Upgrade or migrate to Composable DXP?

Transcript

Note: The following is the transcription of the video produced by an automated transcription system.

Akshay Sura: So Kamruz today we're going to be talking about should we upgrade the existing monolith? Or should we start migrating to Composable DXP? So, everyone's asking about this question like, what should we do? What's the right answer? Is there a right answer?

Kamruz Jaman: Yeah, I think with the big announcement with some of the traditional monolith, CMS is moving towards a. Lighter, composable stack. Yeah, I think it's the question on everybody's lips right now. What should we do? And it's a bit of a bit of a difficult question to fully answer because everyone's situation is different. Some people are deeply ingrained in their existing CMS provider, so it's not an easy move to make. Others are using all of the features in their provider, so to replicate that might be a lot of work for them and others will. Others will have a lot of deep backend integrations that are not going to change overnight. So, it really is. It varies. It depends on kind of situation. I think people will need to. Pay a lot of attention to this. If you're somebody who's just on a brochure where types of sites who are not using all of your features of your existing CMS platform, then this situation might be made a lot simpler. We know where some of the traditional CMS's that we've been used to like Sitecore. The dirty little secret is that nobody really uses those analytics features. So actually, you just you just have a traditional old school systems at that point.

Kamruz Jaman: So, it's just the data, it's the presentation. And then it's a case of do we want to upgrade, or do we want to continue to upgrade, right? Do we want to continue to upgrade? And at what point do we do we make the jump to a headless CMS, SaaS based CMS and when you get to that point, the question is how do you what platform do you get onto? It's not a case of do we upgrade? It is a case of you have to migrate. So, if I was going from Sitecore XP to Sitecore Content Hub, you'd think, OK, well, I can just run the traditional installation update, wizard magic thing and boom, I'm going to be on Content Hub. No, it doesn't. Doesn't quite work like that. You have to migrate that data yourself. And when you go, if you're going to migrate that data yourself, at that point, you have to really ask yourself, is what is the right platform for me that I'm moving to because it is a new platform. It is a new build. Yeah. You might be.

Akshay Sura: Yeah, yeah, no. That's what I was going to say is. If you can upgrade and you've been using all the all the features, then great, but like you said, sometimes you can't upgrade because it's like it's the end of the shelf life, right? So, you have no choice, but the good thing is, at least they can. Do it in pieces, don't always have to take the whole thing at once and create a whole kind of strain on your organization, but they could do it piece by piece, move commerce out, move, you know, marketing automation out and then go that route.

Kamruz Jaman: Yeah, absolutely, I mean, Sitecore's platform is going to stick around for a few years, so it's not like we have to move right now. It's going to it's going to be happening over a several years. But if you haven't been ingrained in all of the features, like you said, you can start to move, start to remove some of these Lego blocks out right and start to un-piece it and put them into the correct boxes that they belong in. One of those ways may be that if you're OK on XP and you're not using any of those features, scale back down to XM and then start to use Sitecore's Experience Edge There's a bunch of new features coming out in 10.2, which also help. But right now, as it stands, if you are going to go to XM with Experience Edge, you have to still rewrite your front end because of the way it's hosted together with Graph QL and those JSON endpoints, which is not no good for your Sitecore MVC sites, but it is good for your JSS sites. Or you can take a step back and use XM with something like Uniform, which will give you take your MVC site and just push it up into a Jamstack based lightweight architecture. And you don't need any of those CD servers but still give you some of that personalization so that there are options to continue to go down the upgrade path. If you if you're not ready for the migration path right now, at least.

Akshay Sura: Yeah, and part of that is also finding we say it all the time, right? Either reusing what you already have. So, nature of these monoliths is you're probably replicating some of the processes so you can get rid of that and just use, if you are using a CRM or a PIM rather than duplicating it. Or DAM, rather than duplicating the effort to make that and then make that a priority and use that. Or if you're looking to add a new feature like you want to do B2B analytics, find the best of breed you're no longer tied to like one vendor. And actually, I personally don't think one vendor can provide everything which is the best of breed, right? It's really difficult to do that. That's why we have so many different companies.

Kamruz Jaman: Yeah, absolutely. This is, you know, you need to specialize, right a Formula One car is extremely good at going extremely fast, but it's going to be no good for me to use it as a generic car to go shopping it right. You need you need those specialist pieces of equipment for the specialist jobs. It's just the nature of the beast, unfortunately. But yeah, people can move these move these pieces out slowly, and they don't have to worry about a Big Bang, everything shutting down overnight. Yeah. Due to the amount of times talking about integrations, you know, as you mentioned, the amount of times we always hear about the source of truth, you know, we have the data in this system, but then we're talking about the source of truth, like, Well, why do we need this bit in the middle? Why don't we just go to the source of truth instead of worrying about this process thinking and this file from this server and then this process running to marry this data together? Just go directly to the source of truth, and there is nothing else in the middle to maintain, right?

Akshay Sura: Yeah, absolutely. Any other piece of advice Kamruz?

Kamruz Jaman: It's a big world out there with the Composable DXP piece. If you are thinking about the migration piece there, it will seem overwhelming. There is a wealth of knowledge out there, but engage with a partner, engage with us, hopefully. But if not, engage with a partner that's been through been through. This is a process. It's an initial struggle. But once you've done this a few times, putting those Lego pieces together is super simple.

Akshay Sura: All right, thank you.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with me. @akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack.