This year’s Sitecore Symposium was held at Walt Disney World, Orlando, Florida and with the event headlined as ‘Elevate the Experience,’ agency owners, Nick Towers and Paul Stephen attended the conference with high hopes about what innovations would be unveiled. This year’s two-day global event focused on recent developments for the customer experience platform and the future version releases (9.2/9.3).
So as the 3000 Sitecore experts descended on the Walt Disney Castle, what dreams were distilled and how did Sitecore’s Fantasyland of content fair? Here are our top five picks from the conference.
Now, this is and was BIG NEWS!. Not only is StyleLabs a complete Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Media Resource Management (MRM) platform which means it gives away to some exciting new features. This is the first time Sitecore has acquired a piece of SaaS platform with the intentions of integrating it with the Sitecore Experience Cloud. Could this open the gateway to further expansion through acquisition?
Sitecore 9.2 and 9.3 which will be released in 2019 will include integrations with Horizon, a new user interface which will streamline the CMS user experience and include a variety of new analytics and real-time insights tools to help marketers analyse data, engage audiences and achieve higher conversion rates.
Our very own CEO, Paul Stephen joined other esteemed global conference speakers alongside Richard Lamb, Digital Director from luxury travel hotel group Red Carnation Hotels and presented a case study on how the agency helped the hotel chain increase revenues by 22%. The session had a fantastic turnout with more than 200 delegates, but, even more excitingly, back in the UK, Account Director, Emma Nijjar, was presenting this exciting case study in the Sitecore Cinema Jam at London’s Festival of Marketing event. This was an exciting moment for the team as we recognise just how far the agency has come in the last 12 months, presenting at two leading global events across two continents on the same day at the same time!.
Once the brights lights of Symposium was over, Nick and Paul attended the exclusive, MVP conference where exciting new features from future versions of the Sitecore platform were discussed and explored in greater detail. The future is looking bright and exciting for the Sitecore of tomorrow!
We now know that from Sitecore 9.1, available now, Cortex is a badge added to any new functionality that leverages Machine Learning throughout the platform. The first ‘use cases’ being added in 9.1 include personalisation insights based on Machine Learning, with an updated personalisation and testing User Interface that will highlight marketing opportunities based on successful user journeys to date. Also, further Machine Learning capabilities will be available through the integration of Open Calais, the intelligent content structure and tagging platform, is now integrated into Sitecore’s own tagging functionality, allowing CMS users to create structured content and tags automatically.
We’re looking forward to the release of 9.2 and future developments in 2019 and beyond for the Sitecore platform!
This blog was originally posted via Sagittarius on 17th October 2018.