Matthew, hello, everybody. Welcome. I'm Matthew McQueen from Konabos. Two weeks ago, Sitecore held a week of activities in Minneapolis on the perimeter of the Mall of America, starting with the MVP summit Monday and Tuesday, the Sitecore DX customer event on Wednesday, and that was one of, I think, five locations around the world where they did these one day events. And then subcon North America on Thursday and Friday. One of the big announcements coming out of the week was XM Cloud Plus. We're used to plus with a lot of our television streaming networks, but in this one, it's a it's kind of a bundling of Sitecore composable products, which we are going to get into. So we're going to focus this discussion on that offering, but we'll also talk about where and how it fits into sitecores current product roadmap the industry at large, and those may be in the on prem position with Sitecore sitecores product set with me is 11 time Sitecore MVP and partner at Konabos Kamruz Jaman. And let us jump right in Cam. I'm going to put you on the spot here. Let's set the stage again. We've done this, but let's set the stage again where site cores, full product set is from the all in one to the next generation, composable. Dxp, yeah, thanks, Matt, yeah. I know you were at the DX Summit. I know you had a lot of insights coming back from that. So it's quite interesting to see your perspective, both behind the scenes, because I think this was your first MVP summit that you also attended, and obviously from the conference and the subcon event itself.

 I know we've been talking a lot about site, cores, journey to SAS over the past couple of years, we've done a number of webinars on this. We've presented at a number of conferences, both at SATCOM Europe last year and at symposium in Chicago last year as well. And we have obviously discussed their current offerings. So they currently have it split up into two, and this is this kind of thing going forward. They have their platform, the XP, the all in one which you can host yourself on your own private cloud subscription. Or you can go via cycles, manage cloud offering where it's kind of a one and done. They will they will host it. They will manage the infrastructure or manageable, everything that goes on behind the scenes for that. And of course, then you have their next gen, composable dxp product offerings, which have been split out into three, three areas, the content cloud, engagement cloud and commerce cloud. But these are all fully SaaS cloud based cloud, cloud based API first, native API first, and native API products, fully composable, fully dx, of what we call the XP. And this is, this is going to be there. There are two streams also going forward. And I think, yeah, the new offering is interesting. I'd say, yeah, no, it's a great point. So we will come back around to the platform dxp, because there were some interesting announcements and assurances that were made about customers on in that situation. But let's build ourselves up to XM cloud, plus by first talking about site course, composable dxp. So this was that next gen composable dxp screen we saw before of the content, engagement, commerce clouds. And so could you give a little talk on what these hexagons are? Always like the hexagon talk? Yeah, and we have the different COVID hexagons quite nicely split out. So the engagement cloud, the commerce cloud and the content cloud. And these are kind of the products area offerings of the product areas. And so the commerce cloud being obviously commerce based, you've got auto cloud, which is again the fully SaaS e commerce platform, and discover which integrates with the cloud to give you product recommendations, Product Search, I'm sure come on to AI. AI with that, of course, is the big buzzword these days. The engagement cloud is all about customer engagement as a name, so personalization, CDP being. The customer data platform, their intelligence, the analytics that you can base your decisions off with. You know, with within your customer touch points, cycle send is their email marketing tool essentially, that integrates with all the other engagement parts and connect. Is there no code integration as a service? IPads integration platform as a service, with the acronyms now, but it's essentially it's a no, no code integration platform to allow you to connect out up multiple different systems and then use triggers to then carry out actions, and you can make, you know, have decision trees to carry out and push data from one system to another system, or, you know, trigger various other actions. And the big part here is the big, big set of hexagons here, the purple ones are the content cloud. So XM cloud is a flagship SaaS based CMS. We talked about this plenty, but it's, it's the next generation content management system based on site called XM, the traditional XM that we all know it, but it's, it's fully, fully cloud based headless, CMS or hybrid headless, depending on terminology you want to you want to use, Content Hub, dam again, that's, it's been around for a little while. 

