Scott Liewehr, Sitecore's Global VP of Market Strategy and Growth, opened SUGCON Europe with a keynote that covered a lot of ground. Where the company has been, where it's going, and why the community in the room matters more than ever.

Here's what he said.

From analyst to Sitecore

Scott has watched this industry for a long time. Web content management turned into customer experience management, which turned into digital experience management. Through all of it, he kept coming back to the same point. The people doing the implementations are the key to success. A mediocre technology with a great team can still deliver. A great technology with a mediocre team won't.

He'd been running Sitecore's Partner Advisory Board as a third party for years. About a year ago, they held one in London on the same day Eric Stine took over as CEO. That conversation led to a consulting arrangement, then to Scott joining full time. He called the current Executive Leadership Team the strongest group Sitecore has had in all the years he's been watching.

Why Sitecore, why now

Two reasons.

First, the leadership. Second, where content sits in the AI era.

Scott looked at the competitive landscape as an analyst. He saw AI disrupting creative tools (if you can prompt your way to a video, do you still need the traditional software). He saw it disrupting experimentation and targeting (LLMs are already doing a lot of that work). But when he looked at Sitecore, whose core is content, he saw AI doing the opposite. Accelerating content. Making content governance more important, not less. That's the strategic moat.

They delivered what they said they would

Since Symposium, Sitecore has shipped what it promised.

Sitecore AI is live for all XM Cloud users. Existing customers got upgraded for free. CMS, DAM, CDP, and Personalize are unified in the new Sitecore AI Cloud platform. Agentic Studio launched with more than 20 agents covering things like campaigns, content creation, and personalization, plus the ability for customers to build their own. More than 60 releases have followed the initial launch, adding profiles, identity resolution, affinity features, and search.

Scott called Studio the answer to a problem Sitecore has had for years. XM and XP were some of the most extensible platforms out there. That was the strength, but also the thing that made moving to SaaS so hard. You can't bring all that customization into a one-size-fits-most cloud product. Studio is how extensibility finally lives in the cloud.

Going global

Sitecore AI is deployed in Singapore. Sovereign cloud is expanding across Asia. UAE and Saudi Arabia are next. For regulated industries and data residency markets, that matters.

The City Tour program has hit San Antonio, Melbourne, Amsterdam, Singapore, and London. Boston, Chicago, and Copenhagen are coming. Smaller, more focused, honest conversations.

Recognition

Forrester named Sitecore a Leader in the Wave coming out of Symposium. Worth noting: the evaluation window closed before Sitecore AI launched, so that recognition was based on the pre-AI products.

CMS Critic nominated Sitecore for eight awards. Sitecore won all eight.

G2 gave Sitecore a Momentum award, top 1% based on user reviews.

Gartner named Sitecore a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Content Marketing Platforms, and most visionary in the category. That one matters because the content marketing platform is the most marketer-facing part of the portfolio.

Next launch

Sitecore does two major launches a year. Symposium in the fall, spring launch in May. The spring launch is May 14. MVPs get a global event a couple of days after. Partners get a preview the day before.

Customers are showing up

More than 300 new customers have signed onto the new platform since Symposium. Scott pointed to the steady stream of customer videos, posts, and press releases. People willing to publicly say they picked Sitecore.

The room

More than 30 countries represented at SUGCON Europe. 80 customers and partners. More than 30,000 active community members across developer channels and public forums. Over 100 user groups globally running more than 300 events a year.

214 MVPs for 2026. 48 of them in the room. For the first time, over 20% of MVPs are women.

Scott said he used to think, as an analyst, that the Sitecore community was the second most engaged in the space after Drupal. He also used to assume MVP was a certification until he learned it's community members actively competing to contribute.

Community is the AI-era advantage

Scott broke down how visibility works in AI-generated answers for B2B software companies. Roughly three inputs.

About 35% comes from what analysts like Forrester and Gartner say. User reviews are another major piece. And then there's the third piece, which is everything else. Blogs, LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos, community content. That's where the size and activity of the Sitecore community starts to pay off.

Learning and marketplace

On-site certification is available at the event. There's also Agentic Thursdays, a weekly video series walking through the agents in the marketplace.

The community has built more than 710 custom applications. 60 of them are in the public marketplace. Partners can build these, deploy them for customers, or white-label them for specific industries.

25 years

Sitecore was founded in 2001. Before that, in 1998, five Copenhagen graduates were building and managing websites. One of them got tired of rebuilding the same site over and over and wrote the first version of Sitecore. 

Sitecore's 25th anniversary is April 26, ten days after SUGCON. This event kicks off the silver anniversary year.

Scott closed by thanking the sponsors.