a string of successful migrations to Sitecore XM Cloud over the past year, we've crunched a few numbers and done ROI calculations for XM and XP users out there.

The results have been incredibly promising. All you need to do is to provide us with a few details, and we will come up with a customized 3-year ROI calculation for you. Let us put our expertise to work and show you the potential returns that await you with XM Cloud. In this blog, we explore how Sitecore XM Cloud can align with your organization's goals and needs. But before moving ahead let’s look at the benefits and XM Cloud’s bottom line value calculation.

 

Key Benefits of Sitecore XM Cloud

1. Improved developer productivity: Speed up development startup timelines by leveraging a pre-established base and website templates. The code foundation is readily available, enabling developers to kickstart their solutions for XM Cloud right away. Pre-designed site templates offer teams a head start by providing common building blocks and expediting the development and content creation processes.

2. Flexible tech stack for any development team: Create incredible experiences using your preferred tools. Developer choice is prioritized, as SDKs for leading front-end frameworks empower developers to leverage their favorite tools. Also, achieve rapid experience delivery by deploying front-end code to cutting-edge hosting platforms that ensure swift delivery of static HTML sites from edge locations on the network.

3. CMS hosting, security, and provisioning included: Access the industry's top-notch CMS as a SaaS solution. Enjoy hassle-free infrastructure provisioning and seamless scalability. Leave the maintenance and updates in expert hands. Benefit from enhanced security measures while gaining full platform observability and monitoring capabilities, ensuring a robust and reliable digital experience for your organization.

4. DevOps and pre-built release pipelines save time: Simplify the deployment and management of your XM Cloud instances, minimizing the workload for developers. Automation streamlines provisioning and deployment processes. Within minutes, user-friendly interfaces enable the creation of cloud content management systems and robust application tenants. Enjoy enhanced self-service capabilities, granting developers full control of the platform, including efficient troubleshooting and log access, eliminating the need for extensive support involvement.

5. Enhanced productivity for marketers: Sitecore XM Cloud revolutionizes marketer productivity by providing self-service capabilities and a modern user interface (UI). Marketers can take charge of their campaigns and content creation with ease, reducing dependency on IT teams. The intuitive UI empowers marketers to efficiently manage and optimize customer experiences, unleashing their full creative potential.

 

Sitecore XM Cloud Bottom Line Value Calculation

Sitecore XM Cloud is a robust cloud-based solution designed to empower businesses with advanced digital marketing capabilities. It provides organizations with a scalable and flexible platform to deliver personalized and engaging customer experiences across multiple channels. By leveraging the power of Sitecore XM Cloud, companies can enhance their digital presence, optimize customer interactions, and drive meaningful business results.

Let’s highlight the tangible advantages that companies can experience by moving to Sitecore XM Cloud. Although the specific benefits may differ from one organization to the other, the article focuses on the fundamental advantages applicable to all brands migrating from Sitecore XP to XM Cloud. With Sitecore XM Cloud, businesses can unlock these bottom line benefits and propel their digital transformation journey to new heights. Let’s check out a few of these benefits.

Content and Marketing Operations

• 50%+ reduction in content authoring due to moving away from Content Editor into Sitecore Pages. It takes half the steps (clicks and keyboard movements) to perform the same authoring tasks in a WYSIWYG tool compared to the Content Editor, plus Pages is optimized further for productivity with autosave, drag and drop, and mobile experience to allow authors perform their tasks on the go.


• 23% percent decrease in time to market. In addition to the improved development operations and effort reductions covered below, content authors can now create new components from scratch and even integrate them with external systems without having to bring developers in with lengthy release cycles, significantly expediting new components, page, and site rollouts.

Technology Operations

• 50-80% reduction of backend development work for new components due to the move to headless. The data access layer is covered by the layout and GraphQL services with a headless SDK on top of it.


• $70k+ in annual savings from upgrade removals. Sitecore requires XP systems to be kept up to date with the support deprecation schedule, which removes support for a version after 3 years, translating into upgrade projects to be required every 2.5 years to remain compliant.


