DEMAND MORE PERFORMANCE

Why upgrade to Sitecore® XP 8.2?The case for moving from Sitecore 6.x and 7.x to XP 8.x

White paper // Why upgrade to Sitecore XP 8.2?

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Contents

Prospering in the age of the consumer ....................................................................................................................................................................................................... 2

Sitecore experience management ................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 2

Sitecore 6.x: From CMS to web experience ............................................................................................................................................................................................... 3

Sitecore 7.x: From web experience to digital experience ..................................................................................................................................................................... 5

Sitecore 8.x: Empowering the business ....................................................................................................................................................................................................... 7

It’s time to get in front of the curve ............................................................................................................................................................................................................. 13

About Sitecore ....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 13

Published 8/16. © 2016 Sitecore Corporation A/S. All rights reserved. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S in the U.S. and other countries. All other brand and product names are the property of their respective owners. This document may not, in whole or in part, be photocopied, reproduced, translated, or reduced to any electronic medium or machine readable form without prior consent, in writing, from Sitecore. Information in this document is subject to change without notice and does not represent a commitment on the part of Sitecore.

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This white paper was originally published in October 2015 with the release of the Sitecore® Experience Platform™ (XP) 8.1. We’ve updated it to include the new features and functionality that come with the September 2016 release of XP 8.2.

Prospering in the age of the consumerIn just 10 years, digital advancements have given consumers great power. They use more digital channels than ever, look for and research more options and companies to serve them, rely more on what others have to say, and seek resolution and fewer hassles from the brands they patronize. And if consumers aren’t well served, they’ll move on. Fifty-three percent of US consumers switched providers due to poor service in at least one industry, according to Accenture1.

In our always-on, mobile world, it’s not enough to simply communicate to your customer. You have to create the most personalized experience possible, one that cuts through the noise and shows them that you “know them.” Delivering the right information to the right person in the right place and at the right time, based on the sum total of that person’s past behaviors and current needs, is the only way to stay relevant. At Sitecore, we call this “context marketing” and believe it’s the only way to manage a customer experience in which the customer is in charge.

Context marketing requires a technology platform that meets three criteria:

■ Integrated content management: Its content management function is built from the ground up to integrate with other parts of the platform and separates the content from its presentation so your content can be automatically delivered at scale across any channel.

■ Contextual intelligence: Your customer analytics must capture individual visitor data, not data by audience segment, to enable targeted and truly personalized experiences.

■ Omnichannel automation: Engagement automation must go way beyond email and landing pages—it should map profiles and real-time behaviors with on-the-spot decision making so you can customize the experience across touchpoints.

The latest release of the Sitecore Experience Platform, Version 8.2, is based on years of industry experience. We have not only watched the market evolve; we have evolved with it, sometimes advanced it, and always ensured you have the right tools to deliver experiences that will help you win loyal customers.

If you’re on Sitecore 6.x or 7.x, why go through the trouble of upgrading? This white paper will answer that question and more, as we walk you through how Sitecore has evolved over the years and the advantages our most recent release offers to your team.

Sitecore experience managementSince we released Sitecore 6.0 in 2008, Sitecore has grown from a platform that provides simple web experiences to one that enables marketing teams to become truly engaged with their customers. Through a 360-degree customer view, Sitecore now helps you deliver content in the context of how your customers have interacted with your brand across all channels and devices.

Think of it this way:

■ Sitecore 6.x took you from basic web content management to web experience management.

■ Sitecore 7.x shifted the experience from web-only to omnichannel digital experiences.

■ Sitecore 8.x builds on the foundation that 7.x created and focuses on empowering your business and marketing users. Sitecore XP 8.2 introduces functionality that helps you get to website launch much more quickly.

1 “Customer 2020: Are You Future-Ready or Reliving the Past?” Accenture Strategy 2014.

Did you know that mainstream support for Sitecore 7.1 ends in December 2016? It ended for 6.6 in December 2015; for 6.5 and earlier, in June 2015.