That was SaaS to begin with, but it's your digital asset management system, and there's another number of modules within those, including the content hub operations and our Content Hub One is the new CMS that they hadn't launched fairly recent in the past several months. I think it was probably around SUGCON, but it's, again, it's essentially, it's a lightweight, headless CMS. It's fully omni channel. It's, it's fully omnichannel, headless CMS, API driven. It's the equivalent, or it's, yeah, it's different than XM cloud. It's because XM cloud is obviously what we used to from XM. It's going to be more of your pure play, headless CMS, without the UI and the editing capabilities that we may be used to with XM and XP from our previous generations. And then to tie all of those things together, of course, you have the search capabilities. And yeah, the search capabilities for the content pieces. There's a slight difference between how discover works as a search platform, because that's making product recommendations and search works on a website based search. And as we look towards the next slide, which will show us XM Cloud Plus and which products are a part of that, let's, let's quickly discuss about that. Pre cloud, pre the plus announcement, Pre Plus. The way this was done, essentially as a customer, is pretty normal in the composable headless world, right where you pick a best of breed technology solution across any one of these dimensions, and there's probably more as well. But this is a pretty comprehensive listing of the dimensions you can have in, in, in headless and composable, but you would pick them and then on these kind of mock based frameworks, they can connect to one another pretty seamlessly. So is that? Would that be the way you'd kind of talk that through cam, yeah. So when we had previously talked about composable dxp, the beauty of composable is that you are composing with the pieces that you need for your particular jigsaw puzzle, right? Or hexagons in this particular case. So if you only needed the content pieces, you would pick Inc cloud content hub, one maybe throw in some search capabilities with cycle search. If you want to go further and start marketing campaigns, you could add in send, either using cycle send, or maybe using something else, like MailChimp or some other provider, right? It's composable. You get to pick and choose the different pieces you need from the different vendors to build the different solution that you need for that particular customer, for that particular project, for that particular point in time, and then in the future, as your projects mature, your projects grow, your needs increase. Is you start pulling in the other pieces as you go along. Now, I think that's, that's the dream, that's the beauty of composable. Dxp, we've all worked on projects like this.

 I think there was a lot of customers who were using some capabilities within Sitecore, and then they were using their marketing teams were using other systems, and, you know, we were integrating those in the background. So we were kind of in this happy in the head, hybrid kind of situation already for some customers, other customers are maybe moving from other platforms and have existing platforms that they don't want to lose, because it's too much work to rewrite everything at that given moment in time. And then you have those other customers who are on things like site or XP and are using all of the capabilities, all of the features, or a lot of the features that is already built into those platforms now they want to move on to a SaaS space system with, with all of the benefits that those SaaS based solutions bring, they would then now need to start thinking about replacement and pieces and pieces in between. Got it and so let's go to our next one, where we did, I was thinking about hybrid, headless and hexagon hex less, I don't know, but so I found some hexagon shapes and blacked out the part the product set that are not in the XM Cloud Plus, and XM Cloud Plus brings in, as we noted, XM cloud is kind of the fulcrum of this, of this composable dxp, XM Cloud Plus. So that's really the content, you know, the produce, optimize, deliver content to the right audience at the right time. We have the personalized right, which is AI powered, as we discussed, and that's to leverage the power of AI to deliver highly personalized, engaging experiences that hopefully drive conversions which we're all looking for. The search is the real key you were talking about there. And there are two different searches. So this is the search product really for content to deliver personalized results within the site, within the Omni channels, the omni channel content Center, which is the part that we discussed, being Content Hub One. I think there was some confusion in the early days of these discussions, and it is really neat, as you said, being able to be at my first MVP Summit, because there is really deep talk in there, a real reaching across the table to discuss between the product folks, the leadership At Sitecore and then the practitioners of the platform. So this was something that I think in some of the original things that went out Content Hub One was not in that, but we have confirmed that it is part of this. And so that's really that true. As you said, headless CMS, we have the CDP for the comprehensive analytics and insights. And then we have Sitecore Connect, which really powers the seamless integrations and connectivity, which can be something that needs to be accounted for in a truly composable, headless world. And so you need that kind of connective tissue, if you will, behind the scenes to help dive across these, these different systems. So cam, you were not able to come. You know, congratulations on your Canadian citizenship. That was the reason you could not make it. There were plenty who asked about that. What was your being? Kind of from afar, for the first time in a long time at one of these, what were your initial inclinations thoughts when you saw this XM Cloud Plus thing come across the stream? Yeah, after I'd, uh, obviously talk to you a little bit and saw a little bit more information by my and I jokingly put out, posted out a little meme on Twitter and LinkedIn. My initial was it should be, this shouldn't have been called XM cloud, plus it should have been called XP cloud, because it seems like it's a lot of replacements for features that are built into cycle XP and that fully featured, fully personalized, personalizable product that we would we would expect, you know, to go to live, personalized experiences to our customers. We felt like it was really aimed more directly at site, Greg's customers, Inc. Needed that for the full features and the full functionality set that cycle is able to offer through its connected, composable dxp offering. We know with XM cloud, you know just the pure play XM cloud, for example. 

