Clay Tablet Technologies founder and CEO Robinson Kelly goes where the business action is – so he’s constantly on the move at Internet industry events spreading the Clay Tablet word among potential customers and partners. He took a few minutes at Sitecore Dreamcore 2011 to discuss his company’s software, which connects Sitecore CMS with language service providers and platforms to streamline the language translation process for web marketers.
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Sitecore Sr. Vice President of Product Marketing Darren Guarnaccia, in a short interview at Dreamcore North America 2011, provides some color and context around Sitecore’s forthcoming marketing-centric additions to its web content management software, the Customer Engagement Platform.
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Fred Harding of Coveo, an enterprise search platform provider, took time out at Dreamcore 2011 to discuss his company’s technology and its integration with the Sitecore web content management system.
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Turn out the lights: A worker in the Park Plaza Hotel ballroom cleans up in the waning minutes of Dreamcore 2011
Sitecore Dreamcore North America 2.0 ended this afternoon with big product development promises, hallway chatter about new marketing capabilities, and a mad dash for the taxi stand for folks with early flights out of Logan.
In his closing comments, Sitecore CEO Michael Siefert painted a big vision of innovation for the coming year especially in advances that will make marketers smarter and more effective with automation, customer intelligence, engagement measurements and more.
The caveat here is: It’s not all built yet, so the company’s unveiling of the CEP (Customer Experience Platform) with lofty, compelling promises puts the pressure on the company to deliver tangible results. (See a product preview here.)
Key takeaways from this year’s conference:
The overall ambition is great. Some customers and partners I spoke with left a little confused about what components/capabilities will be available, and when, and how it will impact pricing, licensing, and existing installs. (Official release of CEP comes June 8 at Dreamcore London.) More than one person left scratching their heads at the alphabet soup of new acronyms.
The real proof, of course, will be a year from now, when we all can look back and see how much of the roadmap reaches the market – and how the earliest adopters are faring.
We’d love to hear what you took away from the conference by commenting on our blog.
In the next few days and weeks, we’ll be publishing more feedback and thoughts from the nine ISITE Design folks who attended Dreamcore, so we hope you subscribe and stick around. And if you haven’t read or heard enough CMS information, head over to our other CMS blog, the CMS Myth.
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The following post was submitted by ISITE Design colleague, Sheryl Hampton, as a public service to the Dreamcore audience.
OK, Sitecore is a great CMS, for sure, and the folks there are super smart. And face it, when you’re referring to a lengthy product name or phrase, day after day, of course you start abbreviating it. However, the acronyms were a bit much this year – I am not kidding when I say I’ve seen in print and heard each one of these multiple times in the past 2 days. Well, not to worry; I’ve created the glossary of terms below for communication from Sitecore regarding their upcoming products.
OK, let’s start with the easy ones we all know…
CMS (Content Management System)
WCM (Web Content Management system)
WMS (Web content Management System)
CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
OMS (Online Marketing Suite)
Now here are some new ones, and Sitecore’s labeling, from the event…
CEP (Customer Engagement Platform)
ECM (Email Campaign Manager)
DMS (Digital Marketing System)
Of course, it all comes down to math…
CEP = CMS + DMS
And, from what I can tell..
DMS = EA + EA + PEE (stop laughing)
EA (Engagement Analytics)
EA (Engagement Automation)
PEE (Personalization and Experience Editor)
I think ECM is another name for EA (Engagement Automation), not to be confused with that tired old dog, Enterprise Content Management. And I’m not quite sure, but rumor has it that DMS is the new OMS. Although I did hear OMS v2 referenced, and saw DMS v2 in print. Yes, I am a little confused. I’m sure they’ll have it all figured out and clear for us when they launch the new products. That way we can easily tweet about it all and be understood!
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The major storyline from this week’s Dreamcore conference: Sitecore’s evolution from web content management to a broader customer engagement platform. Call it marketing and positioning, but the company is taking valid steps to broaden its capabilities as a web platform to go beyond core content management and provide marketers with tools for engagement, communications, intelligence and optimization.
CEO Michael Siefert painted the vision at the start of the conference by introducing the new platform (a souped-up, next-gen version of the original Online Marketing Suite which it replaces) and closed on the same message Tuesday: “We’re the fastest growting vendor in CMS and in digital marketing technology,” Siefert said in his closing talk.
The new marketing-centric platform which layers on top of Sitecore CMS isn’t officially released yet and is expected around June (an early version of the 6.5 releases is available) Sitecore is seeking to become nothing less than a single source provider for a suite of tools necessary to any web marketer. Customer engagement in their definition extends beyond managing the site to managing social media, customer intelligence, analytics and metrics to help make smarter marketing decisions, email marketing tools and more. See the full news release here.
There’s a lot left to do, Sitecore admits. They’re looking a year ahead and plan to have built out a lot more competency in this area in coming releases — predictive analytics, marketing automation tools, etc. And while other marketing technology and CMS companies are adding tools via acquisition, Siefert sees Sitecore’s focus on building an integrated platform to be an advantage. Half the company’s 200+ staff are said to be focused on R&D.
What’s coming in the next year:
This last one — Sitecore Engage — is a nod to the marketers Sitecore is trying to bring along. Engage will be a Sitecore portal designed and populated with content, video, articles, blogs and advice (including phone-based consulting from Sitecore) specifically for marketers, campaign managers, line of business leaders and others who don’t muck with the code so much as run campaigns and generate value through the digital channel. No release date announced, but it’s coming, we’re told.