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Each release since Sitecore 6.0 has built greater capabilities to support marketing and allow IT to focus on performance and scalability. But taking advantage of the capabilities that enable context marketing and omnichannel digital experience requires an upgrade to Sitecore XP 8.2.

Sitecore 6.x: From CMS to web experienceWhen Sitecore 6.0 was made available in 2008, one CIO referred to it as “the most advanced CMS on the market” at the time. The Sitecore 6.x set of releases focused a great deal of attention on improving the efforts of developers in designing great web experiences, as well as easing the work of content editors and publishers.

A new Page Editor replaced WebEdit, and security now used the ASP.NET membership model. Sitecore 6.1 saw the release of a new rules engine and support for what was then called OMS, or the Online Marketing Suite. OMS provided marketing automation and analytics, among other capabilities.

Sitecore 6.2 introduced enhanced editorial capabilities while 6.3 was all about improving the scalability of the Sitecore platform. It was also in Sitecore 6.3 that support for Sitecore® Azure was announced.

Sitecore 6.4 brought a number of enhancements for developers and business users alike, including an improved and extensible Page Editor and support for the ASP.NET MVC (the Model-View-Controller architectural pattern), and .NET 4.

Sitecore 6.x: The case for upgrading

You made an early investment in web experience with Sitecore 6.x. But the difference in Sitecore 6.x and Sitecore 8.2 is significant. Outlined below are the most important benefits and strongest business arguments for upgrading:

■ Support: Mainstream support for Sitecore 6.6 ended in December 2015; for Sitecore 6.5 and earlier, in June 2015. This means you no longer receive free support for errors and unexpected behavior during development, compatibility fixes for supported platforms or hotfixes, and patches for product defects.

■ Ease of use: Sitecore 6.x was an IT or web department’s dream, but for content marketers it only scratched the surface of capabilities delivered today. It’s likely if you’re on 6.x, you’re using the platform for more than basic content management and rudimentary personalization. Sitecore 8.2 puts the power of experience management directly in the hands of the people most responsible for the customer experience—your marketing users.

■ Connected data silos: With 6.x you don’t easily have a 360-degree view of your customers. Your business users still rely on IT and the analytics team to pull together customer data from various sources and run detailed reports on how well customer segments, campaigns, and/or websites are performing.

■ All-new marketing capability: The kinds of multichannel marketing apps your business users are asking for are built into Sitecore XP 8.2. Get ahead of the curve and equip them before they come to you.

■ Visitor data accuracy: Web crawlers, spiders, and bots have continually evolved to find new ways to index. These have caused the analytics professional no shortage of headaches as reporting discrepancies from ads, promotions, and other significant spend channels are improperly tracked. Upgrading gives you confidence in your visitor data.

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Then came Sitecore 6.5 in 2011, laying the foundation for the Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform (what we now call the Sitecore Experience Platform). This release included the newly renamed and significantly updated Digital Marketing Suite (formerly called OMS) which added Engagement Automation, Engagement Analytics, and in-line personalization.

Finally, we concluded the era of Sitecore 6.x with Sitecore 6.6 in 2012. Sitecore 6.6 had a strong mobile focus, providing tools like a device simulator and Page Preview service to help developers build mobile web interactions and applications. Added to the mix were advanced targeting and segmentation that enabled marketers to create dynamic segments by defining one or more conditions. And, native support for MVC was also introduced.

From traffic stats to engagement value

It was in Sitecore 6.x that the idea of Engagement Value was introduced. Defined by your organization based on your specific needs, Engagement Value was a new metric that would tell you the effectiveness of your marketing efforts beyond page views and click-throughs.