We know that there are some basic personalization capabilities in there, but it's not that full fledged customization capabilities that Sitecore customers have become accustomed to over the years, because that is, you know, we've mentioned this several times, that is one of the big reasons that customers buy cycle because of its personalization features, because of its analytics features. So when I saw what they were offering, I think it made a lot of sense as a as a bundle, essentially, and it ties together. I think what we have come to expect from Sitecore over the years, and probably at least the basic set of features that we would expect from a Sitecore XP project, traditionally, right? So you have the XM cloud, you have the personalization, you have the analytics with the CDP, you have the search capabilities, and then connect is in there to be able to tie it together with any other external system that you may that you may want to integrate with the Content Hub One, I think was an interesting one for me, because I was and we had this discussion. So I was quite surprised I had content help one within there, because we already have XM cloud within the offering as the content cloud center right. And I think, I think the rationale behind this is Content Hub One acts as your omnichannel content center. It is a pure play headless CMS in the purest term, whereas XM cloud, it's kind of regarded as a as a hybrid, headless to a certain degree. So I think we discussed this accent cloud would probably be used for your longer running, your more major projects, and then Content Hub One could just be coming in to be used for those smaller marketing campaigns, those landing pages, those things are kind of need to be pushed out very quickly. And then obviously you're the omnichannel capabilities itself. So you know, your mobile apps and other devices that you may want to be pushing content and content out to. Yeah, I think that it almost makes me think of if you're on a big ship at sea, and then there's that really high quality, what is it called a skiff that can get you to land real quick a couple of people, like an excursion, you know? You can, kind of just, you can turn on a landing page. And I've, I've heard in the past, because I was at the DX event in Boston back in May, and I do remember from that one content hub, one being discussed as what you said, where you could launch a quick campaign, see if it works right, see if the idea works. It has legs. You could launch that in half a day, potentially without the need of a full development team. And I think that that is a key. There were, there, were there any in this mix? Now, I know a lot of it is, is the commerce cloud? I did see somebody somewhere say, will there be a commerce bundle? We'll have to see it some other day. But that was not discussed here. This really is the content play. 

This is the, in many ways, the XP for the future, the XP, composable mix. But were there any here that you were somewhat surprised were not a part of a plus at this time? Yeah, Sitecore sent, I think was the one that I was a little bit surprised was on there again, with Sitecore XP, we had the exam email Experience Manager, which would deliver fully personalized email campaigns that integrates in with that integrated in with all the analytics through to the website as well, so they could be tracking click throughs to the from the emails that I would send, which would then deliver personalized experiences on the website itself, obviously recording goals and triggers which event feed back into the personalization further down the road and further email campaign. So I was a little surprised not to see send in there. But equally, you know, it's a composable offering, right? If you, if that's something that particular, specific customers want and specific customers need, you could get the plus, and then you can add on the same, right? So that's, that is, again, still the beauty of composable. It does remain. It's still, it's still a composable offer. It's not a it's not an all in one product. It is just a bundle offering of composable products. You can, you can start adding those in as and when you need them. I would expect if you, if you're not even wanting to use content to have one, you may be able to go ahead and negotiate not having that in your bundle, right? So, and maybe something that some customers don't necessarily want to be using anyway. All right, so the big question, well, first before the big question, I did want to show the kind of most up to date hexagon thing. Quickly talk about it's funny too, because it's the Keystone almost at the keystone of the hexagons, the Lord of the is the AI, what was your thought there, when you saw that kind of take shape there? I saw the slide, and I, I, and I kind of remember who posted this. I saw this on LinkedIn, so sorry for giving you credit for this, but I thought this would be interesting, because obviously AI has been huge, and we even within the cycle space, we've been talking about the AI, and it was cycle Cortex A couple of years back, and the AI capabilities. But being on prem, of course, AI capabilities, and giving quick and rapid updates and enhancements to those capabilities is actually very hard. How do we know this, being a SAS based systems is just something that cycle in the background, can just roll out, and everybody gets it, and then everybody can benefit from each other's knowledge and each other's experiences and the shared experiences as a result of this. So I did see this, and I think I'd ask you about this, you know, hey, what's, what's the AI thing that cycle have added, and I think you had mentioned generative AI, yeah, yeah.