ISITE will be following along to see what and how much they can pull off in the coming year.
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Ever try to find something at a Best Buy on a Saturday, with dozens of other people vying for the nearest salesperson’s attention, only to be swiftly pointed off to a vague aisle yards away? After searching in vain for 15 minutes, frustration, confusion, and disinterest surely ensue.
Now imagine an instance where, instead of sending you off on your way, the salesperson of your favorite shop actually helps you find what you need – delivering you the perfect shirt for your jacket, and even showing you a great tie to boot.
What’s the difference between store 1 and store 2? For starters, you leave store 2 with what you were looking for. But more importantly, store 2 engaged you by building communication, trust, and commitment. Instead of pushing faceless traffic, store 2 created real value for you in the experience.
This high traffic (quantity) versus high value (quality) scenario could apply to any 2 websites. Ron Person explained the considerations in using OMS2 to create a more engaging website by leveraging cross-channel marketing and multipliers.
It used to be for a marketing manager, 3 or 4 channels of marketing in separate silos, with a few key metrics. Now there’s over a dozen channels – different variations, different metrics.
Rather than Einstein’s complex equation for web analytics, we need something simple and elegant to leverage these metrics. We need a model for engagement value, measured by communication, trust, and commitment. Through understanding the actions of users involving these aspects we can find our engagement value, Ron says. That’s where OMS2 comes in.
Engagement value accumulates at transaction points, where we can assign a point value to each point (Ron used 25,50&100, but you use any number to assign your own value to the page).
Looking at the dashboard running on OMS2, we can see where we can tweak, noting traffic types and value across multiple channels. For example, an email campaign creates 8% of value, yet is the most impactful channel. This tells us which areas we need to pump more into and expand on, and which may not be as engaging or impactful. We can track by individual visitor – engagement and activity score on the individual level or the business level.
The dashboard intelligence is so straightforward “even a marketer can do it”. Thanks Ron 
Once we have the engagement value, we can determine relevance – marketing effectiveness, relevance to user interests, value per visitor – and page potential.
Bottom line is, relevance > number of visitors. Instead of high traffic alone, focus on high traffic that’s highly engaged.
The nitty gritty:
Why is OMS2 better?
Although Google Analytics also allows similar tracking now – to prescribe value per page – the difference is the coding and the tracking. You can’t track individuals, you just get the bigger impression, but you should know where your users’ interests lie. OMS2 is easy to track on the business level or the individual level.
Dynamics integration?
The dashboard pulls data from the DMS, after first queries – your one time hit is cached, instead of needing to input a bunch of queries.
Cost per campaign factored in?
Though it’s not pulled in, you can use a program called Tableau for that. Costs change too constantly.
What questions do you still have about OMS2?
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The Dreamcore party band rocked old covers from the '70s and '80s
The real differentiation happens when the sun goes down and the conference reception begins.
Sitecore checked all the right boxes for food, drink, music and reasonable revelry at its 2011 Dreamcore reception Tuesday at the Park Plaza.
Sitecore hosted what I’ll call the “ ‘Round the City of Boston” theme party, replete with a huge Fenway/Citgo sign hovering over a big bar and “neighborhood” food stations: Chinatown (Dim Sum), North End (Italian), Seaport District (crab legs and shrimp) and Fenway Park (hot dogs and pretzels).
Combined with a two-man band rockin’ ‘70s and ‘80s covers (A+ on the tunes), the party was a nice way to end Day 1 of Dreamcore.
Did I mention the open bar?
(If you missed our earlier coverage of the Monday night pre-Dreamcore party at Minibar, go here.)
Party-goes were no match for two oversized shrimp and King crab boats.
The Fenway Park Citgo sign looms large over the Dreamcore party bar.
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There’s up to 20 Sitecore MVPs mingling among the crowd at Dreamcore. Our own Rick Cabral is one of them, although I haven’t even seen him yet today because we stay on different sides of the track (biz vs tech).
Here’s a suggestion: Let’s give em all Burger King crowns so we can easily ID them. Someone want to run out and get 20? I’m sure the MVPs would be thrilled to wear em, right Rick?
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We already knew that Sitecore has a tight relationship with Microsoft. The news from Dreamcore indicates that relationship is even getting cozier with Sitecore actually putting an office inside the mother ship at 1 Microsoft Way in Redmond, WA.
Beyond just living in sin together (too far?), Sitecore’s product development roadmap is clearly favoring even tighter integration with the Microsoft suite with a focus on MS Dynamics and Azure.
Not to mention playing nice with SharePoint, which appears to be a genuine commitment as they realized (the hard way likely) you can’t displace a beast like SharePoint, you can only befriend it. And good news for anyone doing heavy work with Sitecore and SharePoint: The SharePoint connector is being rebuilt to scale better. No commitment on the delivery date, but we were promised, it’s well underway, and “it looks good.”
All in all this is great news for organizations committed to the Microsoft platform. I just hope it doesn’t come at the expense of significant investments to integrate with the broader marketing technology landscape. While there is certainly competitive overlap with organizations like SalesForce and Adobe, having them all work well together is a necessity for us marketers trying to put it all together.
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