Sitecore 6.x was the first step in creating engaging, personalized experiences across channels. CRM Connect

Sitecore 6.x highlights

Sitecore 6.0 was released in 2008 and the last version, Sitecore 6.6, launched in 2012, bringing you:

Content management

■ A new extensible Page Editor

■ Improved Rich Text Editor (RTE)

■ In-Line Experience Management (personalization)

■ Device Simulator – ability to preview content as it would appear on various devices

■ Page Preview Service – allows you to test experiences on specific combinations of device, operating system, browser, and email client

Marketing automation and analytics

■ The Digital Marketing Suite – email marketing, personalization, analytics

■ Dynamic segmentation – ability to create segments dynamically using behavioral or profile data

■ Engagement analytics – tracking the quality, not the quantity of your website visits

■ Engagement automation – defining automatic actions based on visitor behavior

■ Executive dashboards and reporting

Development and architecture

■ Support for the latest development technologies: ASP.NET MVC & .NET 4

■ Mobile web and app development

■ Official support for Sitecore Azure

■ Scalability and performance improvements

To give you some perspective (and a bit of a reality check), Apple released the first iPhone on June 28, 2007, less than one year before Sitecore 6.0 launched in 2008. Apple released the first iPad in April 2010—nine months after Sitecore 6.1. Your audience has likely moved on; has your content management system?

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enabled you to store customer activity on the website in your CRM and use CRM customer data to personalize what contacts experienced on the web. It was an important step in the right direction, but there was certainly more to come.

Today’s customers demand more than a simple personalized experience, and you need to connect more than your CRM system to get a complete view of your customers.

Sitecore 7.x: From web experience to digital experienceThe arrival of Sitecore 7.0 in 2013 marked the start of an important two-year journey to bring digital experiences to every channel and device. The website was joined by mobile and social, areas that continue to grow exponentially today. By 2013, a completely different buyer—the millennial—became a legitimate target audience. Buyers no longer lived in only one channel, they interacted across channels and expected a seamless experience as they moved between them. Sitecore 7.x introduced omnichannel experience management.

There were four releases of Sitecore 7.x. Sitecore 7.1 introduced the industry’s first search-based architecture (ContentSearch). Marketing users and developers now had access to search in every UI and could easily drill down and find content through faceting and content tagging. Not only did the search on the back end improve, but also on the front end for website visitors.

With ContentSearch, you could easily and quickly search massive amounts of content across a single Sitecore application instance. This was great for leveraging enormous repositories of news or product information. The search architecture was pluggable, so you could use Lucene or Solr search engines that shipped with Sitecore or plug in a third-party solution of your choice.

Sitecore 7.1 also brought developers SPEAK, or Sitecore Process Enablement & Accelerator Kit, a framework for developing Sitecore applications quickly and easily with a consistent interface. SPEAK came with a library of reusable page layouts and components and a predefined set of user experience guidelines that streamlined the UI development process.

With Sitecore 7.2 came publishing improvements, including the ability to preview publishing targets such as a site in a

different language, or a pre-production site, robust support for publishing recovery, and better configurability. Also, a refreshed SPEAK UI, and multivariate testing for multilingual websites, came with Sitecore 7.2. Sitecore now used ContentSearch indexes exclusively, and had more filters for finer searching and segmentation.

In addition, Sitecore 7.2 added more intelligent engagement analytics so you could better track your visitors.

The xDB turning point

But it was the release of Sitecore 7.5 that marked an important turning point. No longer referred to as the Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform, the Sitecore Experience Platform (Sitecore XP) 7.5 introduced the Sitecore® Experience DatabaseTM (xDB) and the Sitecore® Experience Profile® (xProfile) and laid the foundation for what Sitecore is today.

Sitecore 7.x highlights

Sitecore 7.0 was released in 2013, and the last release, Sitecore 7.5, launching in 2014. What did 7.x deliver?