 I think the way, there seems to be a few paths out there with the dxp, CMSs, and some are trying to go very native with the AI integration, to really kind of do it themselves, and to think of new ways to integrate this. Not saying site core is not but it does seem, from what I've heard at many of the discussions, the talking points is that this is a close collaboration as a strategic partner with Microsoft to utilize a lot of the generative AI features that Microsoft is, let's be honest, so far this year, really winning, winning with and so to me, it seems like not necessarily a white labeling or a, you know, kind of taking it over and hiding it, but a true collaboration to utilize a lot of the best aspects of something like open, AI's, chat, GPT, across this mix. Now, AI has been a part of a lot of different technology products for years, right? It just really came to the fore now. So there also is, there probably is native work as well, happening with the AI. But I have kind of read it as Microsoft being a big kind of collaborator, or site core, collaborating with Microsoft to utilize those best, best in breed aspects of that system. Yeah, and I had, yeah, I obviously been reading up on the capabilities, and they talked about generative text and images in Content Hub, for example, Content Hub One. So that will, and I think we've, you know, we've been working with chat GPT, quite a lot in our in our day to day work. So it has been really good, where you can start entering some text and then have it make some suggestions, right? Not necessarily, there's something you're going to use word for word, but it will essentially enhance your daily work in life. But I think generative, especially chat, GPT four. Now the generative images, I think, is going to, we're really excited about using those, because it's going to really push things to the next level, where you're not just using stock images. You can have chat GPT actually go and generate a specific image for you with the exact thing that you have in mind for your article, using your brand guidelines on top of that, right? So if you have some specific ground brand guidelines that you would like to follow, it will, it will take those prompts and generate those for you. So I'm really excited to see how they integrate those, and what that what the capabilities are within those, AI within personalization. I think I'm not sure really this, to go into depth on that one, but again, the capabilities of that could be, could be amazing, especially coupled together with the CDP. If you could use the customer data from CDP to segment a customer, then that's just, it's just going to give so much better results in the what you're presenting to them on the front end. And again, using AI, with the CDP, you may be able to discover new segments of customers that you hadn't thought of, right? So with customer segmentation, it's always what one person or a group of people think their segments are. But it doesn't mean that the segments are correct when, necessarily the borders of those segments are in the right, right, you know, right section sections and where you you're placing them.

 The AI can give you a lot more insights into where those customers are interactive, and with it, where those borders may need to be tweaked a little bit here or there, or hopefully identify entirely new segments for you, right? And a couple of that in the search, if you can get in, you know, start personalizing those search results for what people have been looking at throughout their journeys. And it's just enhancing those that experience much, much further and giving users the information that you want at that particular moment in time again, we've been using chat GPT a lot. What I've been finding funding with things that's chat GPT is it just cuts down the amount of search I need to do, whereas before, I'd be going with the Google and reading like 15 articles now I can just ask chat GPT, and it will just give me the information without me having to spend hours and hours to read all that, all that other information. So if that kind of capability start to come into these products, and the intersection of these products, I think it's some pretty exciting times ahead. Yeah, there's a lot of gray space that can just be, you know, optimized in many ways, and that that is an important part in composability. So the big question, Cam, why bundle so I think with the kind of, kind of mentioned this a little bit earlier, with the with some of those capabilities within cycle XP, I think it made sense where we have those customers that have been on XP and are kind of used to those powerhouse of features of XP had presented to them. And so then x, if they're going from having used a lot of those features and they're going on to the next step. A bundle will make sense to them. A bundle from within cycles ecosystem makes sense. We had spoken about this in some of the earlier webinars and presentations where we looked at the products and break down some of the histories of how some of the products have come on, and you know how a lot of this has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary. And one of the things that we had talked about having obviously having worked in the composable space for quite a long time now, being one of the first, first in this market space. One of the things we've talked about is interoperability, essentially and integration. I know people don't like integration isn't closely tied integration so much within the headless, headless space. But what we had found was, if you're going from a web content management system and you're presented with a pure play headless, a lot of people do still want their head. The Web content management features like being able to preview and build pages and compose pages and things like that. So we know one of the things we were excited about is if cycle is able to bring all those text guns together, keep it composable, but at the same time, make their products integrate easily, right that low code, no code that you love so much. And if they can make their products local, no code between, between their suite, then that adds a lot of that adds a lot of positive for the other customers. 

