Sitecore SUGCON Europe 2023

Matthew McQueeney here from Konabos. with Kamruz Jaman, partner and solution architect and Vaishali Dialani customer experience strategist. And we're just going to talk a little bit about our final thoughts where from the Sitecore SUGCON 2023, a two day event for developers. Kam, you can kind of set the stage about what this has meant over the years, what we're supposed to get out of this this event, in your experience? So Sitecore SUGCON organized by the community and it's organized for the community initially was very developer focused, but we obviously have a huge focus on the marketing side of things as well. But one of the things I love is you get to hear from the community about things they've been working on and how they've been solving problems, real world problems in their everyday job. Kam, I think the big piece here was that there were no new announcements in particular, and I think many would look at that and say, “Oh, no new products. What does this mean?” But I think in this case, it's kind of a there was a lot of ramp up with new products composable getting that all set. It's not bad news, right. Absolutely. I think that over the past year or two, we've had a lot of hexagons being added to that cloud, but we've had a lot of new clouds added. So I think not having a new product is probably a bit of a respite for us. It's one less thing we now need to think about again what they have been focusing on a lot is they had all of these separate hexagon and all of these separate cloud, but what they didn't have was integration between those pieces. And so when we talk about Composability, what of the beauty is you can use whatever system you like that fits your needs and your requirements at that given moment in time. But one of the difficulties that we see is then you have to go and integrate all of those systems as a behind the scenes. No new products means that you've had more time available for them to do R&D and make those integrations and start making those connections and start figuring out how the composable stack can work more like the monoliths used to. Without all of the technical debt and all of the complexities of that came with the monoliths and the tie ins also that came with them on the right. When you use a monolith, you have to use all of the system or none of the system, and now you can use parts of their system, all of the systems that they provided you for and stack them up and as your needs arise. So, Vaishali, this was your first and not only is your first, but you presented the customer experience point of view user research. What were your thoughts of this event? And also you're presenting. What I've always heard that's Sitecore is big on developers, but this is my first time experiencing it and it was super exciting that they had like a marketing track where they encourage marketers to come and voice themselves just for themselves and the customers because they are the frontline workers. What was interesting, I was presenting on the importance of user research in the composable dxp world. It was very insightful and had such an engaging audience. So even to have three forth of the room filled up kind of showed the interest and the engagement that people want to learn about it now. And discovery is equally important in the product space. And back to you. One of your questions I found really interesting was that I'm kind of glad that none of the new products were released in this event. I think, you know, like they mentioned, it's time to reflect on the existing products and how they can educate the customers on what how to leverage these products rather than just keep launching products that might not be the best fit for the end users. One of the most interesting things to me during this session definitely was the fact that they were encouraging everyone. They were collecting feedback from partners, from clients, from community, and that kind of helped and showed that they are willing to take that first step towards listening to their customers. So I'm super excited to be in the stage where we are rolling with them. Kam, the last piece here, this is a developer conference, mostly the developers of Sitecore longtime, very loyal to the platform. Composable poses a change to maybe how they've done things. So I think a part of this without not having new announcements as well I know you like sidegrade versus upgrade maybe sideskill some of the developers right. So a lot of this is in education because then they are and we are going to go back to the customers and help them make this transition as well, right? Yeah. I mean, obviously we've been we've been working in this composable space for a long time and here at Konabos we've been trying to share our knowledge and our experience like, like we always have with the community and what does composability mean, what does the jamstack architecture look like, what does the API first mentality look like? And most traditional Sitecore developers have done things in a certain way, and there's me here Konabos having done the composable stuff. We we know that it requires a different set of skillset and different way of architecting, solutions, a different way of looking at problems. If there is a mind shift coming, a lot of people again, sharing this information as to, you know, what do you have to prepare for or how do you prepare for these things? We did a talk last year at SUGCON on how to be a Sitecore .NET architect in this new composable world and what that actually means for you. We've had these frontend teams, we've had these back end teams. I think just the way we work with each other is going to change slightly. I don't think anyone's should be worried about losing jobs and things. It's just you just need to shift your mindset, right? And I think we've been saying that a lot even with some of the talks here. We need better education. Sitecore does have all of these products. People are a bit unsure how to use those products but or how to integrate those products, but also more importantly, how do we shift to those products, Right. And this new technology stack. And that's where I think a lot of the problems. Right now for a lot of the customers, we've our traditional Sitecore we know the upgrade path is just an upgrade, right? Yeah. Whereas now when we move into this new headless way, way of working, we have the upgrade, right to XM Cloud, but that also involves a technological shift which may involve project rewrites and how do we move to that in the most seamless and easiest way without full blown scale projects and, you know, putting things on hold, for example, and how do we tackle that without causing a huge burden on the businesses and the users. So they hope they're going to be sharing more information and sharing more and more of their knowledge and how on techniques and strategies to do that over over time with the community. If anybody needs any help, of course, Konabos is here with these transitions, just reach out to us and we look forward to speaking. And we've had a great time here. So thanks everyone.