Content management

■ Sitecore tagging /facets for improved search experiences

■ Item Buckets for improved content architecture

Marketing automation and analytics

■ Introduction of xDB

■ Introduction of xProfileTM

■ Integrated Tag Management

Development and architecture

■ Sitecore ContentSearch

■ SPEAK UI improvements

■ Sitecore Items Web API

■ Support for MVC ASP.NET 5.1

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Built on an open source NoSQL database, xDB is a big data repository that collects and connects all customer data from Sitecore and other external services and applications. xDB is the foundation upon which all Sitecore experiences are built today. It feeds the Sitecore xProfile™, a customizable view of a specific customer and their relationship with your brand across channels versus an aggregated view of a target segment. While xDB stores all customer data, xProfile provides immediate insights at the individual level and enables you to take action in real time, ensuring a highly relevant and contextual experience for each customer as they interact with you on any device.

What’s important to recognize about Sitecore 7.x is that it lets you move beyond tracking traffic, clicks, and stats to

fully embracing experience management, delivering a highly personalized experience for each and every customer.

Sitecore 7.x put in place the infrastructure for true contextual customer experience management. It brought together disconnected marketing and content management tools and centralized customer data in a single repository. It eliminated silos that prevented a complete understanding of the customer, and it allowed marketers to deliver relevant experiences for each customer, not just segments of customers.

And these changes were just the start.

Sitecore 7.x gave IT and web users the architecture and framework to create great customer experiences, but it didn’t address the ease-of-use needs for marketing and business

Sitecore 7.x: The case for upgrading

If you’re using Sitecore 7.x, you’ve likely progressed from managing only a website to managing an experience on mobile and other channels. Again, there are significant differences between what you’ll gain from Sitecore 7.x vs. Sitecore XP 8.2, as follows:

■ A consistent user interface: A new clean, consistent user experience across the entire Sitecore Experience Platform ensures Sitecore is easier to understand and use, lowering training and support costs.

■ Empower the business: Enable business and marketing to test and optimize content and experiences, and analyze engagement value independent of IT.

■ Know every customer: At the heart of Sitecore XP 8.2 is the ability to connect and collect customer experience data to provide your marketing team with a single view of each customer. That’s the only way for them segment, personalize, and deliver contextually relevant content to each.

■ Cross-channel experience delivery: Sitecore XP 8.x enables you to use Sitecore as a central hub to manage all your digital properties, Sitecore and non-Sitecore, seamlessly sharing content, customer data, and analytics.

■ Test automatically: Testing is vital to knowing whether your content is relevant, and every experience must be tested on difference audiences. Sitecore XP 8 automatically tests every edit you make to an experience, without requiring you to go through training or change the authoring experience.

■ Optimize automatically: Analyzing the results of tests consumes time, requires meetings, and can be overly (and unproductively) scientific. Instead of analyzing and calculating new segments, as you might be doing on previous Sitecore versions, move to simply “accepting” or “skipping” them with Sitecore XP 8.2. The platform will identify the common attributes of your visitor behavior and automatically suggest segments and personalization criteria for them.

■ Embedded device detection: Sitecore XP 8.2 embeds Sitecore Detection Services, which allows you to detect two types of information—the IP geolocation of your customer and the device they’re using.

■ Dispatch: Email performance and dispatch is tremendously improved in Sitecore 8.x as Email Experience Manager now uses xDB. The UI has also been overhauled and you have new tools such as List Manager and Campaign Creator to support your marketing campaigns.

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users. How do you empower them to independently build and deliver on their vision of a complete customer experience while allowing you to focus on critical infrastructure and architecture activities related to performance, security, and application integration?

You have to take it to the next stage, and that’s where Sitecore 8.x makes its entrance.

Sitecore XP 8.x: Empowering the businessSitecore 7.x laid the foundation of contextual marketing and experience management by putting in place an integrated suite of technologies that support individual customer journeys.

Announced in September 2014, Sitecore XP 8.0 enhanced that foundation to better support marketing and business users as they create, deliver, and optimize unique digital experiences for their audiences. It enabled marketers to control their own

vision without having to rely on IT.

So what does 8.x do to empower business and IT? Released in December 2014, Sitecore 8.0 brought cross-platform visual design for client interfaces, applications, and modules. It provided a new UI that was consistent across the entire Sitecore Experience Platform, lowering training costs for business and marketing users and both time and support requirements from IT. Essentially, the new UI made working within Sitecore easier than ever before.

