Sitecore 9.1 - What's in it for us as Marketers?

I hope you must have heard about Sitecore 9.1 upgrade that came into general availability on Nov 28^th 2018. The same was announced during the Sitecore symposium. This version is a major breakthrough for marketers. I am saying it not because it promises something that will change your life overnight, but because this lays the foundation of the next era of your digital experience management.

Here’s how I will summarize the big leap Sitecore is trying to take with this version:

1. Cognitive computing
2. Decoupled rendering
3. Integrated technology

Cognitive computing:

Certainly not a new term for marketers. Advance analytics has been playing a key role in solving marketing challenges such as clustering, attribution modelling, propensity analytics, churn analytics etc. Market leaders, such as Amazon and Netflix had used machine learning quite effectively for recommendation engines and to create next best action predictions. The big catch there is the complexity involved in getting to that stage, and the effort and skills that such players had to invest seems quite daunting for any new entrants. Building up a team of data scientists to create such models and engines might take months or even years. I wonder if most of us as marketers will have that liberty in hand. Sitecore Cortex handles this dilemma by helping us meet that want of cognitive computing without the need of heavy investment and long lead times.

Decoupled Rendering:

Being a marketer the only thing that matters to me is achieving my KPIs. I should not be worried whether the technology used is .Net or JavaScript. Sitecore CMS was fundamentally built on this principal. The concept of Headless CMS was introduced right in version 6 but it took long time to mature and make it effective. Sitecore Omni brings the decoupled vision into true action with the ease & effectiveness of separating rendering from content management. This will lay the foundation of implementation of C.O.P.E (Create Once Publish Everywhere) philosophy. C.O.P.E. had been spoken a lot within marketing community as the answer to our woes of maintaining multiple content repositories. With Sitecore Omni, it will become much easier to use Sitecore as the master content management repository while the rendering can easily happen on any device/platform including mobile app, IoT device, wearable etc.