XM Cloud Takes Off at SUGCON Antwerp
The European SUGCON conference, held April 3–4 in Antwerp, Belgium, is a unique event on the Sitecore calendar. Unlike its more brash, marketing-focused sibling, Symposium, SUGCON is a practitioner-focused gathering, where developers and marketers share practical learnings and where the product team shines a light on where the platform is going. This year's event had two focus points: how AI, specifically agentic capabilities, is coming to the center of the platform and how XM Cloud continues to grow capabilities as it separates from its platform-based roots.
The AI Inflection Point
The conference keynotes by CEO Dave O'Flanagan, CPO Roger Connolly, and CTO Danny Robinson argued that the "AI Inflection Point" made the role of the content management system (CMS) even more central to an organization. The way people get to your content is changing, with search traffic expected to drop by 25% by 2026, but people will communicate about your brand in new places and hear about it from new sources, such as LLMs. This is yet another reason to ensure your brand voice is strong, clear, and authentic. Sitecore is positioning its products as a brand-aware "AI first stack" built around Stream. Its generative capabilities are anchored in a brand voice and secured so that a company can confidently train it with proprietary brand materials. However, their AI-first vision extends beyond content generation to encompass translations, component generation, and, eventually, how content should be stored. The vision shared was specific, detailed, and far-reaching.
The Big Reveals
The first concrete reveal was a live demo of the Marketplace SDK by Liz Nelson and Spiros Misichronis. My colleague Erica Stockwell-Alpert has written about the importance of Marketplace as a place for customizations and integrations in a SaaS-based product. We got our first look at the SDK in Antwerp, with a live demo of an XM Cloud integration being built and deployed. The SDK had a clean, CLI-focused feel, the tooling looked strong, and the deployment model looked flexible. Apps can be deployed to the Sitecore Portal, the XM Cloud Site, or to support an individual field (including custom field types), and can be deployed as either single tenant (e.g., for a client's implementation), multi-tenant (an agency tool kit), or reviewed and approved public apps. Although these will start with XM Cloud, the plan is to make the Marketplace support all Sitecore's SaaS products over time. As the Experience Editor is being deprecated for XM Cloud, Sitecore needed to show a new way to continue its legacy of deep customizability. Marketplace looked ready to take on this role.
The second reveal was a rethought JSS for XM Cloud, which Liz Nelson presented with Christian Hahn. Without the need to support Experience Editor, there was an opportunity to considerably slim down the JSS footprint. The new Content SDK reduced payload size by 89% and load times by 200ms. It removed any performance concerns around the number of components that can be on a page. Although still in beta, Liz Nelson indicated it would be released by summer and that new XM Cloud projects should "definitely be built on this."
The third reveal was an AI-powered Design Library coming to the Sitecore Cloud portal. Liz Nelson and Eirini Kalampogia presented a "centralized hub for all presentation management," allowing marketers to search components across all sites, view all variants without creating a page, and test content and theme variations in real time. The new Design Library also provides in-context access to brand assistant support from Stream. Developers could see code and engage in collaboration and code reviews "without needing local setups." Marketers can create code and no-code components, which developers can then polish and extend. Developers can use the tool for code reviews, collaboration, and experimentation, "without needing local setups."
The final reveal was an early peek at XM Cloud Content, a new CLI-first content repository designed by Alistair Deneys. This struck me as a distillation of the elements of items, templates, and fields, but rethought anew in a dramatically simplified form. Authors define content types and content items. Content types can compose fragments and packages of reused fields, giving us the power of template inheritance while keeping it in a strictly composable form. This honors the design maxim to prefer composition over inheritance, which we all learn the hard way, as inheritance chains can become unmanageable very quickly. Publishing happens as a two-step process. First, you identify the items to be published. Then, publishing is an instantaneous, bit-flipping operation. When items are published, they become immutable, providing a solid audit trail of what was visible when. Creating item types will automatically, but optionally, create GraphQL endpoints. All operations are supported from the command line, though a Pages-like editing experience was also shown off. While there was no word about when this would be coming to XM Cloud, it looked extremely polished and promising, taking the best parts of the content model we've worked with since Sitecore 6.0, rethinking them, and leaving the problems behind. I'm keen to watch this effort unfold and see it integrated into the product.
Karma as a Service
There's something different about attending these events in person vs. catching up with them in blog posts and YouTube videos. This platform has been built and continues to be built and used by people who are genuinely passionate about the product. "The community is our key strategic differentiator," as Dave O'Flanagan noted. After the last question, I was waiting to ask Alistair Deneys a question (which at this moment I completely forget!). I caught a bit of a conversation between him and Andy Cohen, the architect of XM Cloud, who had given a fascinating talk earlier that day on the challenges of building with a tool he had previously built. "ChatGPT said I should call this talk 'Karma as a Service." He had talked a lot about his battles with Experience Edge, so he was very interested in the new publishing mechanism. "So you identify the items to publish first, and only then you publish them? That's brilliant!" Being a fly on the wall for these conversations makes the trip worth it. That's when the ideas click. And the waffles weren't bad either.
Want to learn more about what’s ahead in Sitecore XM Cloud? Reach out. Our Sitecore MVPs and Sitecore experts would be happy to chat with you about the product roadmap and how you can make the most of your Sitecore investment.