Sitecore 8.0 leverages xDB to measure Engagement Value in new ways, too, looking not just at past or current activity but also future (predictive) customer activity. As well, it looks at customer activity across non-Sitecore sites, recommending actions to improve customer experiences. Continuous testing and optimization means that all content changes can be A/B tested, including personalized content. Sophisticated multivariate test scenarios are also available in the platform.

In the Experience Profile, marketers can now dynamically create segments based on demographic and behavioral

Sitecore 7.x (left) featured a very Windows-centric look and feel that appealed more to IT and developers. Sitecore 8.2’s UI on the right is much more appealing to all users and lowers training costs.

The analytics in Sitecore 7.2 (left) focused on the user’s basic interaction with your website, while Sitecore 8.2 analytics measures each customer’s interaction—down to the individual level—across channels over time with a clearly visible timeline of events.

Sitecore 7.x vs. 8.2

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Sitecore 1.0iMac launches, Aug. 1998

Google �les for incorporation, Sept. 1998Digital video recorders introduced at Consumer Electronics Show, Jan. 1999

Sitecore 3.0Apple launches iPod and opens �rst retail storeWikipedia launches, Jan. 2001; now includes more than 17M articles

Sitecore 4.0 built entirely on .NET

Google IPO, Aug. 2004Facebook debuts, Feb. 2004LinkedIn launches, May 2003iTunes music store opens,April 2003

Sitecore 5.0 delivers support for XAML concept

Windows XP Pro released, April 2005YouTube launches, Feb. 2005

Sitecore 5.2 based on .NET 2.0Twitter debuts, March 2006SlideShare launches, Oct. 2006Windows Vista for Business Use released, Nov. 2006

Sitecore 5.3 launches with O�ce 2007 look and feel

Apple iPhone debuts, June 2007

Sitecore 6.0 launches with Intranet Portal, Sitecore Foundry, Sitecore Xpress

Web Experience Manager launches with Online Marketing Suite v1.0

Microsoft Windows 7 released, Oct. 2009

Sitecore 6.3 and 6.4 launch, with enhanced scalability and full cross-browser support, respectively. Analytics enhancements are also added.Skype provides high-def videoconferencing, Jan. 2010Instagram launches, Oct. 2010

Sitecore 6.5 launches with Executive Insight Dashboard and OMS, renamed DMS

Uber mobile app launches o�cially in San Francisco, 2011

Google+ debuts, June 2011Amazon releases the Kindle Fire, Nov. 2011

Sitecore 6.6 released with MVC support, Azure, device simulators, SQL Server mirroring, page preview service, Email Campaign Manager 1.0, and Segment BuilderMicrosoft launches Windows 8 in Oct. and Microsoft Surface tablet in June, 2012Tablet computers become the fastest adopted technology, June 2012

Sitecore 7.0 released with Solr native search architecture, mobile SDKs, Email Campaign Manager 2.0 (or EXM), content tagging and

faceting, .NET 4.5Google Glass launches, Feb. 2013

Sitecore 7.1 debuts with SPEAK, rules engine enhancements, bulk pro�ling, and search by personThe World Wide Web turns 25, March 2014

Sitecore 7.5 Experience Platform launches with changes to data handling (xDB debuts with Sitecore Experience Pro�le), new �exible and scalable architecture, improved search and tag management, multivariate testing, Experience Analytics improvements, optimization tools

Sitecore Experience Platform v8.0 sports a new UI, Federated Experience Manager, list management, new taxonomy features

Twitter has more than 500 million users, May 2015, and mobile surpasses desktop for

internet access, March 2015

Sitecore Experience Platform 8.1 andExperience Management 8.1 launch

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EQT comes onboard as majority partner, April 2016

Sitecore through the yearsSeptember

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Microsoft expands alliance with Sitecore to innovate Azure-powered solutions, July 2016

Sitecore Experience Platform 8.2 matures the platform with tools that help customers accelerate their time to market

8.2

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data and use these dynamic segments to drive real-time personalization on a website, in email, and in automated nurture campaigns.

