I'm Bluffing

 Every year, Sitecore organizes their yearly worldwide Symposium event. This event has an outreach across all customers, technical & platform partners as well as all relevant representatives of the technical team that is building the Sitecore ecosystem. This event typically spans across 3 days, followed by 1.5 days of in-depth product and technical sessions offered uniquely to MVP profiles (Most Valuable Professional). This year’s Chicago-based edition was host to 2500 attendees, over 100 speakers and keynote sessions from October 17-20th. Since The Reference (EPAM) is a Platinum Sitecore partner with 3 MVPs, we attend this event on a yearly basis. The corona pandemic wrought its disruptor role here as well, causing this Symposium to be the first real-life event over the course of 2-3 years. As the market has shifted considerably over the last two years, due to technology advances and preferences such as Composable, Headless, SaaS platforms, lightweight platforms, no-code...

I've been a more than avid Sitecore supporter over the last (almost) decade. I've been in the trenches with the team, customers and product teams more than once. And that implies that I have seen the Sitecore platform evolve from pure CMS into the experience platform and more recently into all flavors and options that come with the platform or that can be added into. It truly remains an enormously versatile platform overall! With the introduction of more and more new architectures such as headless, best of breed and pure cloud based solutions, the landscape did begin to change though. Which provided Sitecore with quite a challenge as they were not ready for this transition. Now, since the acquisition of Stylelabs / ContentHub, and subsequently all other platforms such as Moosend, Boxever, Four51, Reflektion, Sitecore acquired a lot of power and knowlegde and has since then ramped up its developing capabilities. The ultimate goal? To move into a SaaS(-like) platform in a first p...

 I hadn't found the time yet to post this enormously valuable blog post. But regardless of when, I still need to add this. Not only as a validation on the work that was done during the last year, but also to honor all the other Sitecore MVP's out there. The last two year have been challenging, let's be honest. And all my fellow MVPs have continued their hard work, spreading knowledge, building up expertise, convincing customers and colleagues alike on the best approach and the best way forward with the platform. We are, slowly but certainly, looking at times where we can once again meet in person and start to exchange on even more information. Let's hope this year will be an interesting one for all of us, both customers, partners, developers and MVP's. More information on the Sitecore MVP plan can be found here: https://mvp.sitecore.com/ A big thanks to Sitecore for the recognition, it will not go unanswered!