I think that the bundling makes sense in terms of what it offers for an X existing XP customer. I think we had, we have also seen some things around some of the customers where licensing becomes an issue, not licensing so much, but getting the contracts for those licensing through their legal reviews and their pro it, security reviews and everything else that their internal businesses need to sign off on if and we've discussed this with a number of enterprise customers, where just having the one vendor to deal with. Right is saves them months and months of legal headache where it's just lots of reviews and lots of paperwork and lots of checking that the eyes have been dotted and the T's have been crossed right, and having to do that with one vendor is painful enough, and having to do that with multiple vendors is a nightmare. So having everything under the one roof, having the one contract to sign, having the one signature, signature to be made, will be the ideal scenario for a lot of enterprise type customers. I think you really hit that on the head. And a few things that I kind of picked up from being in Minnesota in different conversations. One, I know pricing has not really been something that's out there on this, but I did get the sense that there will be some level, again, don't know what it is, but there will be some level of a bundle discount to get all these, as opposed to, if you were to purchase each a la carte, again, don't come for me, but it and that seems to make sense, but what you hit there was huge. Was procurement before Sitecore had the composable dxp products, if enterprise customers wanted to go composable, they had to leave, essentially, they would have to leave Sitecore, right? They would have to go and get a composable, a headless product, to fulfill whatever the need is at those different levels of the stack. So one Sitecore creating the composable, dxp, even a la carte gave its customers the ability to move ahead under the auspices of Sitecore, this felt to me like the natural next step, where you bundle them, because a lot of these customers, even anybody who wants to Go composable, it is a learning curve. It's an education to truly understand what it means to be composable and headless. You have a frame of reference from so many years all of us do of working with these more all in one systems than not. And maybe the exception would be, oh, we'll plug in Google Analytics for that. Oh, we'll use an email newsletter for this, but the majority of the other ones, whether we love them or not or bemoan them, they were all in that kind of single login, single platform. So going to this new world poses an issue where, yo, great, I get best of breed. But wait, every one of these, these maybe six to 10 major decisions across my technology and martech stack, I have to procure. I have to go out there, you know, I have to look at anywhere from one to three options in each one. And then after we go through that, I need to then get individual companies through procurement in a huge enterprise. That's hard. So there are a lot of pieces at play here, where I really do think this bundling idea, the composable there is a customer centric aspect to this. 

It is listening to the customers. It is trying to meet them where they are. I had once heard an enterprise customer say that when they need to do something, technology or, you know, marketing technology wise, they go into their procurement system and they search what is available and use that, because it can take, you know, even as a provider, like we are services, it can take a lot of time to get onboarded. So though those are critical aspects. And so if, within that paradigm of Sitecore being a provider for these companies, you can make available best of breed technologies composable in the stack, that, to me, is a very big piece. And then the last thing that I thought was interesting was, when you have a composable dxp, and a lot of these were brought in through acquisition, Acqui hire, right? You have these product heads. Who are, you know, you have someone who's in charge of search. You have someone who's in charge of, you know, XM cloud, like there are product heads and this bundling, I got the I got this from the discussions. This bundling is also kind of a coming together of these great minds at the different product levels on a more common roadmap where everybody's rising together. You know, they always use the Better Together term. So I thought that was interesting from the people product side as well. Yeah, yeah. I think that that that was a that this is a natural progression. I think when those other companies had been acquired, they. Obviously always going to be a matter of some time needed to align. Have those products run separately. How they, how they slowly but surely start to fit into that togetherness, right? So those hexagons were when they were first bought out. They were separate, very separate hexagons. Now we can see that they are coming together a bit more closely, a bit more tightly knit, a little bit more like jigsaw puzzles, but they're still hexagons. You can still remove them easily and replace them out with other pieces Absolutely. So we kind of have spoken to this, but customer is always the most important here. Yeah, yeah. So again, the ideal, the ideal customers again, are those people who have been Sitecore XP customers that have, well, using all, or a majority of those features within cycle XP, but they now want to move up to the next level and move up to a fully SAS based modern, modern CMS. And they want to take a cloud to elite, to the cloud, right, and other enterprise level customers, I'd say, who are looking for cloud based dxp systems, not just a content management system, but you know, if you just want the CMS piece, you have cyclo XM cloud, and you have content hub, one that has options, but somebody who wants an actual fully featured dxp suite, if you like, they don't want to go for the all in one. They want the modern cloud based, SaaS based system. They don't want to deal with the infrastructure. They don't want to do with the upgrades they need, the scale. 