Another key capability that came with Sitecore 8.0 is the Federated Experience Manager (FXM). FXM enables Sitecore to become a central hub for the collection of digital properties regardless of whether they’re hosted on Sitecore. In other words, it supports content management and measurement across Sitecore and non-Sitecore sites that you own to ensure your customers are receiving a consistent and connected experience as they navigate across sites on disparate CMS platforms.

Sitecore 8.1, released in October 2015, provides full integration with Sitecore® Commerce powered by Commerce Server 8.1, ensuring the user’s purchase transaction is seamlessly integrated with the overall digital experience. This consistent, unified interaction that customers demand improves commerce and drives revenue. This version also offers Sitecore Detection Services—IP lookup and device detection services built into the platform—as well as rules editors. You can customize your users’ experiences based on their location, and optimize their load times and display based on the actual device they’re using.

XP 8.1 also introduced a new, easier way of doing business with Sitecore based not only on what we heard from industry experts, but from you, our customers. Two versions of the 8.1

platform are available. The first, Sitecore® Web Experience Manager (WXM), allows you to start only with Sitecore’s top-rated web content management system and its in-session personalization. While not able to provide marketing with a full array of contextually aware marketing tools, this option still provides a solid footing to expand into the Sitecore Experience Platform (XP).

Sitecore XP 8.2, released September, 2016, focuses on maturing the platform and bringing numerous usability and performance improvements based on customer feedback. The ability to publish content and items across geographically diverse installations was improved to fulfill the needs of the most demanding enterprise customers, new data integration frameworks were built to improve third-party information sharing, and new tools like the Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SxA) were delivered to accelerate customers’ time to market.

SxA provides reusable, templated, drag-and-drop UX layouts and components to help customers on XP 8.1 and later quickly build out Sitecore-powered websites. A WYSIWYG-style editor and components become immediately ready for use in Sitecore’s Experience Editor, like testing, optimization, and personalization. XP 8.2 also introduces official migration tools to help existing customers move data from pre-existing Sitecore instances to 8.2 at no charge.

Sitecore® Web Experience Manager and Experience Platform 8.2We’ve packaged our platform with flexibility in mind—both for those interested in our market-leading web content management system or those who want to use Sitecore to manage the entire customer experience. The table below outlines the differences in Sitecore® Web Experience Manager and Experience Platform as well as add-on functionality and licensing options.

Sitecore Web Experience Manager 8.2 Sitecore Experience Platform 8.2

This edition addresses the needs of those who are primarily interested in Sitecore’s top-rated web content management system (the Sitecore Web Experience Manager). Besides equipping you with market-leading content management functionality, Sitecore Web Experience Manager also provides in-session personalization.

This edition combines Sitecore’s Web Experience Manager with advanced functionality to deliver one integrated marketing system that harnesses contextual customer information so you can offer a highly personalized experience to each customer.

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■ Reusable content—Write once and use across a multitude of digital channels with content decoupled from presentation mode.

■ Multisite management—Shares content, presentation, and modules with central management and monitoring across multiple sites.

■ Multilingual content—Presents the right language to the right customers regardless of their digital channel. Content authors manage and write multilingual content in one place, without having to jump between multiple language sites.

■ Enterprise-class search—Gives visitors as well as content authors a flexible and scalable search engine to find the right content using features such as customizable facets.

■ In-session personalization—Delivers targeted, relevant content to visitors by setting personalization rules that test details about the visitor. Device Detection lets you automatically detect and optimize content for visitors’ devices, and Geo IP Detection lets you personalize based on physical visitor location.

■ Contextual personalization—Collects intelligence from all customer interactions (current, past, even offline) across all channel sources in a real-time, big data repository. That way, you can deliver an experience in context of how customers interacted with your brand yesterday, last week, in the last second.

