Feb 23, 2023
If you are a Sitecore Platform DXP customer (the umbrella term that Sitecore uses to characterize the Sitecore XP and XM products we’ve known for the last 15+ years) you probably have a lot of anxiety around the recent acquisitions Sitecore has made and their recent announcements around XM Cloud. Some questions customers have been having are:
Am I losing support?
Has my investment been made worthless?
Should I continue to invest or abandon in-progress initiatives?
Will I lose my developers?
Is composable right for me?
If it is, WHEN is it right for me?
In order to answer these questions, we need to define the relevant pieces first, so we can talk about them intelligently. To better understand this post, I recommend taking a few minutes to review my post on Sitecore terminology.
So if you are an existing Sitecore Platform DXP XP or XM Customer and you have some of the questions above, take a deep breath and DON’T PANIC. The Platform DXP product will be around and supported for multiple years. However, you must start thinking about and planning your next move. If you have a large implementation of Sitecore Platform DXP, it could easily take that long for you to plan and execute a migration off that platform to something new.
It’s important to start planning your next move not with urgency, but with purpose.
Here are some key questions you need to answer first:
Is the composable architecture right for you? If not now, do you foresee it to be in the near future?
Are you able to identify the tangible benefits for you and your site(s)? You aren’t going to do this move just because Sitecore and maybe the marketplace tell you that you should.
Assuming composable is right for you, what are the suite of solutions that are right for you? It may be just as easy for you to migrate to a new CMS vendor as it is for you to migrate to Sitecore’s composable stack.
Here is a high-level comparison of Platform DXP and Composable:
| Sitecore XP (where you are now) | Sitecore Composable (where you are going) |
|---|---|
Can work with MVC or Headless |
Headless will generally be required to take advantage of automatic upgrades |
Upgrades are expensive |
Upgrades are automatic |
Infrastructure planning is substantial |
Infrastructure planning is minimal |
Personalization is performed within the CMS and is integrated |
Personalization is performed separately |
Inclusion of complex business logic is easy |
Inclusion of complex business logic usually requires a separate back-end |
Development is in HTML/JavaScript/C# |
Development is primarily in HTML/JavaScript |
There is much to consider with Sitecore’s new product announcements and moves to composable. It could be the most radical change you’ve made to your web platforms in the last five, or even ten years, but the benefits could also be just as dramatic.
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