They need all the capabilities of you know that a headless system provides and being able to scale on demand, essentially, but requires all of this, all the full features, without having to go ahead and integrate all of those pieces individually themselves. And there's one point here that I especially want to bring up about going to composability like this. And it's this idea you hear this acronym, TCO, total cost of ownership. And I think one of the main major benefits of going composable that we can't bank yet because there's not enough time. Is in the previous world of on prem, you know XP, there were these major upgrades, right? So going from nine to 10 even maybe going in a step change from like 10 to 10.4 which we'll get to coming out. That was a that tends to be a large cost with a pretty meaningful team to make that upgrade, sometimes you have to go through steps, and you have to upgrade via a number that you're not even going to be using, because you have to do it in that kind of cadence. So with cost is higher for those XP customers as well, because it's not just the content, the CMS you're upgrading. You also gotta look after the analytics yourself in the background as well. And that itself needs to go through an upgrade process. And it's quite tricky. It takes a lot of time. It takes, you know, a lot of effort. So yeah, there is a that part of the concept, the upgrade part of the total cost of ownership. The other piece is, so remember when we when everybody first started going moving across to like Microsoft, Azure and AWS and things like that. It's like, I no longer need to maintain that data center and those racks, and I don't need to have my engineers maintaining the hardware and failures and backups and everything else. So, you know, everybody went to went to Microsoft, Azure and AWS and others, other cloud based providers, and we had virtual machines, but the virtual machines needed to be needed the software updates, right? They needed the windows to be upgraded every so often and whatever. What other security patches that needed to happen? Somebody needs to go and do that and restart the service. But then we had pads, which just like, hey, I just deploy it, and then Microsoft's just gonna, gonna handle that.

 I think with as versus VMs is pas was a little bit more expensive, but I no longer need an engineer to be doing the upgrades and restarting, and it just deals with the scale automatically, because if I get more traffic, the powers will just go from like three nodes to 10 nodes, and then it will scale back down, right? So the total cost of ownership, I think needs to also take into consideration the human engineering aspects of it that we also have to pay for. It's not it's not in that invoice that we get from the vendors, but it is still a human resource cost, right, a cost that we have to pay. Yeah, from the business itself, yeah. And so I, I do think that will be something we'll have to obviously keep tabs on for the customers and the practitioners, but that is going to be a major part of this. When you look one to one right now, and I'm not talking about cost, but you know, an enterprise system, it's going to be costlier, but you're having that system, you're hopefully removing the need for very costly upgrades. You can now have great agility, where, I'm not going to call it a one click upgrade, but I have seen it in other places where you upgrade to new features. I even think I remember Steve always likes to say you can upgrade on a Saturday, right? And it's and it's there by the next the CEO Steve Chicago's. But it's those kind of things where there's like an opportunity cost as well of being able to be this agile and not have the upgrades and be more focused on the business outcomes that you know coming from the ideal customer point. These are the kinds of things. Even if you are a customer on XP, on prem, and you are looking at this, you are the ideal customer, because you might be Inc core ready, but you also have to think of yourself well as you know, this could be an ideal for me, for our team. What can we gain by moving this way in opportunity, cost of business outcomes, you know, not as many costly upgrades. Like, there's a lot of it's like, what is the customer ideal? So, you know, I think that that's a that's a piece that will only come out in years, right when you can look at the counterfactual of what would this upgrade have looked like, versus that this path we're on now, you know, having this overall license cost. Yeah, and I think customers are looking to be using cutting edge technology, using AI features. I think that's the this is the ideal place for them. It is because the innovation is so is happening so rapidly right now in the AI and AI space that an on brand customer just could not keep up, right? The SaaS based systems are just updated for you, a new, a new AI model could just be deployed, and you know, you won't know, and then it's just, just like we're saying with chat GPT, where we've gone through like chat GPT, three, 3.54 I'm sure, a lot more, and this is just within the past few months, right? We're not talking years. 