■ Experience optimization—Shows where customers are coming from and exactly what they are doing on the site with robust site analytics. Includes A/B and multivariate content tests and campaign management to ensure you know what works best and how visitors are engaging.

■ Marketing automation—Features marketing taxonomies to help you organize activities in a meaningful, structured way, as well as engagement plans and email management. You’re able to nurture relationships with visitors by adapting communication to leverage content, channels, and media most appropriate for each interaction.

■ Multichannel marketing—Tracks visitor interactions and generates analytics information on external, non-Sitecore websites from within Sitecore, and then delivers personalized content back to those non-Sitecore sites.

Add-on functionality (priced individually and available for download at dev.sitecore.net)

Sitecore commerce options

The Sitecore Experience Platform integrates with a choice of commerce systems, including our own, to provide your customers with a purchase experience that’s connected to content. Sitecore’s commerce add-on provides native capabilities such as order management and product catalog management, and integrates product search, shopping cart interactions, and purchasing into the Sitecore® Experience Database™ to give you a complete customer view.

Print Experience Manager (PXM)

PXM lets you personalize print documents in real time, so content can be shared from the web in a streamlined, custom manner. Tight integration between the Print Experience Manager and Adobe® InDesign® ensures that personalized publishing from dynamic data is simple and automated.

Email Experience Manager (EXM)

Sitecore’s EXM empowers marketers to use everything they know about how a customer has engaged with their brand—via web, email, social and commerce activities. They can tailor every email interaction at scale with the utmost precision. The most recent product release includes an improved UI, reports, scalability, and expanded global support.

Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SxA)

SxA allows content teams to design, assemble, and deploy web content across channels without development resources. Pre-built components, dynamic wireframes, extensible templates, and mobile-first layouts incorporate best practices by default and reduce time to market.

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Licensing options

You can purchase Sitecore XP and WXM under two licensing scenarios, depending on how you budget and plan for technology investments.

■ Perpetual installation licenses take into account the number of production vs. non-production installs, concurrent users, and add-on modules, on a perpetual license basis. Ideal for customers who budget for software as a capital investment or up-front expense.

■ Consumption licenses take into account visits per month, non-production installations, concurrent users, and add-on modules but allow for unlimited production installations. This option is perfect for auto-scaling cloud hosting.

Reasons to upgrade from a TCO perspective

Your current Sitecore implementation is working fine. Why upgrade? Let’s examine the need to migrate from a total cost of ownership (TCO) perspective. Have you considered the following?

The cost of multiple applications. If you’re on Sitecore 6.x, you have web experience management capabilities. But your email marketing, your analytics, your testing and targeting, and e-commerce software are all separate applications. Depending on your version of Sitecore 7.x, you may have the same situation.

Create a spreadsheet and document how much you spend on each marketing technology you need for your business users to do their job. Include costs for purchasing/subscribing, maintaining, training, integrating, and support to business users.

The cost of bringing together customer datasets. Now think about all the silos of data that need to be pulled together to give you that 360-degree view of your customer. How many different repositories store customer data? How much time to do you spend responding to requests from marketing to unify different datasets? How many times do you perform

these activities multiple times before you get the right data? And when you do, is the data comparable so you’re delivering one metric of customer engagement (vs. one metric for email, one for web, one for social, etc.)?

In your spreadsheet, write down how much time your team spends responding to these types of requests.

The cost of analyzing and reporting on customer activity. Finally, think about how much time your team spends creating reports and dashboards for your marketing users. Report generation can be time-consuming, and explaining reports can take even more time.

In your spreadsheet, document how much time your team spends working on report generation and explanation.

Putting it all together These are just some of the financial considerations inherent in using disconnected systems instead of taking advantage of Sitecore’s integrated customer experience suite. It’s not just about technology costs; it’s about resource costs. It’s about the time and effort required for you to easily empower your marketing users to do with Sitecore 8.2 what they need in order to deliver the experience customers demand.