• 100% removal of the platform infrastructure and maintenance overhead cost. With XM Cloud being fully SaaS, all infrastructure, hardware, and application maintenance, including upgrades fall under the responsibility of Sitecore and can be removed from the client’s operational budget. Custom code for integrations, APIs, and jobs can be moved to Vercel or Azure Functions that are ‘serverless’ and will not add significant impact in most cases.


• 15%+ reduction in front end development speed due to the use of modern frameworks like React and Next.js and new frontend developer-friendly tooling like VS Code. Traditionally, front end developers on Sitecore projects have been restricted by the tooling, processes, and frameworks that were centered around backend developers. With XM Cloud Jamstack support, front-end developers can now deliver more engaging experiences efficiently.


• Up to 83% reduction in deployment effort is provided by the native CI/CD pipeline included with Sitecore XM Cloud. With Sitecore XM and XP, vendors, and internal teams would need to spend weeks to create an automated code and content deployment throughout the Sitecore environments, but with XM Cloud it comes out of the box.

Accelerating the Move to XM Cloud from Sitecore XP

 

1. Create a plan based on major milestones

• Product add-on selection and rollout: It emphasizes search, experimenting, personalizing, and using data analytics and forms to quickly deliver value. The focus is on achieving results as fast as possible.


• Solution updates: Migrate to a serverless infrastructure and move processing out of the solution. Update integrations for search, forms, data, and analytics, and rebuild with headless architecture. You can also consider DevOps updates.


• Content and data migration: You can use serialization to migrate content efficiently. Also, migrate custom databases to the cloud and contact data to a Customer Data Platform (CDP).


• Training, testing, and release: Training for Marketing, IT, and content authors. Conduct user acceptance testing to confirm functionality before going live.

2. Start by selecting the right products: You can use complementary composable products for website search, experimentation & personalization, analytics & data, and forms.

3. Re-architect the solution based on MACH and SaaS architectures: Apply security and performance-focused SaaS and MACH solution architecture best practices. This ensures that you maintain the value while keeping the focus on efficiency.

4. Migrate the website code to headless with Next.js: With the help of Altudo's Headless Accelerator with 70+ components, you can easily migrate to Sitecore XP with JSS. This can be done either gradually or rapidly depending on the roadmap and budget. Components include Navigation, Page Content, News, Payment, Products, Blogs, and more, which significantly reduce migration efforts.

5. Migrate your content and data into the upgraded implementation: Altudo's content migration scripts can help automate the entire process. Analyze the content in the master and web databases and create serialization files. Preview and publish the migrated content on XM Cloud, and conduct parity tests for consistency.

6. Optimize team's performance through training and monitoring: Train your team on new Sitecore tools, including pages, components, and Explorer. Also, provide training on complementary tools like search, analytics, testing, and forms. Educate developers on migration updates, offer DevOps training, configure the new SaaS system, and don’t forget to analyze the impact on processes and dependencies.

How Do We Approach it?

• Maximize value from your existing data: Centralizing customer data and driving actionable insights from it is critical to intelligent decision-making and personalization. We will use Sitecore CDP to create a single view of the customer to be used for rapid decision-making across channels.


• Scalable omnichannel engagement at the edge: Real-time decisions based on multiple data points are critical for increasing conversions. Personalized experience delivery must be fast, or customers will simply leave. We will use the latest Jamstack with Sitecore Personalize to activate fast-performing personalization at scale.


• Simplified experience management: Digital sophistication doesn’t mean complexity for marketing and IT. New mobile-optimized, user-friendly authoring UI in XM Cloud, with self-service focused tooling like Components and Sitecore Connect, will help improve effectiveness and productivity. Besides, the SaaS-based architecture reduces the maintenance.

Wrapping Up

Apart from the above-discussed benefits, other significant indirect cost savings and revenue growth factors also justify the ROI of moving to XM Cloud, such as 10x page load speed improvement from the Jamstack headless approach, that pretty much removes the concern with Google Core Vitals. Or the security risk and liability reductions due to the reduced attack surface of XM Cloud and globally scaled data centers of Vercel.

We see most break-even points falling in the second year and if you would like to see what the real financials will look like for your company, then fill out this form. We have created an advanced ROI calculator in partnership with Sitecore to provide a holistic picture of comparing the costs of license change and migration to the real $ value of the benefits that will be realized over 3 years.