We're just talking months here. Yeah, rapid, rapid iteration. So let's tie this all up together by finishing on this part of the conversation before our conclusion. But the what is the site, core XP roadmap. Because this was a, this was something that in the in the discussions was very focused, right? Because I do think you always want to go towards the shiny, newer things, the promise, the agility, all this. But there will be a business case where large enterprise customers cannot move that fast. And before I allow you to hit that, there was a quote that the aforementioned Sitecore CEO Steve Chicago said at Sitecore DX Minnesota, he hit the point that there's many, many years of ongoing support, and we will continue. You have our commitment that we'll continue promoting, upgrading, enhancing our core platform for as long as there is demand for it. He even put out the words six or seven years in his conversation. So cam, why is that? And then once you give us some of the what these, all these numbers mean here. So in terms of the feature roadmap, I don't think we know what's coming up, so I'm just gonna put that out there. We haven't been told, like in previous years, we would have been told, Hey, this is what we're gonna these are the things we're working for, working towards in the next release of psych, whether that's some personalization pieces, whether that's some enhancements to some of the core functionality, or whatever that is. We don't have any information on what the actual feature roadmap is. What cycle have committed to is support for cycle XM and cycle XP. Of the cyclohexane Sitecoretic speed platform that that is going to be ongoing and continuous, they announced, and I asked you about this, we'd have ramblings of a cycle 10.4 traditionally, that had been released around the symposium time. So that would have been around now up. February, November, time. But you had said that in the XA, specifically mentioned April, 2024, which is actually better, in my opinion, tell me a second so we know that there is going to be a new release of 10.4 we don't know what's going to be in there. What I suspect will be in there is similar to a 10.3 so there will be some features that have gone out into cycle XM cloud. We know XM cloud is based on cycle XM, the core product. We can even see that from some of the code basement things within the code base. So there's hopefully that means it's easy for them to keep these two in parity. So they give some new features out for cycle, XM cloud. XM cloud is SAS based. It has the benefit of getting everything immediately. And then the good thing is they can kind of battle test that a little bit, and then in the next release of 10.4 they can bring those features in. So we get a bit more of a fully tested, fully rounded feature added into 10.4 by being so by releasing in april 2024 that gives them another three years of mainstream support until the end of 2027 and extended support until the end of 2030 which is Huge. 

It's like seven years from now, right? I think the good thing about releasing in April, rather than releasing in October November, like they traditionally had been, their support is always for till for three years, three years from the end of the third year from the current date. So if they had released in October or November, that support would have been until the end of 26 right? Suppose you're essentially getting a longer support period by just then, delaying by a few extra months. So I think that's good for the customers. I think that's good for all of us. It also gives us some extra time to get some more features in there. Yeah, no. And let's, let's move to the next one, which a very elegant product strategy update from Davo Flanagan, cyc, course, Chief Product Officer, you had pulled this one out. We put a couple of the headlines from it, which I think were interesting. If anybody has their camera and doesn't, hasn't seen this article, you can hit the QR code there. It'll take you right to the article, because we did pull out for the purpose of the slide, some of the key things, one of them was the upgrading is optional, and Sitecore will support any modernization journey. And then you had rightfully said, well, they have three journeys here, and those kind of resonated with you. Can you want to talk quickly through those three journeys? Yeah, so again, this is something that we had discussed in some of our presentations and our webinars previously. We have a few extra breakdowns and how to get there. But essentially, the first one is that customers just over there, we're going to just put all our effort behind get into XM cloud and that composable dxp platform for whatever means. And that may mean maybe you're starting a brand new project. You're on a brand new redesign project of your current site, and it would make sense to just, you know what, we're just going to do this fully Inc cloud, and just go all the way headless and fully cloud native. There are others who are treating it as a bit more of an iterative approach, taking it as a second CMS, or using Content Hub One for those marketing campaigns that we spoke about earlier, there's quick, quick, quick, and actually almost, I would say, dirty, but it's not marketing campaigns, those landing pages and again, that gives some slow, some lower barriers to entry to get to that space. It gives them some time to create, essentially, almost like some POCs, get some learnings out of what they need to do, what they don't need to do, which they can then take on to maybe their main projects and help them to plan that out. And then there are some of the other customers who are just not ready to or not ready or not able to get off of their current on prem XP XM installation, and for them, it's going to take a lot longer. So again, this, this, this announcement that 10 dot for is coming is great news for them, because it gives them more time. It gives them a lot. It gives it, it gives them more time to get off that platform.