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The path to Sitecore XP 8.2: Upgrade vs. migrate from scratch

The decision to upgrade from your current version (or even another web content management platform altogether) to Sitecore 8.2 is not straightforward. Depending on your starting point and current customer experience strategy, you have some options.

If you’re moving from Sitecore 7.5 or higher, the upgrade is super simple. If you’re moving from a lower version of 7.x, you have several options.

1. You could upgrade to 7.5 and then to 8.2.

2. You could start with a clean Sitecore XP 8.2 install and migrate your content from 7.2 using Express Migrations.

If you’re still on Sitecore 6.x, the best way to get to Sitecore XP 8.2 is to start with a clean install and migrate your content.

Any upgrade to Sitecore 8.2 is more than a simple technical decision, however. An upgrade provides a great opportunity to revisit your content strategy and clean out the content in your WCM that is outdated or ineffective. It’s also the perfect time to re-evaluate your marketing strategy and develop new plans that enable the creation and delivery of unified, contextual customer experiences.

Some of the activities you and your marketing users will want to do prior to any upgrade include:

■ A content audit: Take the time to document and evaluate the content on your digital properties. If there’s content that is outdated or not viewed by customers, it’s not content you need to migrate to your new Sitecore 8.2 platform. A content audit will tell you what content is worth keeping, what needs to be updated or built upon, and what you need to archive or delete.

■ Creation of customer journey maps and personas: It’s not about your products or services, it’s about your customers. To create lifelong customers you need to understand who they are and their journeys to a decision and beyond. Without this information, you are working in the dark. Start by defining a small number of personas and map their journey to purchase. Don’t forget to identify how they expect to interact with your brand after the purchase. The customer life cycle doesn’t end with the sale, and retention is a critical component of the customer life cycle.

■ Review and revamp your information architecture: With clearly defined personas and customer journey maps, you can now build an information architecture for your website and mobile apps that supports those journeys while aligning with your business and content strategies.

■ Define appropriate metrics and measurables: You are moving from measuring traditional web analytics that measure traffic and clicks to experience analytics that measure both the quantity and quality of engagement. You need to define metrics and KPIs that give you a holistic view of what’s happening with individual customers and your digital properties overall.

■ Technology audit: With any upgrade you’ll want to review the technology you currently use to see if there are:

» Tools you can drop because Sitecore 8.2 includes the functionality.

» Integrations you’ll need to set up with various data sources, or software you need to keep and connect to.

» Training required for both developers and business users.

» Infrastructure changes required.

White paper // Why upgrade to Sitecore XP 8.2?

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It’s time to get in front of the curveYour marketing and business users are demanding more and more every day because your customers are demanding more. If you are working with disconnected marketing technology, you’ll never be able to fully embrace context marketing and support today’s always-on digital consumer. When your customer data is spread across many application and data silos, your business users can’t see a complete 360-degree view of their customers. They won’t be able to create the unique, relevant, real-time digital experiences customers expect.

Sitecore 8.2 gives you a strong foundation and a tightly integrated user experience that enables business and marketing users to market in context of how audiences interacted with your brand yesterday, last week, or last year so they can be relevant right now, in real time, across all channels. This isn’t a decision about whether you should upgrade; it’s a decision about how to best upgrade so that you can deliver great customer experience—internally and externally.

Next steps

Find out more about Sitecore 8.2 and how it enables context marketing by downloading the Sitecore Experience Platform brochure.

About Sitecore Sitecore is the global leader in experience management software that enables context marketing. The Sitecore® Experience Platform™ manages content, supplies contextual intelligence, and automates communications, at scale. It empowers marketers to deliver content in context of how customers have engaged with their brand, across every channel, in real time. More than 4,600 customers—including American Express, Carnival Cruise Lines, easyJet, and L’Oréal—trust Sitecore for context marketing to deliver the personalized interactions that delight audiences, build loyalty, and drive revenue.

For more information about Sitecore, visit sitecore.net