Sitecore announces headless CMS offering

Sitecore, the CMS and e-commerce platform, has announced the launch of Sitecore Experience Edge, a new platform for headless content delivery at scale. The platform’s content creation capabilities will be accessible to marketers as well as developers. The headless content delivery will be available in early 2021.

Two options will be available initially, Experience Edge for Sitecore Content Hub and Experience Edge for Sitecore Experience Manager (XM). The former allows headless content delivery to any channel through APIs, with the content managed by marketers, and tools for content lifecycle management. The latter offers XM customers to publish static website content as well as deliver headless content. Content management is again accessible to marketers.

Headless and hybrid. Headless CMS — so-called because it lacks a content delivery component (the head) — allows the front-end (basically, any channel) to request content from a content hub through APIs. It’s viewed as advantageous to brands and organizations seeking to push content across many channels rather than just feed it to a website.

When headless capabilities are combined with user-friendly content management tools, the result is often called “hybrid headless.” Jose Santa Ana, Product Marketing Director for Sitecore AI and Content Hub, confirmed that it would be accurate to describe Experience Edge as a hybrid solution.

“First, it does offer coding-free content management (with the full content planning, collaboration, and management capabilities) for marketers, but requires front-end coding for publishing of the content and building the experience,” he told us. “Secondly, for Sitecore Experience Edge for Experience Manager (XM), it’s hybrid because the underlying XM content management solution can be deployed on-premises, while the delivery layer is deployed as SaaS.”

The two options. We asked Santa Ana why Sitecore was offering the two distinct Experience Edge services. “The two offerings address two different use cases, which can translate to two different groups of customers,” he explained. “Sitecore Experience Edge for Sitecore Content Hub allows marketers and business users to manage the content while developers build the presentation/front-end separately.

“Sitecore Experience Edge for Sitecore Experience Manager (XM) allows marketers and business users to control both the content and the presentation/experience composition layers, while removing the burden of content deployment, infrastructure setup, and scaling.”

Why we care. As digital marketing evolves rapidly from the model of creating web-sites and web-pages and publishing content designed for them, headless CMS — and especially hybrid headless — will increasingly be seen as a route to delivering channel-agnostic content as channels continue to multiply.

About The Author

Kim Davis

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech Today. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.