Sitecore Symposium 2021 review: some takeaways and predictions

Even though we had another virtual Symposium, it was still a fantastic one with some incredible publications by Sitecore, their customers, and the community.

Some key takeaways and predictions for me:

• The composable DXP is really taking shape. I foresee most new projects being built on a headless front-end stack to take full advantage of these great SaaS offerings.
• Sitecore XC is dead, long live Order Cloud. I can finally say that I would welcome doing a Commerce project — it would be a headless front-end with Order Cloud for sure.
• EXM and Sitecore Marketing Automation is dead, long live Sitecore Send. I still am not totally clear on how easy it would be to replace the XP and EXM integration with XP and Sitecore Send, but from the talks it seems doable.
• Content Hub and its closely related new offering Experience Edge still look very “beta” to me. Call me old fashioned but I think that XM/XP hosted by a competent cloud hosting provider will be around for a long time to come.
• Symphony — the Front-end as a Service site builder which uses some of SXA under the hood — this could be good, of course when coupled with a fully SaaS offering, I think it will take a couple more years to mature, but we will see how it looks when it is released next year.

Thanks to all the contributors that made Sitecore Symposium a great event!