 It gives them additional time to figure out what their roadmaps look like and what that journey to a fully cloud native system looks like, but those customers can use the on prem and supplement that with other composable dxp products, whether that's from Sitecore or from other custom other vendors and other vendors and providers or. Or maybe they're already doing some of this. You know, we have mentioned this, that some of our customers are on site called XM XP, but they use different mail providers right to send out, send out email campaigns, or different providers for some of some of the other features. So for those customers again, they can, they can stay, they can continue to stay on prem, but start to move towards composable by using and supplementing other services. Is, is there a general I'm putting you on the spot a little Is there a general guidepost in your head about what the what the average enterprise customer on site core, what they can do or should do? I mean, they should talk to Konabos, of course, but what, what they can do or should do based on version of Sitecore you might be on because we talked about the support for 10.4 we didn't talk about what currently is has run out of support, or is upcoming running out of support. You know, whether we're in the nines, I think is there? Maybe you can answer that. And then if you're, like, on a nine that's running out of support. What the kind of move that might make sense for you to do with the information we have if you're if you're somebody on 10 dot x, what are the kinds of things you could or should do with this? Do you have any general guideposts in your head? Yeah, it's really hard to generalize on this run, right? So I again directly mentioned to get in touch. We do have a road mapping service that we have presented several times before, and we do think that is probably one of the most key things you could do on your road to composable is to get a road mapping service done. Figure out where you are, figure out what your North Star is, figure out where you need to get to, and figure out how you're going to get there right the and how you get there is going to depend a lot on where you currently are, if you if you're a customer who only has one site on site core XP or site correct, and you're only on site core, and you're really only using the XM features that roadmap looks a lot easier than somebody who's on XP with a few sites and using all of the capabilities. But to some customers we have where they have 250 sites on the platform. Getting that moved isn't going to be an overnight journey. It's not even going to be a one year journey. It's a huge journey and huge undertaking, and that will require a very different way, a very different approach. If you're just on exam, it's going to depend on again, or even XP is going to depend on where you are on your journey. Are you? Is your customer? Are you just happy with everything you have right now, and you just want to lift it and shift it and move it across to a new platform? Are you, maybe at the point where you're thinking about modernizing not just your infrastructure, but modernizing your organization, maybe, right? And that involves a redesign. 

So we're working with our customers where they're not just looking to move to next level. They want to actually rebrand, and not necessarily rebrand, but redesign their entire site. Because they've been on their current they've been on their current site for, you know, several iterations of site called upgrade after upgrade, and it's just a little bit faster sell by date. Honestly, they do, they do realize it requires modernization on that. So I think depending on where you are or you want to get to, it will require very different approaches. Yeah, and Graham here. Thank you very much for the comment. It's a nice, long one, especially when you say we nailed it. Just kidding, but, yeah, no, it's it. It truly is unique. Now, the one thing I will say is, what is the next version of Sitecore to run out of support? Do we know that off the top? I know when we did this last year, nine was nine just ended support, right? I don't know if we know if the top of our head we're going through this, but with the we want to raise here, we have a actually, the folks at Site core, on the product side, partnership side, have created a phenomenal directory of organizations like ours, who create products to be showcased within the site, core partner product finder. And we are hopefully, you know, cross the fingers. We're hopefully very close to launching our inaugural one. And we're, it's called the Konabos way finder, thanks to Jake and team over there. For the for the work they put in and reviewing and helping us along on this. But it's very much this, this exact idea. It's structured road mapping exercises, where we can put several layers of our team at the customer experience, technical marketing, business processes, working with your team to not only help transform you digitally, but hopefully match where you are in your business processes, and allow those two things to inform each other to work out what could be a three to five year road mapping based on the complexities of your platform situation, organization. And so we're really, we're really excited about this potentially coming out there, but it's, yeah, it's, it's a unique opportunity. It could be complex, but at the end of it, you have a clear path forward. 

Because one of the things that I notice with a lot of composable thinking is the ability to have rapid iteration is unbelievable. Like, it's a great feature of this, but not everybody needs that, right? So if we can launch something very quickly, that's great, especially if it's a proof of concept for this composable pathway. But sometimes we really need a full accounting of where we are at a place in time, in our current state, and where we want to go. And our feeling is that if we can help you get there within a quarter or half a quarter, that's as much a value as what rapid, rapid iteration, rapid launching can be in a lot of the in a lot of those platform features. So yeah, I think the road maps and road mapping is definitely something you don't want to make composable, something you want to sit, sit down and figure out before you just start throwing pieces out there like it adds a great, great, great amount of value and helps everybody get their thinking straight in terms of the cycle support. I did just look it up, and I actually surprised. I was actually a little bit surprised, but mainstream support for cycle 10 and 10.1 actually ends at the end of this year. But if you're on cycle nine dot, 9.0 mainstream extended support for 9.0 ends at the end of this year. That the mainstream support is quite it's been almost three years. Wow. It's a little bit crazy that cycle 10 and 10.1 has been around for that long. But the good thing is, if you're on 10 and 10.1 upgrades, actually, that is the point at which upgrades became a lot easier. So get in touch if you, if you're on those versions, and we can, we can, we can help with the upgrade to the latest versions as well. Perfect. Well, thank you Kim. Thank you everybody for watching and who will watch this on demand. It's been great recapping an interesting year and an interesting month here with some major updates. And was great getting together with the site core community. Of course, there is nothing like it, so we'll talk to you soon. Thanks, everyone. Bye.